Let There Be Light

Forget about the argument over how much of the year should be on Daylight Savings Time, how would you like there to be daylight at all hours of the night? A giant space mirror may soon be sent into orbit to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of the Earth.

Okay, one won’t be big enough to light up the entire dark side of Earth, just patches of it. Reflect Orbital, a California startup, plans to deploy and operate Earendil-1, which would be a prototype satellite with a reflective film that’s roughly 59 feet across.

This first test could allow certain regions to have sunlight 24/7. They say this could have important applications in solar energy and agriculture. Solar energy I can see, but I’m not sure about agriculture because I am a firm believer that plants need to rest, just like animals do.

Earendil-1 will orbit about 625 kilometers above Earth. A motorized reflector will aim sunlight at a designated target. The illuminated area would span at least 5 kilometers. This one spacecraft can provide only brief illumination. A longer spot of light would require many satellites passing in succession.

Reflect Orbital says such beams of light could help with search-and-rescue scenes, light up disaster zones and remote construction sites. Maybe. But would you like to be woke up every time one of these sunlight beams wander over your house?

This is only one spacecraft, so how disruptive could that be? Well, the company plans to have 2 satellites this year, over 5,000 by 2030, and more than 50,000 by 2035. With that many reflectors aimed at Earth, it could be pretty disruptive, I’m thinking. It’d be great for solar farms, but what about wildlife that couldn’t do whatever they normally do at night? And why bother with street lights when you could just light up the city with a few dozen mirrors. I’m betting black-out curtains would become quite fashionable.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the deployment of this first mirror but declined to require a full environmental assessment. People made comments about wildlife that need darkness to navigate, reproduce or hunt. They also brought up concerns about human sleep and aviation. The FCC thought those claims were not a worry for one satellite. They declined to consider the ramifications of a hypothetical fleet.

The main critics are astronomers, who have serious concerns. A mirror could appear as a bright moving object, which would leave streaks across telescope images. That reflected light would also be scattered through the atmosphere.

A recent European Southern Observatory study found that, with 50,000 reflecting mirrors, every exposure from an observatory’s wide-field camera would be lost whenever the mirrors were sunlit. They also calculated the full fleet would make the night sky 3 to 4 times brighter, even if individual beams were not pointed near observatories.

The FCC received more than 1,800 comments objecting to the proposal. Some of them were from astronomists and dark-sky groups. But the agency’s authority centers on satellite communications and radio frequencies. Therefore, they could not consider those comments.

Mirrors have been sent into orbit before. Russia deployed Znamya 2, a 20-meter reflector in 1993. It cast a five-kilometer patch of light that raced over the ground of Europe at 8 kilometers per second. The entire thing lasted a few minutes. In 1999, a larger follow-up mirror snagged on an antenna during deployment. Naturally, that ended the experiment.

NASA projects that reflecting sunlight is possible but controlling it and making it useful is harder.

One thing that wasn’t mentioned in the article is how much heat is going to be reflected to Earth with the sunlight? The planet is already overheated, as evidenced by the droughts and severe heat waves we are experiencing. We don’t need more heat being added to the atmosphere and ground during the night, when the planet is supposed to be cooling off.

We also don’t need another 50,000 satellites clogging up the near-Earth space. It already looks like rush-hour traffic out there. This takes a toll on astronomy projects, too.

Okay, I can’t stop them from sending up a prototype. But I hope it fails miserably. Everything living on Earth is used to having a day/night cycle.

If a company just HAS to put satellites in orbit, they should do something to make it up to the astronomers who are trying to understand our universe. Like build a new space telescope and send it out beyond the ring of satellites that already circle our globe.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-us-cleared-a-giant-space-mirror-to-shine-sunlight-after-dark-and-turn-night-into-day/ar-AA27Ujht?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=a8cf5b2a94754b05938e873ab337a5e0&ei=37

Dead Sea Scroll Deciphered

A 2,000-year-old code has been cracked! It looked like random scratches on parchment, but specialists can finally read it. This means that a handful of obscure Dead Sea fragments provide a new window on one of antiquity’s most studied communities. The new information tightens the focus on the Qumran sect. It reveals how they organized their sacred calendar, guarded their teachings, and even experimented with writing itself.

Specialists used to think of the Cryptic B writing as an irritant in research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a strange alphabet that was only seen in tiny, damaged fragments. The characters did not match Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek letters. The few repeated shapes were too scattered to allow decipherment. Then one scholar mapped the recurring patterns across all known fragments and found that the odd symbols were not decorations or shorthand. They were a fully structured script that systematically encoded Hebrew words.

The key was that a handful of signs appeared in positions where one would expect common Hebrew consonants. Also, the spacing of the text mimicked the rhythm of known liturgical and legal phrases from Qumran. Once those facts were noted, the rest fell into place and revealed that scribes had swapped a consistent substitute for standard letters. It wasn’t a random cipher. Cryptic B was a rule based script that could be read like any other. This work is seen as a step in decoding the last unreadable corner of the Qumran corpus.

But why would the Qumran community write in code when ordinary Hebrew script was in daily use? It has become clear that the sect was not hiding explosive doctrines. Instead, it was writing certain teachings and calendrical calculations as restricted knowledge, reserved for properly instructed insiders. The decoded fragments have the same themes as the better known scrolls, such as purity rules and festival observance. This suggests that secrecy was about controlling access. They weren’t inventing a parallel theology.

The breakthrough confirms earlier interpretations of the Qumran group as tightly organized with a strong sense of boundary. The cryptic B passages align with their distinctive calendar and legal traditions. The script was part of the same intellectual world as the rest of the library. It was not a rogue experiment, but a tool in a strategy of managing sacred information. This fits with scholars’ descriptions of the sect’s discipline and helps explain why the fragments were carefully preserved despite their tiny size.

Cryptic B is intriguing because it is a carefully engineered writing system that sits alongside other enigmatic scripts from the same site. Among Qumran manuscripts, specialists have recognized several unusual alphabets such as Cryptic A and Cryptic B. The basic idea seems to be substituting one set of signs for another while still following the structure of Hebrew words.

Structural clarity shows that the scribes were not improvising, they were working with a convention that other members of the group could learn and reproduce. Cryptic B appears only in limited contexts, often on fragments dealing with sensitive topics. This suggests this alphabet was deployed selectively rather than universally. When one studied the pattern across the corpus, it seems this scribal culture experimented with layers of writing, from standard scripts to specialized codes. This would signal different levels of access inside the same physical library.

Decades of frustration ended when a specialist in ancient scripts pulled together all the available photographs and transcriptions. He treated the problem as a unified puzzle instead of isolated curiosities. He tracked specific signs clustered around familiar formulae and compared the cryptic fragments with passages in Hebrew script. Finally, he could show that the unknown alphabet was a consistent system.

The new knowledge dovetails with earlier work on the Qumran calendar. Years ago, researchers decoded another scroll that laid out the community’s schedule of festivals and seasonal transitions. The group followed a structured, solar based calendar.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/mind-and-soul/2-000-year-old-code-cracked-a-dead-sea-scrolls-secret-revealed/ar-AA1SXywN?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=69504ba802754e8997779ac7d601a875&ei=101