Talk:3225: Satellite Pollution
I'm surprised this isn't Black Hat's operation RDiMartino (talk) 21:34, 27 March 2026 (UTC)
Space mirrors have been in the news lately. 2603:8081:9700:1224:0:0:0:3 03:50, 28 March 2026 (UTC)
As explained in https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ this wouldn't work anyway since the banner would be moving at 7.8 km/s, or else it would need to be hung from a space-elevator-like counterweight located beyond GSO. If cueball accomplishes THAT kind of feat, I think the astronomers would be more impressed than annoyed. 2A02:590:121B:4001:9505:CE66:9EEB:2974 21:42, 28 March 2026 (UTC)
- Geo-stationary orbit would work though Tanner07 (talk) 14:14, 29 March 2026 (UTC)
- For reference, the quoted 100 miles width at GEO/GSO would roughly span the Moon"s radius (not even its diameter, which is the usual rule of thumb for "how big all other things in the sky look"), so would seem to be on the lower edge of being useful for bringing 'better' views of the sky it obscures (with and without advertising) to the casual Mk-1 Eyeball observer of the universe. Thus it can only really be 'useful' to the astronomers that it's in reality inconveniencing.
- Though if set at ISS level of orbit, 100 miles would be ~45 Moon-widths, slightly narrower than a paperback book held at arm's length (if I'm cross-converting my trigonometry correctly), which would conceivably have some public primary purpose, upon which the secondary purpose of making it look like the stars it is also obscuring (give or take its rapid journey across the starfield, and mis-parallaxing issues unless it has very sophisticated 'observer-adaptive' optics to directly counter this effect) might be a mitigation/sop to astronomers like the minor rejig of Starlinks was to reduce their flare-profiles. 82.132.239.130 11:43, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
- 7.8 km/s isn't that fast though, when viewed from down here on the surface. I love going outside in the evening to watch the ISS go by: it doesn't zoom past in the blink of an eye, it takes a few minutes to pass overhead. That's plenty long enough for a banner to be in view and to get a good look at it. If there are a couple of hundred banners in LEO you'll have lots of opportunities to see them. The real issue is power: during most of the night the banners will be completely dark because they are in Earth's shadow. How will they be illuminated? If the goal is to show fake stars, the banner will need powerful floodlights installed as "stars", so what is powering the floodlights? Martin (talk) 22:23, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
I do wonder if this is in reference to results in search engines, given the "sponsored galaxies", and the tendency to provide fake results at the top for many engines 2806:2a0:b2e:8322::edc (talk) 13:34, 30 March 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
I am reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke story, I think it was Watch This Space, part of a series set on the first moonbase. As scientific experiment involving a cloud of glowing atoms is sabotaged to produce an advertising slogan. Coca Cola is implied but never named.--2A00:23CC:D248:8901:5D76:61B5:C315:E67A 08:05, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
- I'm reminded of the "Galaxy of Trash" scene from Fight club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhaVpD92w-A Kev (talk) 18:49, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
