At 6:30 PM -0500 7/24/01, Jim Choate wrote:
And these are reasonably low power lasers...
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/IJSSE/issue1/unwin/unwin.html
The simple fact is that the thermodynamic impact of a laser beam that is several feet across and emitting more photons than the surface of the sun will not be easy to reflect unless immense cooling is taken. Cost/weight factors alone argue it in the negative.
"More photons than the surface of the sun" for HOW LONG? A minute? A second? A millisecond? A microsecond? You confuse fluence with flux, a classic mistake. (A pulse "brighter than the sun" but lasting only milliseconds will have far less heating effect than other flux level pulses lasting longer. Calculations matter. And, yes, I used to do these calculations when I was refuting Kosta Tsipis' calculations of the late 70s. Fluence matters.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns