Pish. Only rank amateurs tool around with pointing lasers at the moon. You want to get anything meaningful done, you need to show commitment.
You left out the link: Laser Pointer 
No, I honestly would need to be told that I’d have a snowball’s chance of being able to do so, unless the light beam was sufficiently diffused by that point to render it harmless.
If I was standing at one end of a football field, and you propped up a mannequin at the other end of the football field, I doubt I could hold the pointer steadily and accurately enough to put that red dot on the mannequin’s face, let alone in its eyes.
So we’ve got an airplane a thousand feet up, moving at a couple hundred miles per hour on takeoff or landing. No, the idea that I could threaten it with a standard office laser pointer would never have occurred to me. Still seems extremely improbable to me. Maybe some people have steadier hands than I do.
And this is where people go wrong. At the distance of the airplane, the dangerous cone for the laser is 50 feet across. It’s not a dot.
You don’t need to maneuver a tiny dot onto an eyeball at two miles. All you need to do is put a 50 foot circle so it briefly sweeps across any of the cockpit windows. Once.
And the disconnect between what I’m saying here and what **RTFirefly **was thinking is exactly how decent ordinary citizens (such as he) are doing this in their hundreds or thousands every year.
It *sounds *innocuous in the extreme. But it’s not really. Hence the need for significant public education.
If for some reason fancy lasers become the hot toy this Christmas for older boys and younger men this will really be a mess.
(Off topic somewhat) I know the above was most likely in jest, Your Great Darsh Face, but, just in case, and in interest of fighting possible ignorance - lasers are extremely useful in astronomy/space-imaging. Here’s one article by Bad Astronomer (former Doper!) telling how lasers are used to measure our Moon’s distance from us very accurately.
Plus, many astronomy observatories use a laser’s reflection off Moon and its Apollo moon-landing missions’ carefully placed mirrors to measure Earth’s atmospheric ‘disturbances’ to optically correct for atmospherical distortions of incoming light-energy for such during their often lengthy imaging views of the heavens above. Here’s a look at Google Images of such happening.
So, pointing lasers (of much, much higher power than those handhelds, I am sure) at Moon is widely used and has led to better science results (!). Pretty cool, I think.
Now, back to bit about planes and lasers…just don’t do it.
The idea isn’t that you would be able to target the pilot’s eyes, but that you wouldn’t be able to NOT accidentally flash it in his eyes for the very reasons you state. The person is flying a plane, leave him be.
See, I knew it’s dangerous, the light will spread, etc., but I had NO clue it’d be 50 feet across! Man, that’s huge.
I’ve always known that you do NOT aim a laser pointer at someone’s eye (and that you NEVER look directly into the laser). I’m sure this is relatively common knowledge, but not universal. But even of the people who know laser pointers can blind you, I’m betting the vast majority don’t have any clue that the beam spreads out, like, at all. Most people either never take a physics class or forget everything from it after that semester. The beam width stays skinny for the length *they *can see it, so why would it occur to them that it’d widen? Especially to 50’ across!
So I would bet that the people who do this shit think there’s probably no chance in hell the laser would actually reach the plane (aiming at a moving target, etc.). And if it DID, what are the odds that the suuuper skinny laser beam will directly go into the pilot’s eyeball? And it wouldn’t occur to them that the windshield can refract/intensify the light, either.
All of those assumptions are WRONG, of course. But it’s not absurd for people who don’t know much about optics* to reach those conclusions.
- which is the vast majority.
Yep!
Those are the ones I was talking about.
Kids don’t know any better, and they’re too young to understand if you try to explain it.
Parents either
A: don’t know,
B: don’t care,
C: or just want the kid to quit begging for it
–G!
D: All of the Above :smack:
I’m actually kind of curious now if a lot of kids are being blinded by holding these “toys” up to their eyes.
I’ll suggest that “stupidity” is not quite the right word here. I agree that it’s largely a function of people not considering the consequences of their actions either at all, or not beyond their own immediate gratification. As you say, trying to hit an object with a gun/laser/whatever is fun, and if you lack any consideration of the target, then there’s nothing to stop you from performing that action.
So it’s not quite stupidity but rather a lack of that inner voice that says “hey, maybe you should think things through a bit before doing that…”. Of course the two things are closely related, but I’ve met plenty of people that are highly intelligent in some particular field that lack that voice.
Agreed. As I said: “… brain-off stupidity …”
If your brain is off, whether from lazy habit, selfish habit, excess beer, or good old fashioned low birth IQ, the result is the same. You don’t behave as a thoughtful judicious adult. Instead stuff just happens with your higher functions passively watching whatever it is your lower functions just did.
I agree that lack of IQ isn’t the cause for the vast majority of functional stupidity in the world. Brain-offness is an acquired behavior.
I think that would be the reasons LSLGuy states.
Hey, I’m not doing anything with a laser pointer outside. Hell, I haven’t even used my laser pointer for anything at all in several years, not even to tease the cats. I’m just pointing out the reasons that this particular issue has never crossed my mind, nor would have if I were the sort to use it outside.
I’m not asking for an explanation of the science here, I’m just saying that AFAICT the general understanding (and certainly mine) of a laser’s power and utility is based on the *lack *of diffusion of its beam. So turning it around and saying that the danger of lasers in this situation is because the beam diffuses considerably - no, this isn’t going to be intuitive to most people.
The general notion in this thread that people who aim their lasers at airplanes must be acting maliciously because the risks are so obvious strikes me as total nonsense. I bet 90% of Americans would have no fucking clue.
Lasers capable of lighting matches or paper are also available if one knows where to look.
I’d actually like to have one of those, if you want to PM me.
Google knows where they are. Here’s one of dozens of dedicated online retailers http://www.wickedlasers.com/
An Amazon search for “high power laser” produces 62,000 hits. Sixty two thousand. Not all are hand helds, but the majority are.
This is not a hush hush secret.
Why are these things even legal? No, that’s not quite what I mean to ask . . .um, what purpose do they serve / why do people buy them? Aside from the super weak one that I bought to entertain my cat (which did not prove to be very entertaining, btw) what the hell would I ever use a strong one for?
Science experiments.
Our green lasers aren’t strong enough to set things on fire but the cats love 'em. Ours are much more interested in greens than weak little reds and the greens take standard batteries (size AAA).
When I first started seeing them on sale – over $20 at Costco for a 5-inch pointer – they were being sold as great gifts for your favorite teacher, to replace the old-fashioned stick he/she was using at the blackboard (or whiteboard, as the case may be). Only about a decade later did I see the 3-inch versions being sold as cat toys (and now as kid toys…). :dubious:
–G!
Do not attribute to malice
what is better understood
as mere ignorance.
…–Confucius
They’re great for amateur astronomy. An interesting effect of a beam with semi-infinite extent is that if you point it at a distant object, like a star, nearby observers will also see the beam terminate at that object, even though they’re at a different angle.
I have a ~100 mW green laser that will light a match, which I bought long before they came into the public consciousness. It really is just absurdly bright. To be honest, the 5 to 10 mW models work just as well for astronomy and don’t pose much danger (though you still don’t want to point them at aircraft).
Bumped.
It’s been a problem for U.S. military pilots these days, in the South China Sea and in Djibouti: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/22/politics/pacific-ocean-us-military-jets-lasers-intl/index.html