Lunar Lasers

Two different articles about building lasers (well, lasers and a maser perhaps) on the moon. Reuters has a story about a potential lunar power plant, creating electricity with solar panels and beaming it to Earth with microwaves. Space.com has a piece about building a sort of super-sized Star Wars program on the Moon, giant lasers set up to blast incoming space debris and not, of course, anyone here on Earth.

Comments

BSOD

[thetechweenie]

Sorry sir, we had a BSOD on the Laser Station, and it just zapped an extra 10 miles stretch for the Grand Canyon...

What OS would this run on? I hope NOT anything M$. I can already see it on the news. "Giant laser from the moon zapps 1,100 people. Could it happen in the Bay State, tonight at 11".

Re:Microwave

[CoolVibe]

I think microwaving the earth from the moon is not going to work. There are too many disturbances and obstacles in outer space itself. There's background radiation, solar winds, x-rays, the earth magnetic field, and all that is going to seriously fsck up the transmission. I know it was Tesla's dream to transfer energy wirelessly, but this would probably put him in a hissy laughter fit... OTOH, imagine a Tesla coil that could send arcs of electricity to the earth... Yikes... (yeah, I know that's physicly impossible, but just _imagine_)

Nah, better would be if they used the generated electricity for the lunar infrastructure.

The laser thing bothers me a bit. Who says that one couldn't point such a thing towards the earth to blast stuff out of existance?