I don't know about you, but I like nighttime. It's good. Necessary. God made it, after all, and He pronounced it "good," just as He did the daytime.
So I'm not sure why, per the Washington Post, we should consider, you know, getting rid of night:
Two little-noted applications under review by the Federal Communications Commission would, if fully implemented, fundamentally remake the night sky.
One of those applications is from SpaceX, which "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers." A million satellites in the night sky would, of course, fundamentally change the nightscape, turning our view of the cosmos into a perpetual motion play.
(Honestly, it seems unlikely. I mean, c'mon, Elon, I love you — but I'm dubious you're putting a million satellites up there anytime soon!)
The other proposal, however, seems, if not hugely more possible, at least way more frightening:
A start-up called Reflect Orbital proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night, with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight.
That's no exaggeration. The company has literally proposed to use mirrors to reflect sunlight down onto the dark parts of the Earth:
Reflect Orbital founder Ben Nowack told the Washington Post that the project is "aspirational," and it's not exactly hard to understand why. Shooting a bunch of massive mirrors into space and reflecting sunlight back down onto the surface seems, to put it mildly, far-fetched. I'm pretty sure it was a James Bond villain plan, right?
Still, the company seems happy to aspire, so much so that — if you consider the light of the full moon as a baseline — the company dreams of producing "the light of up to 1,000 moons by 2028 and 360,000 moons by 2035."
The process by which that would happen is simple enough, if grim-sounding:
An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north.
Here's a video of how that might look, via Reflect Orbital:
The company has some of its "stars" currently in development, according to the Post. Nowack aims to start selling the satellites "in mostly developing nations," but eventually he wants to "illuminate major cities [and] turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it."
To say the least, Nowack's vision of his own endeavor is, um, grand:
He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine."
To say the least, turning night into day could have radical effects on countless things around the world, from biodiversity to human health to human civilization.
