The Dawn and Doom of On Demand Sunlight
Some legacies don’t secure a future. They just scorch it into oblivion.
NOTE: What follows is speculative fiction. Built on the realities of today. Approach with caution.
The year is 2153.
The industrial fuck-ups of human expansion have rendered the planet hot. But it is still habitable. To an extent.
Humankind has receded to the newly tropical polar and sub-polar regions. Nothing survives in the equatorial regions. The decimation of life in this erstwhile paradise of diversity and greener prosperity has dramatically changed climate conditions. Earth is not what it used to be anymore.
But humans? Just the same.
So what if sub-FTL speed spaceflight failed? So what if the colonisation of Mars was a Martian dumpster fire? The Earth still breathes, laboriously so, but there is life. The Northern and Southern hemispheres, and their respective polar regions, are home to some 2.8 billion people. All engaged in farming. The tech is controlled by nation-states run by oligarchs. Tired of fighting their way through stupid “communist” and “socialist” governments of the world, these leaders decided to have their way. Their aim? The common man should not be the subject of welfare.
Politicians, it appeared, were the entry point. Nowhere would you find people so egotistically subscribed to their fantasies just to cling to power. Lie to people, kill people, swap people, or crush people. All for money. Their tenacity was second only to the oligarchs.
And so money exchanged hands. Large sums of money. Mind-bogglingly large sums, to be precise. In figures that a common man on Planet Earth would never see in six generations. It was during one such exchange of money-for-power and power-for-money that, during the year 2026, a fledgling startup called Reflect Orbital, with aims just as grandiose as their italicised name, decided to get their grabby hands on the only free resource left unexploited: sunlight.
Housed in the U.S. state of last light, the state in perpetual burning, and the state of tech evangelism, Reflect Orbital bricked their Californian dreams with a simple ambition: harvest sunlight.
The idea was simple. Send some satellites into the junk-filled orbits of Earth. Equipped with mirror-like reflectors, these hunks would be positioned to capture and redirect sunlight towards our scarred planet. Solar, after all, is the ultimate energy. So why not trap it where it abundantly goes to waste?
On the 15th of July, 2026—in an expression of freedom from the blueprints of the previous week’s 4th of July celebrations—the Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) shook hands with Reflect Orbital’s top brass and allowed them to test the space waters with their first-ever launch: Earendil 1.
Named after a character from J. R. R. Tolkien’s massive epic who carried a star across the sky in the legends, the satellite would come equipped with an 18-meter-wide mirror to redirect sunlight back to a designated spot 5 kilometers wide.
This test was to be the first bead in a chain of satellites 50,000 strong. Because the Earth rotates and satellites themselves move in their respective orbits, a single spot cannot be illuminated for long, unless you have more satellites focused at the same spot.
It was this exact proposal due to which a now-extinct race of human beings, then known as Scientists, who were experts in their respective fields, protested against Reflect Orbital. They warned of massive disruptions related to nocturnal ecosystems, human circadian rhythms, public safety, and a host of problems humans never had to contend with. These people were, as tradition was, promptly ignored.
Reflect Orbital was poised to make it big. But like any corporate back in the day, its commerce would spawn copycats aimed at the same idea. Inject more orbital debris, I mean, mirrors, and push all that light to Earth. On demand, of course.
The subscription model of life was a commonplace in those ages. It’s no different from how we have to rely on ArcticAir by Meta-Dyson Corp for AI-simulated fresh streams of cold winds—for which we all pay a third of our corn, potato, and mushroom harvests. Imagine that, but for all things absolutely essential to humans then: movies, TV shows, music, GPT-models, internet services, and whatnot. Bare necessities, too, such as wartime updates and sports broadcasts.
Soon, the near-Earth orbit was crowded by bands of reflectors pouring down sunlight where it was needed. The U.S. was the first and default client. European nations, Israel, and Russia soon followed suit. The technology was so good that these nations immediately demanded concentrated sunlight on their enemies in then-continuing wars and leave a scorched earth behind.
Palestine and Iran were the first casualties. Calculated and constant illumination dried the people into husks without nuclear, kiloton-like devastation. In a single move, Israel had finished its mission of genocide. But it could no longer annex these charred nations.
Ukraine was next to fall at the hands of Russia. One day, the Sun rose and never set. Russia found its way to control reflectors under the U.S., concentrating sunlight for just 5 days on Kyiv. Today, the ruins stand as a monument, not because people made it, but because it’s a unified and solidified mass of molten architecture, geology, and biomass that once were living beings.
The next targets were Central and South American nations. In a bid to exclusively make the Americas white again, the U.S. government led a dedicated coup d’état under its new Department of Drug Elimination and Control. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina were immolated within a fortnight of Operation Apollo.
In the East, China had launched its own reflectors into space. Always ahead of the curve, the nation finally brought true the declarations of its past: uniting the Eastern world under the Dragon with its rulers at the centre. The Sun finally belonged to the Middle Kingdom.
North and South Korea were the first casualties of China’s solar exercise. A warning shot. Good enough to coerce. Japan was asked to subsume into the Chinese fold, subjugated and forced to shed their imperialist legacy. Nations kissing the waters of the South China Sea, particularly the Muslim worlds of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, were ordered to follow Chinese-sanctioned Buddhism, lest they suffer the wrath of the Sun.
Next was the subjugation of India. In a pincer move, China blocked the flow of Tsangpo, also known as the river Brahmaputra in India, and then dried its bed. It then threatened the government of India with the melting of Himalayan glaciers. With no possible escape, the government had to cede several northern and north-eastern states and officially recognise them as China’s territory.
Although Russia, India’s longstanding ally, did intervene, it found it strategically optimal to accept Chinese influence. For its own survival.
The rest of the world had to genuflect to the solar superpowers. A consortium was set up, with billionaires at the helm, to transform subjugated and subsumed territories of the world into feudal farmlands. Turn the bleeding third-worlds into bread baskets for the rest, while the Whitest of the West and China would lead.
However, overuse of these mirrors rapidly changed the climate. For worse. Experts thought that 2026 was the year of a Super El Niño. But the overheating of equatorial nations for war crimes raised the temperatures to soaring levels. Europe, unable to cope with the overheating summers, had a death toll worse than the bubonic plague. Economies started to collapse. Governments were reduced to ashes.
A new line of rulers emerged, a class primarily deriving their legacies from the works of Tolkien:
In 2077, Palantir and its European counterpart, Sauron, led the worldwide surveillance through extranet connections, the successor to the World Wide Web.
Only a decade later, Reflect Global launched a set of interconnected orbital arcs that formed a massive Dyson sphere around the Sun. This project was named Galadriel.
In an ironic move, the streaming apps of the world formed a unionised platform. All music, or at least what was left of it, would only come through the aptly named Bombadillo.
By the turn of the millennium, the nations had ditched equatorial areas completely. Coasts had been rebuilt with gigantic walls of interconnected mining networks to stave off rising water thresholds and allow some to wash into underground causeways to harvest salt. The project was undertaken by Thiel’s New Religion successor and great-grandson, whose corporation was called Moria.
These were only the tip of the iceberg, or as they used to say. No icebergs survive in this age. Wildlife has been all but wiped out, with only human-bred species surviving for consumption.
I remember my grandmother used to sing of a world that felt more alive, more hopeful than what we were handed over. There was some retribution, though. Those with money who ripped the Earth and left for Mars crashed on the red planet. Reflect Orbital’s entire C-suite board had to go orbital due to initial backlash. They crashed into the debris of China’s then-defunct satellites. But that did not stop the company. Not in the slightest.
For the common man, the slaves of the new world, it’s only a matter of time before the oceans boil off completely. I do not know what will come of the future, or of humanity as a species. But if any sentient life is left in the darkness of space, they will surely exemplify us as the planet that flew too close to the Sun.
Just for the record, and for their eyes, I never signed up for this space mirror future.
