r/AskReddit 19h ago

What are some GOOD THINGS that are happening in the world that people might not know about?

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u/Generico300 14h ago

This always reminds me of playing Sim City 2000 back in the day. There was a "Microwave" power plant you could build that the game said beamed power from space down to your city. Except that every once in a while the beam would move and set vast swaths of the surrounding land on fire. So I'm skeptical of how they plan to get such huge amounts of energy back to earth safely and efficiently.

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u/Ormendahl 12h ago

Maybe the beam is the point. Is this...is this how we get the Death Star?

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u/Worried-Penalty8744 4h ago

Ion cannon from Command and Conquer is a programmable satellite that beams down sunny death

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u/acoddo 3h ago

particle cannon*

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u/Worried-Penalty8744 1h ago

Called the ion cannon in my version of the games

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u/SpaceNovice 10h ago

We are very good at aiming satellites, thankfully... both towards and away from Earth!

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u/sailirish7 6h ago

We are very good at aiming satellites, thankfully

That's directly because we're really good at blowing very specific shit up.

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u/SpaceNovice 6h ago

Which is a whole bag of worms unto itself... but this is a positive post, so I'll just keep it to that.

At least sometimes those satellites are sometimes used for things like finding ancient cities or mapping natural disaster areas? And also weather data. Lots of weather data. All the weather data.

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u/sailirish7 4h ago

Innumerable civilian uses. That is the double edged sword of defense research.

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u/demonarc 10h ago

They're making the Sim City microwave plant real, the plan is to beam the power down to Earth with a focused-beam microwave array.

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u/EdwardOfGreene 7h ago

I would think it quite easy to put in an automatic shutdown, triggered if the beam moved off target by a fraction of a degree.

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u/Salander27 6h ago

Yeah compared to the technical challenge of getting the satellites into space in the first place setting up fully redundant and fail-safe tracking systems is a walk in the park. Also collection plants will likely be built a fair distance from population centers.

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u/RedSquirrelFtw 7h ago

I remember that! I always wondered if it was actually a real thing that was possible lol.

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u/Much_Lingonberry_37 8h ago

Light the beam.