brown_cow's comments

brown_cow | 7 years ago | on: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

Both these thermodynamic arguments look good, I don't see any contradiction though

(1) can't heat an object to a higher temperature than a source object using lenses - you can't transfer heat from a cooler object to a warmer object without work and lenses don't provide a mechanism for work. This still leaves room for reflected sunlight from moon albedo getting something hot enough to burn, at least from a thermodynamic perspective.

(2) you can get something arbitrarily hot using lunar panels, this is just a bad heat pump (max COP 1) where you feed work generated by the solar panels into a perfectly thermally isolated system with a resistive heater, and we could do this a bit more efficiently with a true heat pump.

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