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Annoyingly and predictably, reads like AI slop. You can practically guess the prompt goes something along the lines of 'write a press release explaining why thi
by ryankrage77 2mo ago
Annoyingly and predictably, reads like AI slop. You can practically guess the prompt goes something along the lines of 'write a press release explaining why this bad idea is a good idea'.
- blondie9x 2mo agoI think this company intentionally ignored discussing how battery storage has made solar energy a much more effective and viable solution.
- ben_w 2mo agoNever mind that, they're ignoring light bulbs for the S&R stuff. At least, best I can make out over this UI choice: https://imgur.com/gallery/bad-ui-5t0O0SH https://imgur.com/gallery/bad-ui-5t0O0SH (Why, of all the things, would someone use a fire as their example for this? Fire is famously a light source. Also, famously, smoke is a thing that blocks out light from above).
- datakan 2mo agoAnd also cheaper than launching stuff into space. This may have been approved but that's a long ways off from actual viability.
- Robotbeat 2mo agoLaunching a gossamer thin mirror in space is not very expensive. Broad strokes claiming anything launched to space is going to be a more expensive solution has to level with the fact that GPS and quite a lot of telecommunications and Earth observation seem to have incredible leverage if launched to space instead of just using ground based solutions.
- ben_w 2mo agoFor this use, "gossamer thin" is unlikely. You want to control where you point the mirror, it needs a structure that not only doesn't flop around when you torque your spacecraft, but also doesn't have surprise vibrational modes that squeeze and expand the illumination zone. (Things I'm learning while researching what is now looking like an eight thousand or more word blog post about why a different space thing, data centres, is also not a good investment; my guess is this would be less of a problem if you used mirrors like this to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight away instead of towards).
- Robotbeat 2mo agoI know for a fact it is gossamer thin. It does need structure, but there’s a fundamental limit to how small your spot size is anyway due to Conservation of Etendue, so small deformations aren’t a huge problem.
- ben_w 2mo agoYou know "for a fact" anything about a tech which is currently in the experimental stage (or even "press release before first experiment" stage), in a field which has a famously large gap between theory and practice, confidently enough to assert it will definitely not suffer from the problems that mean the large sheet materials we already launch to space (space-qualified PV arrays) are much heavier than bare cells? > Conservation of Etendue, Sounds like you think I have in mind something like an Archimedes' heat ray. I do not see anything close to that for the presented satellites. I would aver that the presented design is so far from being useful that making it useful requires solving enough engineering challenges to also enable an Archimedes' heat ray; but again: what is actually shown is not that. The numbers I see from Reflect Orbital suggest they have an expectation of the apparent brightness fluttering by 5x from internal motion of the reflector. At the scale involved, may be easier to consider the imperfections/ripple as behaving the same as if some of the specular reflection becomes diffuse reflection.
- Robotbeat 2mo agoI know for a fact because I’ve dug deep into the field, colleagues work on it every day, and I’ve met and talked to the founders of Reflect, saw material samples of their mirror tech.
- Robotbeat 2mo agoI’ve physically touched the materials being used for solar sails and the lightweight mirrors.
- 2mo ago
- postalrat 2mo agoDo you have anything to say about the project itself or do you only care about your perception of ai slop?
- brookst 2mo agoI swear this is getting so common. “Well I’d be fine with eugenics and sterilization of the poor, but the website uses em-dashes a lot so I think it’s just awful AI slop”.