[tripzilch]

well, first thing that comes to mind is, with that anyone that builds a device that focuses a large amount of solar energy into a tight beam aimed at the Earth, I'll have a hard time believing that's going to be used for some benevolent energy-harvesting purpose.

And even if it is intended to, what will be the accuracy of this beam? what's to say some orbital junk won't crash into it and "oops" scribble a nice kilometres-wide Lissajous figure of scorched Earth onto our planet, like a hit and run graffiti tag?

Even if, according to WP, NASA is "a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science", the US government has proven itself rather incapable of keeping itself in check, so the odds of it going to turn into "hey we could also turn it into a gigantic solar death ray space weapon", somewhere, at some point given its life cycle, seem pretty high to me?

[zxcdw]

I'd be surprised if most didn't think of this at some point when reading the original article, let alone when talking about concentrating huge energies from space in general.

That said, perhaps people don't consider it feasible, as in, "not in MY world". Sounds dystopian sci-fi and so on.