Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
The mass of the solar system's dust cloud is small on a solar system scale (about a 15-killometre asteroid), but quite large on a human industry scale. You also have to grind it remarkably fine, and disperse it very widely, which sounds expensive. I think you'll need to be really quite high-tech to do enough of this to be noticed, never mind to have any side-effects other than annoying astronomers.
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That's assuming we're talking our solar system, and deliberate action. A protoplanetary disk is probably something like 10^12 times the density of our dust cloud.
As for the effects on detection: it depends on detector details, because it varies with sensor resolution, but a decent rule of thumb is to reduce range by the fourth root of sky brightness, so 10,000 times brighter would be 1/10 detection range (side note: the +24 should really
replace the +10 for in plain sight, not add to it).