I would expect a technical publication to be a little more precise in their language, this is hardly a laser.
I'm sure no FReeper would ever actually do this...
I was looking into using such a thing as solar kiln to fire ceramics, but in fact it would take a whole roof full of solar cells to do so, and the sun is not reliable enough for a 12 hour firing.
Maybe some day...
Looks like you could make use of that, starting a camp fire, heating water, etc.
I played around with the big Fresnel lens I stripped off an old projo tv a few years ago.
It was quite interesting to find just how much intense heat you could concentrate on one spot.
And entertaining too.
I never did get around to making a frame to hold it but what I had envisioned looked pretty much like what this guy did.
I did temporarily fix it in place with some clamps once and made one heck of an impressive charcoal starter with it.
I found a shower curtain which, oddly enough, features a pattern full of Fresnel lenses. You can see the spots of light as the sun shines through it.
Duhhhhh, must have been written by a Walking Dead fan.
I can buy a couple dozen high wattage green lasers from China dirt cheap, each in itself many times stronger than your average pointer, strip them down to the bare emitter and using a machined aluminum plate can align these lasrs so they are virtually parallel over a long distance.
Then I would mount it on a quick traverse gimbal with a high power zoom camera. It would be portable, able to literally pop out of the roof of an obscure beater.
When I was just 14 I salvaged an old movie projector lamp, bought a huge magnifying glass, made a tube and found the best focus point, mounted it on a piece of wood like a rifle stock.
This was back in the 70’s.