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First Artificial Aurora May Lead to Night Sky Ads
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting that the military's HAARP project has had its first success generating artificial light displays in the ionosphere. They created little green speckles of manmade aurora within an existing auroral display. The work is designed primarily to 'enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.' Next up: sky-high neon advertisements."
and what's their contact info?
welcome more light pollution.
A guy shines a laser pointer in the Sky, and the FBI is after his ass. You think there going to allow this? I think not. They will consider it a airline safety issue (hence homeland security) until they can pass a separate law.
Then the sky will chance based on that terror warning system.
So get ready for yellow and orange nights!
The article talks about possibly lighting urban areas with this, but to me, it sounds like a HUGE waste of energy. I'd rather see dirigibles with fluourescents than irradiating the sky (and any planes/satellites/birds overhead) with what doesn't instead just keep going out into space.
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Considering that Freon is a wonderfully inert substance at ground level that gets changed into an ozone eating monster at altitude under high UV, one wonders whether hosing the atmosphere with highly charged particles is a good idea.
I have not RTFA, but I hopefully this is done over the US and not in in a far away place like was done by the nuclear testing bastards.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Given the light pollution in most of the world, people don't spend much time looking skyward anymore. Even if you could produce a pretty design, most people wouldn't see it.
BTW, did you notice the transmitter power. One megawatt. The frequency; HF. We're talking about some seriously expensive engineering in order to get a pattern of RF which will produce any kind of controlled image.
On a historical note: The Canadians had the HARP project which involved Gerald Bull shooting shells into the ionosphere. Because this was the world's leading ballistic technology at the time, the Canadian government cancelled it. Canadians hate being the best.
No, how about we point the street lights toward the ground, you know the thing that we want light on. Think about it this way (if you can):
Street light puts 1/4 of its light emitted energy in the sky (based on a worst case of 45% above horizontal). If they were designed to shine only below horizontal they would produce up to 25%* more light for the same energy consumption.
*Naturally some light energy would be converted to heat energy in heating the reflecting surface.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I call bullshit on this. I've been arguing with crackpots for over 10 years about this. It doesn't take much knowledge of plasma physics to understand what this is for and what it can and can't do. People either seem to think it is for a) manipulating the weather, or b) beaming thoughts into your head (I kid you not). Ok, the last one is by definition for the tin foil hat brigade. The weather modification stuff just doesn't make sense. It is bouncing very low frequency radio off the ionosphere ... those layers are way way up above the troposphere where the weather is for starters and if you beam energy using HAARP to somewhere else it will also pass right through the troposphere ... and anyway just think how much energy it would require to alter the atmosphere by inductive heating by a grossly inefficient method using a transmitter that is also very inefficient. Bahh. Silver iodide or just spreading a crop disease is just so much easier.
Bitter and proud of it.