Beer, sex, and lasers.

[Tokzic]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

It wouldn't cause every other country to throw a fit. It would cause a country who cared to take it to the UN forum. Ooh, threatening. Scary. But that's all that could happen.

technically if they only advertise it in north america, china won't even see it

[Calcium Deposit]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

That seems pretty prejudicial of chit-chat.

Or it means that this thread isn't as serious to me as it would be in another forum.
Or whoops I mean Chit chat is just chuck full of serious threads.

[devonin]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

Depending on the manner in which they tried to project the image onto the moon, I'm not exactly sure they could pick which countries could or couldn't see it. The moon's pretty far away. If you put an image on it large enough to actually -see- from Earth, I'd imagine everyone who can actually see it from their hemisphere would be able to see it.

[JKPolk]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

technically if they only advertise it in north america, china won't even see it

I was more saying the fact that, assuming the corporation planning on advertising on the moon is international, they could just shine from China. They'd have no restrictions by doing that, and China would also gain the prestige of being "the first country to ad on the moon," which I'm sure they'd just love for nationalism purposes.

[Tokzic]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

just judging by the fact that they have a "sorry it didn't work" video online and it hasn't even been night yet, i think this is completely fake

[bluguerrilla]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

Regardless of whether or not this is a joke (and I'm sure it is), the numbers make this impossible.

The concept is using the law that the far field diffraction pattern of an illuminated screen will be the fourier transform of the screen.

So, you take a fourier transform of your image (Rolling Rock logo), put it on a small screen, shine a laser through it towards the moon, on the moon shows up a fourier transform of the fourier transform of the logo (which is just a reversed version of the logo, so you have to reverse the image to begin with).

I'm sure many people have seen this work with laser pointers, etc.

There is, however, no way this would work because the power required is unfeasible.

[OMG its HIM]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

...weird?

[arsonistsgetallthegirls]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

Who said it had to be cast from earth?

Space lasers.

But that would be rather expensive...

[JKPolk]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

The power required wouldn't be any more than that needed to fire the new Naval Rail Gun, and while exorbitant it's not impossible.

[Misa_Amane]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

& i only opened this because it said beer.
mmmm...

[bluguerrilla]

Re: Beer, sex, and lasers.

HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHA

http://www.osa-opn.org/Blog/post/2008/03/Image-of-the-near-side-of-the-moon-taken-by-the-Clementine-mission.aspx

tl;dr version: No.

What would it take to build and fire a 100-GW cw laser? My best guess (from U.S. Energy Information Administration data) is that the United States generates roughly 4,000 GW of electricity every hour, but I could be way off. Would it really take 2.5 percent of the U.S. electrical supply to make a visible green dot on the surface of the moon?