

Unrelated to the article itself, but god fucking damn is that website absolutely absurd. It looks like a shitty campaign website. The sad sad man changed the seal of the office and put an eagle (because books are lame I guess) and “free state of florida” at the bottom like that’s a real thing. Can’t believe this works on people.
What is the physics or math behind that? Light from the sun is essentially aligned by the time it reaches earth. If the mirror is perfectly reflective, a 10 m^2 mirror should light up a patch of Earth roughly 10 m^2 times the cosine of the angle of the mirror. So unless the angle is close to 90°, most of the losses would be from poor reflectivity.
I totally agree it’s a stupid idea. But maybe it’s even worse than I am thinking of?