the moon into a giant disco ball

day and night would not

be a disco party instead of diffusely reflecting sunlight onto

all of us a mirror tiled moon would reflect

spectacularly you would be lucky to momentarily

catch a single reflected beam of sunlight

now with the help visuals by Nick from Yeti Dynamics who you should subscribe to

immediately let's see what would occur if a disco ball moon actually happened

here's the earth with an imaginary screen behind it so we can track the

path of reflections

from a disco ball moon. It's 3,012 mirror tiles are ten kilometers thick

in between one hundred and 150 kilometers

across and as you can see the beams of sunlight they

reflect would only intersect with earth briefly

and rarely a few every month or so would race past at more than 20,000 kilometers a second

from the service a Earth they'd just be tiny flashes in the sky

0.1 percent as bright as the regular Sun

and would last a fraction of a second. The Earth's Sun and moon just

aren't an ideal locations for disco ball effects

but if our disco ball moon was closer

and orbited earth not 384,000 kilometers away but

less than 450 as far as the International Space Station does

it would be torn apart by gravitational

title forces. Shoot. Also the moon doesn't really

rotate from our perspective like a fun disco ball

it librates but it's starting to look like instead of an awesome lunar party decoration

a disco ball moon would just be a lunar party pooper

so for the sake of investigation let's allow this disco ball moon to not be torn apart

and allow it to spin in the sky now we're talking

occasionally we would get glittery reflections on the dimmer image

of the Sun. From the surface of Earth

this is what we would see

you know being able to see

Earth reflected is almost cooler it's like being

a bacterium on a giants face who's looking into a mirror

you can see the giant but not yourself

it kinda makes you feel small

but it would be a great way to take planetary selfies

so let's watch a mirror the width of the moon orbit as close as the ISS does

from the surface of Earth it would look like this

the strobe lights around the edge by the way are ten kilometers across

pretty cool

now finally let's take a look at the moon as a rotating disco ball from low orbit

the moon is not a disco ball

and likely never will be it's just

a diffuse source of illumination but its

Illuminating in a different way to imagine what would occur

if that actually happened. Woah and as always

thanks for watching

my

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