Slashdot Mirror
Tsunami Warning From Space?
Peter bayley writes "Tell me I'm crazy or tell me someone has already done it — but wouldn't a satellite equipped with a laser be a great way to warn people of tsunamis? I was pondering how to warn people in remote coastal areas once evidence of a seismic incident has been received by the monitoring stations that have now been set up following the large Boxing Day tsunami. The idea is to illuminate the areas that are likely to be at risk with a bright (but not dangerous) light. People would be told to head to higher ground if such a light appears in the sky. Put the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit. Make it tunable so that different colors can convey different meanings. You would be able to warn anyone, anywhere they can see the sky. The laser could be directed to illuminate only those areas at risk, skipping unnecessary areas to save power. Power could be varied so that it is visible day and night and through cloud (raise the power where the satellite detects cloud cover). I emailed some people at NOAA about it but they said it would stand on too many toes by circumventing local emergency service organizations in the various countries. I replied that countries could easily opt out, in which case the laser would be turned off for those countries — but received no further reply. Anyway, I thought the massed minds of Slashdot would relish the chance to demolish my idea."
It's funny, in the recent "How Smart Are You" poll, only 5% of slashdotters rated themselves below average, yet there are some really fucking stupid answers to this post. Read the damn posting people (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot...).
For starters, there are those saying that it would be better to use radar than a laser. You can't see radar, the article's about using the laser for warning people, not measuring the height of the ocean surface.
Then there seem to be a ton of replies along the lines of "it would take gigawatts to illuminate the entire Earth! Sharks with friggin' lasers, etc...".
Who said this thing had to illuminate the entire damn planet in one go? Jeez, ever heard of raster scanning people?
So, it has to warn people in at-risk sections of coastline. That alone cuts the area to be illuminated by orders of magnitude. Then, it doesn't need to illuminate all of these areas simultaneously and permanently - it could sweep them repeatedly. Imagine that the laser was spread out along a line, say 20Km wide, and that then scanned the affected coastlines. So the people underneath might only see a bright flash lasting for say, 10th of a second every ten seconds. Brief, but maybe enough - better than nothing if you're out of range of a siren.
On top of that, you could limit your illumination area so that, at any one time, you're only lighting up sections of coast that are likely to be hit by the approaching tsunami within the next 3 hours, say. Obviously you needn't illuminate any areas which the tsunami has already hit - it's too late for them, sadly.
Come on slashdotters, how about actually engaging the intellect that I'm sure is actually present, and then discussing how this idea *could* be made to work (even if there are better ways), instead of idiotic "terrible idea" comments.
Obviously the lights went out because the cell towers were saturated. I didn't realize AT&T served Chile...