LostXOR

Yeah I’ve definitely been caught off guard by the different sellers selling identical products before. Check the URL and see if the ID is the same, it probably won’t be.

Excuse me, did they censor the man’s eyes in the MRI? Why???

Remove those cursed half circles and you’ve got yourself a nice annular solar eclipse!

If you look at enough rocks, you’re bound to find one that resembles something humans would make.

This, however, is not one of those rocks.

Also make sure you have file extensions enabled in Explorer, it makes it waaay harder for something like this to work.

“But I saw it on TV!” says the man currently saying untrue things on TV.

Some calculations:

In a 1000km orbit, you’ll need a mirror about 9km across to appear 0.5° in diameter from the ground (the same size as the Sun), and therefore light up an area with the same illumination as the Sun.

Note that you can’t make due with a smaller mirror focused to a tighter area, as the brightest thing the mirror can reflect is the Sun, and so it must appear at least as large as the Sun in the sky to illuminate any point on the ground by the same amount.

With the much dimmer goal of moonlight illumination levels, the mirror shrinks to 9km / sqrt(400,000) = 14.2m in diameter, which is actually rather reasonable. However it would only illuminate an area 0.5° wide from the mirror’s point of view, or around 9km. And because the mirror is orbiting at 7.4km/s, you’d only get a second or two of illumination.

TLDR: Moonlight mirror 14m across, could light up a 9km diameter area for a little over a second.

Edit: In the case of a permanent mirror in geostationary orbit, a 500m mirror could provide moonlight illumination to an area around 300km in diameter.

Hahahahah-

Wait… They’re serious?

Does anyone really think this could actually work? A LEO satellite would have to be massive (>1 km) to reflect a significant amount of sunlight, and you’ll need to put it waaay higher to avoid atmospheric drag. Not to mention the problem of the satellite only being above a given location for a few minutes a couple times a day.

Still, hosting costs were the reason for discussing legal liability. Such a server also increases centralization which isn’t ideal.

That doesn’t solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.

Reminds me of something.

Time to contribute great code to tons of open source projects, completely anonymously of course.

I’m pretty sure the energy gained from the ice falling into the Earth’s gravity well would exceed its cooling capacity by an order of magnitude or two.

Yeah, I just left my SSH port as 22 since I only use key-based authentication so there’s really no security risk. Plus, it’s funny going through the logs and looking at all the login attempts.

True, though bonking it really hard is probably going to be less complex in most cases.

We do have the technology to redirect a potentially extinction-level asteroid, so I don’t think it would be all doom and gloom. More like a scramble to launch a redirect mission. (And besides Apophis isn’t large enough to cause an extinction event, just destroy a country or two).

Yeah they can’t really be seen through clouds aside from maybe the clouds looking slightly brighter.

Go out anyways and look north, there’s a good chance you’ll see something.

NOAA’s predicting a Kp index of 8.33, hopefully we’ll get some good auroras tonight!

Where are you located? I’m in need of some new backup drives and would be happy to pay a reasonable price + shipping if you’re interested.