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Tom Kalbfus

Banned

Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Combining different wavelength lasers with prisms.

Normally prisms are used to split white light into these different wavelengths. The white light enters the prism, and the prism bends the components of white light by different amounts depending on its wavelength. What if we reversed the direction of these light paths started out with seven laser beams of the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violent, and arranged these lasers at the same angle at which the prism would normally split light in, shine these different wavelengths at these exact angles towards the prism, and out the other end would emerge a beam of white light. With this we can create artificial sunlight without having to heat materials to the temperature of the surface of the Sun. I was thinking of using this idea to terraform Venus, that is instead of trying to reflect natural sunlight with mirrors so as to produce an image of the sun that appears to rise and set, we just create the sunlight artificially. We block incoming sunlight with a giant solar collector at L1, then beam the energy collected, to a battery of different lasers which produce beams of laser light at different wavelengths, converging on prisms which combine the laser beams into a single beam of white light, the white light then illuminates half of Venus to produce day. the light emitter is in a 24 hour orbit around Venus above its equator.

this is a to scale drawing of a 24-hour orbit around Venus So imagine where it is labeled "Sky Sphere" we place an artificial Sun instead. ( I see no reason to make another drawing, so I use this one.) Seems to me the Sun would be about as big as the box, to illuminate Venus with an image of the Sun. Either Solar power is beamed to it, or it uses some other process to generate that power such as nuclear fusion.

This idea may also be handy on the smaller scale with space colonies, saves on mirror geometries.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-05-05 01:34:49)