CONCEPT - The Solar Lighthouse

I was in a mood for thinking today, and as I sat scrawling in green biro in my notebook - like Kingsley Amis' demonic LS Caton - a few interesting ideas came to me as I stared at my fruity tea bag leaking bits like a demonstration of entropy.

Question; assuming we decide that the risk of  "How to serve man" or rampaging martian tripod scenarios is low enough, how do we signal our existence to whatever lifeforms on Goldilocks zone planets there might be?

We can send space probes with cutesy drawings or gramaphone records on - bad luck if our aliens have reached the mp3 stage like we have - or we can wait for our radio and tv signals to leak out into space far enough, by which time they would be so weak as to be incomprehensible.

OR you could make our solar system into a lighthouse.

I figured, as I sat scrawling over my sievable cherry and vanilla tea, that you could costruct an enormous reflective surface, or perhaps rather a flexible array of many many mirrors, or even nano-reflectors (I'm not a scientist!). This orbits the sun in such a way that the sun is at the focus of the reflector, and thus its light can be beamed in selected directions. Perhaps a form of lensing could be added to intensify the light, I have no idea.

It would be perhaps best to site the array out above the north or south solar pole to avoid interfering with our sleeping rhythms and is out of the reach of most asteroids.

So yes, initially I thought this would be a method of sending powerful morse type signals to selected targets. You move the array around as required, and then control the signal by changing the alignment of the individual reflecting surfaces so at times they are perpendicular, essentially, to the sun's light. But then I also thought you could use it for perhaps lighting and warming selected solar system bodies, perhaps as part of a terraforming process.

Anything else? Well, it could provide impetus for a solar-sail powered craft. It could even, perhaps, deflect asteroids away from the earth by the phenomenon of radiation pressure. It cant be that much more far fetched than painting half of such an asteroid white to save humanity.

It might also be totally pointless, an impossible to construct folly borne of idle thought by a writer with a wonky cuppa. But I love thinking these things up! And (I hope) bigger cranks than me have changed the course of our existence...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/04/2013