This is a conspiracy theory that’s going the rounds on youtube. Such a “simulator” would have to be wider than the Earth to hide the sun simulataneously for people at opposite sides of the globe. This is a nuts idea if you have basic astronomy or physics. I did this debunk to explain why it can’t work.

They use as evidence for their conspiracy such things as sun halos which they claim have something to do with these mirrors, and often say the darker circle of sky you get inside a sun halo due to refraction in the ice crystals is the planet that they are attempting to hide with the mirror. This idea is scaring some people who genuinely think there is a huge planet in the sky being hidden from view by gigantic space mirrors or lenses.

I did a calculation to help make this clearer, details below. The conclusion was that assuming the lens or mirror system is only one mllimeter thick and the same density as water, then with a thousand launches a day from both China and the US and suppose each launch can send 10 tons to L1, which is the only place it could be constructed and stay in place without constant rocket thrusts to keep it in position, it would take 17,500 years to launch the mass.

I think part of it is that here are so many marvels in our society like being able to phone someone up and send them video using a tiny hand held device, your mobile phone - that people without a good physics background need a little help to know where to draw the line between fantasy and reality.

I’m not going to go into whether you could hide the sky with mirrors or lenses. How is it supposed to work? What do you see reflected in the sky where the planet is supposed to be? You’d need something far more high tech than a mirror, surely, or all you’d see in the mirror is the Earth itself reflected back, or some other patch of the sky if it’s at an angle. And as for a lens system, again how is that supposed to work, except to magnify slightly one part of the sky? I don’t know how you could do it even if you had a quadrillion dollars with present day technology or near future technology. But let’s ignore that “minor inconvenience” that we don’t have a design. We can still calculate a minimum mass assuming, say, a thickness of at least a millimeter.

First, let’s look at what is supposed to be evidence of this. Do you see how it is much darker inside the halo? They are always like that. It’s the same also for rainbows, they are always darker inside, because of the way the ice crystals (in this case) and water droplets (for rainbows) refract / reflect light from the sun:

Halo in the Himalayas, photo by Anton Yankovyi taken from Anapurna base camp on 20 April 2014

For more about this and how it works, Halo (optical phenomenon) and for more photos again all showing it dark inside see Why a halo around the sun or moon? | EarthSky.org

Here is an example video using sun halos as “evidence” that we have huge mirrors and lenses in space blocking out Nibiru and projecting a fake sun in some way to Earth.

Sun dogs are rare so it's no surprise to have days without a sun dog. Depends where you are and on your weather conditions. Where I live they are so rare I've never seen one. I'd love to see a sun dog :).

Here is a fun video that Shane Jones of our Doomsday Debunked group did to help debunk this idea which uses figures from my debunk calculation:

TO BLOCK THE SUN FROM THE ENTIRE SURFACE OF EARTH IT HAS TO BE AT LEAST AS LARGE AS THE EARTH

The Sun is larger than the Earth so the closer the shade is to Earth the smaller it is but the smallest it can be is the diameter of the Earth.

Also anything in orbit around the Earth in LEO orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes or so. To continuously shade the Sun it is no good even to be at GEO. Because that would be stationary relative to the Earth as it spins, but the sun doesn't stay at the same point in the sky either relative to someone standing on its surface. As the Earth spins, of course the sun rises and sets.

There is only one possible place to put it, at the L1 position where the gravitational effects of the Earth and the Sun balance. Something placed there would in principle stay in between Earth and Sun permanently. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is there.

So, to block out the Sun for everyone living on Earth you are talking about a mirror or lens the diameter of the Earth, so a mirror 12,000 kilometers in diameter at the Sun Earth L1 position, a long way away, further away than the Moon.

By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter

Spy satellite mirrors are similar in diameter. It is possible to put mirrors into space and lenses too (if there was any point) that are meters in diameter. But thousands of kilometers in diameter - no, we don’t have that capability yet.

Currently our heaviest lift rockets are the the Delta IV heavy and the Chinese Long March 5. Both can get 14 tons to GTO - that's geostationary transfer orbit. The Long March 5 has 5 tons to Trans Mars Injection - so that's more of a challenge than L1 so I think at least 5 tones with each launch to L1 with one of those heavy lift rockets. But less than 14 tons.

Assuming the lens system is only one mllimeter thick and same density as water, then with a thousand launches a day each from China and the US, suppose each launch can send 10 tons to L1, it would take 17,500 years to launch the mass.

The numbers are vast - it’s amazing what a difference it makes to the calculations when you are talking about millions of square kilometers of surface area.

They could do it in 35 years with half a million launches each per day, which would probably require several million launch pads each continuously in operation assuming a typical several days turn around time per launch pad. And they need vast factories to make all those rockets too. And cities of many millions of people whose only job is to make the rockets. Never mind the vast operation of manufacturing lens components amounting to over a hundred billion tons just for the payload and many more than that for the rockets. But all those figures are for a “lens system” only one millimeter thick!

I think somehow we'd notice :)

Detail: suppose the sun simulator is 1 mm thick and similar density to water of one ton per cubic meter (I think most lenses would sink in water) then with radius 6,371 km then the volume in cubic meters (and so mass in tons) is 0.001*PI * 6,371,000^2 tons or around 127,500,000,000 tons. Google calc here 0.001*PI * 6,371,000^2

If both US and China were doing say 1000 launches a day then it would take them 127,500,000,000 / (10*2000*365) = 17,500 years to complete the project.

If both were doing a million launches a day, or a launch on average every 11.5 seconds, then the construction would still take 17.5 years.

Obviously there is no way you can launch a rocket every 11.5 seconds from the same launch pad. Instead since the turn around time is bound to be more than a day they would both need millions of launch pads to do it in a reasonable timescale.

And - that doesn't explain how this one millimeter thick "lens system" achieves what they want - and you have to figure out how to keep it from folding up or moving away from its unstable equilibrium position at L1 - and it also has to be several times the diameter of the Earth to match what they claim to be its size in their sun halo photos.

And think what an astronomical spectacle it would be, with millions of spaceships going up there every day to ferry all the materials up to make it, and the lens or mirror gradually unfolding in a space construction project billions of times more ambitious than the ISS.

It’s just an absurd idea.

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