Stardate 20010815.1243 (On Screen via away team): I suppose it's harmless. Our friend declares "I honestly don't know. I'm a writer and an artist, not a scientist." That's for sure. His idea is to try to get a huge number of people, all at the same time, to point their laser pointers at the dark part of the half-moon on a certain night in hopes of making it light up red. Sigh.
The reason it's obvious that he's not a scientist is that he hasn't done the math. Suppose he talks a million people into doing this. A laser pointer is 3 milliwatts, but some of that is going to be lost (maybe a third) passing through the atmosphere; figure maybe 2 kilowatts hitting the surface of the moon. It's going to hit an area the size of Iowa, given how difficult it will be for people to aim them and hold them steady. Assuming people could hit a square 100 kilometers on a side (which is unlikely), you're talking about 10,000 kilometers, or a power flux of twenty milliwatts per square kilometer.
And in order to be seen, it will have to achieve a brightness comparable to the lighted half of the moon. That's about 1 kilowatt per square meter, or a gigawatt per square kilometer. To be visible you'd have to approach at least 5% of that (if not more), so 50 megawatts per square kilometer. Our hero is off by about 9 orders of magnitude. To be visible he'd need a hundred million people each holding 25 million laser pointers. (discuss)
