No it doesn't, no it doesn't and no it doesn't.
Anymore for anymore ?
(I posted this before I ever saw the clip. When it opened with him waving it around in his hand ...)
Mars is at least 56 million km from earth (let's assume 60Mk for sake of argument), and so his laser beam takes 200 seconds to get there. Mars orbits at 24 km/sec, so in 200 seconds it travels 4800 km. Its diameter is about 6400km, so if he aims at the centre of Mars, the beam will arrive at its orbit at a point 1600km after Mars has passed. So it can't have ever had any effect on the soil of Mars (even if its effect could be detected) as it never hits Mars.
Let alone how diffuse the laser beam would be when it got there. Perhaps he aims off to one side in the hope his beam and Mars will coincide when it gets there, like a clay pigeon shooter. And does he really think that any superpower is going to take a blind bit of notice of his claims anyway?
Aren't there regulations covering pointing lasers into the sky these days, to protect aircraft pilots from being blinded?
What would worry me most is that he's a doctor, a GP, so I would expect someone of reasonable intelligence not to be given to such bizarre thinking. Remember, your life (or lots of people's) is in his hands!
You used far more brain power than I did when I called it "bollocks" :)
I've never particularly listened to his reasoning, but I got the impression he wasn't doing it to claim it for himself, but doing it to prevent others claiming it as "unused".
Indeed, especially as it's 3500W! Interesting hand-holding a device like that...shall we say at least 3500V at 1 amp? I don't think that it's illegal to shine a laser into the sky, but it is with the intention of targetting a plane. Anyway, with a laser even of a few tens of milliwatts, it would be possible to blind a pilot, particularly at night. The person using the laser might not even hear the plane if the wind was taking engine noise in the opposite direction. It is a very foolish thing to do.
I live in Hampshire. I'm relieved he's not /my/ GP!
I missed that bit.
A 3.5kW laser ?
I think I need a mission to Mars to retrieve my eyebrows.
It looks like the purple 400nm frequency doubled 800nm laser. It might change to the odd atom's vibrational state at Mars but that's about it.
Likely to cause serious eye damage to anyone who gets in the beam.
It looks like it might be a 3500mW laser at most. 3 orders of magnitude weaker than he claimed. The backscatter was consistent with that.
Good for popping balloons at point blank range but by the time it reaches Mars the beam divergence will make it a negligible flux.
A 3.5kW laser in a pencil beam would be ionising the air as it went through and melting the puny handheld device in seconds.
Moon bounce with seriously powerful and well collimated Lidar lasers get about a dozen photons per pulse back to the telescope. They are also much more responsible by putting the outgoing beam through a telescope so that its energy density is much lower.
He might have a slight point about the treaty though even so.
Various scammers have been selling plots on the moons surface and dim stars to people ever since the moon landings - perhaps before that.
- and that's just for the moon.
Sounds completely hat stand to me. Brian
He needs to shoot just ahead of mars as gunners used to do in the last war with enemy planes.
Brian
That is a worry, Does he know David Icke by any chance?
Brian
There are negotiations going on at the moment internationally to hammer out the space prospecting problems. At the moment you can use off planet resources to make places to live, to support life there and to make vehicles to bring you back, but this only gives you that right. No sovereignty or use of the resources to bring back here to use.
Brian
So 3.5 watts then. I'd at least slip on laser safety glasses for that. If I was James Bond, I wouldn't be too worried about the crotch of my pants.
Rather than the doctor being an evil genius, more of a precocious teenager. A laser pointer genius. Every neighbourhood has got one. I was hit by laser point light one evening while out for a walk.
Paul
AKA, deflection shooting.
Very important with pigeons and pheasant.
No,amateur astrologists are allowed stronger green lasers than mere mortals as pointers
Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net posted
Does that work with light beams, though? What about relativity? What would it look like from the Moon's rest frame?
Jeff Layman formulated the question :
I think someone made a mistake with the decimal point. Where would he have even managed to source a 3.5Kw laser?
Not hard to get a couple of hundred watts CO2 lasers. As used in laser cutting.
And 5Kw is not unknown....
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