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Solar Power Satellites by 2020?
soulfuct writes: "Finally, a national space agency has budgeted funds for a test project to convert solar energy in space to microwaves and beam them down to Earth. They plan to deploy this for use by 2020. Kudos go to the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and Kyoto University for being the first to realistically act on the idea of solar power satellites promoted decades ago by Gerard K O'Neill in his book The High Frontier. With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?"
Seconded. Make Texas the first place to have its humans turned into TV dinners.
Other countries to consider frying include France and Israel.
Only two things come from Texan
I have a friend who is Indian, Nakoruru. I don't know if it is a he or she since they all look the same. This is what I said to him/her when I first met it:
Nakoruru, what is that, Indian? Go make me a slurpee, Nakoruru, and give me one of those little "wassup" ligthers, too. I love that shit. Is it true you people eat your own children? I think I'll pass on that hot dog, Nakoruru. I don't want to be muching on little Nakoruruette. Hey, what are you doing? Why are you unzipping your pants? Put your pants back on! Oh
DUH!!! Obviously, bush is saying this stuff because enough Americans (albeit an appearant minority) are environmentally savvy the Bush (or an advisor) has realize they need to be appeased somehow -- and the way politicians appease is by eloquent words that don't mean anything. Even if some people are aware enough to see through, the masses have beceom lulled enough here to scoff at them and say "Bush said it was a crisis, and he's gonna...."
Personally, I'm not too comfortable with powerful microwave beening beamed at Earth. I think using all the potential space wasted in the form of roof-top for power might be better; snd using it to electrolyze hydrogen might not only be a good form of alternate auto feul, but a compact and effective (if not perfectly effcient) way of saving the power for a rainy day (pu intended) -- at least better than batteries or giant coils, I suspect.
Don't have the cash to pay off your loans? That's OK. We accept land.
This guy is totally off his rocker. There is the simple problem of free space path loss. Let us do the math:
/g2 = antenna gains (not in dB)
First, lets suppose you could invent an antenna that could produce a beam so narrowly focused that it would travel from geosynchronous orbit (~25,000 miles out (4e7 meters)) to earth and only spread into an area that is 500' (152m) in diameter (this is totally and completely impossible, but we will use it as a hypothetical example). so:
a sphere has a surface area of 4/3*pi*r^3. That would be 4/3*pi*(4e^7)^3. Next, our receive ara is 500 sq ft. so pi*(152)^2. Using this, we convert to dB for simplicity:
10* Log(4/3*(4e^7)^3 / (152)^2) = 185.6 dB gain. (yes, I've made some simplistic assumptions and simplified the calculations, so sue me).
Lets assume the receive antenna is also capeable of an equally ridiculus and impossible gain. So we look at the Friis free-space equation:
Pr = Pt*G1*G2*l^2 / (4*pi)^2 * d^2
where:
pr = power receive
pt = power transmit
g1
l = wavelength
d = distance between antennas
oops, out of time, someone else will have to finish this...
His priorities are to get real, viable energy on the market at a reaonable price sometime in the nearest possible future. Solar cells are not ready for the kind of production increases we need. There are 2 seperate issues here, fuel and electricity. Fuel is expensive because supplies are limited because refinery capacity can not meet the demands of the "greatest economy in history" Same story with electricity. Demand is out stripping need and conservation is great but it will not take care of the problem. We need greater capacity so that this doesn't happen again down the road. It will happen again next year because it takes time to build. Lets just hope people wise up to the fact that it's liberal envirnmental and regulatory policy that caused this. I know you think he's a bitch to the oil industry, but you never question Clinton and his ties to extreme environmentalism and his inaction over 8 YEARS to do anything to solve this problem. Give Bush a break... he's only been in office for 4 months and he's doing more about the issue then Clinton in his 8 years.
Hemp is the fastest growing industrial plant in the world. It can be harvested 30 days after planting. It grows even better temporate (mid-atlantic, north-pacific, and south eastern) climate zones. If hemp were not demonized and it were allowed to be a very useful industrial crop, modern technology could cut down even that 30 day "waiting period" to next to nothing. Hemp does not even leech the nutrients out of the soil like corn does (which prevents multiple re-planting in the same area). It is by far the world's most useful illegal plant. Paper, cooking oil, clothes...anything can be made out of hemp. Pity.
Dyslexic.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
Nuclear power is economical in cases where oxygen is at a premium. I can't imagine powering a submarine with coal, or a battery that would last a submarine three months...not to mention, you can use the excess electricity to split water and produce oxygen for the crew to breathe.
Just what *did* you think that cloudy sky that shows up on the startup screen was supposed to mean?
hawk
As someone in the oil industry, I resent that. YOU people have done much to create the crisis with YOUR belief that only opec members should be allowed to make money in the oil business, and frankly that article of faith has done a lot of damage to our ability to fix things. (As has the behavior of the IMF in Venezuela, which really wasn't a nice way to make friends.
As for NASA, part of the problem regarding solar power satellites is that it would require cheap launch. NASA, as I have seen over the past twenty-one years, wants billions upon billions of dollars so they can research cheap launch, but they also very much appear to not want to be successful. Looking at the way they mismanaged DC-X, eventually going with Lockheed's design for the X-33, which doesn't appear to have even been a good-faith effort, is kinda indicative of the problem. They went over budget 50% and are still roughly the amount of the original budget away from flying. Or were, when the program got cancelled. That much money in Roton, and we'd be able to launch solar powered satellites by now.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
As someone in an industry that would be in competition with solar power satellites, from what I know of the design of rectennas for power generation, they would have a strong safety feature in that the waveform characteristics on the satellite would be created by a pilot beam sent up from the ground. They're basically designed so that the beam would be very wide, and locked onto the receiving array.
For more info, check out the usenet group sci.space.policy.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
The real reason for Bush's "energy crisis" rhetoric is to funnel more money into the pockets of his friends in the oil business and to justify further destruction of the environment.
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L5 in 95 was the bumper sticker mantra of the L5 Society. The solar power satellite concept was O'Neill's scheme to put humans permanently in space. He said it was the best place where a high tech civilization could thrive. Then he asked how can we justify the expense of building space habitats. His answer was to mine the Moon and build solar power satellites. And use the profits from the power sold to earth. to build more space habitats.
If the power companies had only known! They could be reaping whirlwind profits today from California's energy crisis. They could be taking the satellites offline to repair meteorite damage. Claim the Moon or Earth is blocking the Sun. There's an ion storm. Help! Help! We're being attacked by Ewoks! ...but I digress.
The society formed with the intention of disbanding on the first permanent space habitat. Sadly, this did not happen. By the time 1987 rolled around the L5 Society merged with the National Space Institute and changed it's name to the National Space Society.
Ack! I'm having flashbacks to my mispent youth:
Bonus question: What does L5 mean? And which brand of foil is best to line my hat to protect me from the orbital mind control lasers?Senator William Proxmire: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the L5 Society?
Witness: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that you'll cut NASA funding and go and spend it on cheese subsidies.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Speaking of nuking cows with megawatts of microwaves, compare that with all the talk about 0.6 watts of cellphone radiation causing brain cancer.
Why would _our_ sunlight generally be decreased? We don't have to stick the sats in between the Earth and the Sun (although they will in the course of their orbits ocassionally do so) but generally stick them to the sides where they're getting light that otherwise goes into space.
Remember the point of a Dyson Sphere? To collect wasted solar energy. Given the resources, we could put gigantic collectors above and below the sun leaving the ecliptic free. We're starting small of course, but it is, I think, better than what we have now. (hint: burning fossil fuels also generates heat as well as polluting chemicals which may cause greenhouse effects further changing temperature.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The aircraft thing isn't actually a big deal.
... but not very many! Any violation would probably be by private pilots.
...)
... in order to have a commercial flight wander into a beam you would probably have to have both a ground controller and the pilot mess up. And all of the computers involved on both sides get messed up too (or ignored). Not very likely.
... this is nothing new. Controlled access airspace has been around a long time.
... they are on their own ...
...
....
Go out and find (I would bet you could get some example off the net) an aviation sectional chart. You would be amazed at all of the areas marked off as restricted or off limit airspace. (Controlled airspace of all types, military training areas, missile ranges, etc.) Yes there are violations of these areas, and yes there probably would be some violations of uwave transmission beams
(Private pilots in general are pretty good at following the rules. In my exerience anyway. Mostly because the rules tend to make sense. However after spending some time with a few in Yuba county CA, I no longer believe that all of them even try to follow the rules. Or even get a license. Glad I don't live out there
Any incident with a IFR (read as: commercial traffic) aircraft running into a beam would be even more unlikely. Commercial pilots (the ones I've met anyway) are unbelievably paranoid about running into things. These are people who think of inter-aircraft clearance distances in terms of miles! They are very aware of where they are and where they are going. Soooo
The other worry you expressed about uwave interferance is not an issue. We would be talking about a direct beam here. The scatter would probably be quite small, and the restricted airspace around the beam would most likely be large enough to avoid that problem entirely.
So in conclusion to the aircraft issue
As far as birds go
I have a feeling that powersats would hurt far fewer birds than wind generators though.
I think it could be fun trying to design orbits to avoid running any other sattelite with a lower orbit through the beam though
In any case it would be good to work all of this stuff out now, with solar power. This paves the way for moving nuke plants (and hopefully fusion plants someday) off the surface and into orbit.
wow, this is getting quite long
OUT
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
This has been talked about for many years. The trick is to do it safely. High-power microwave being beamed down to anywhere other than the intended receiver can be a serious danger. Imagine if that beam lands on, say, a person.
The most obvious solution, and probably the one that will get implemented in one form or another, is for the receiver to transmit a homing signal for the bird to locate, and the power relay only gets turned on when the homing signal is locked in.
One might wonder, though, what kind of danger could exist if some not-so-nice cracker got into the control system of such a satellite and aimed the beam at someone they'd like to cook...
--
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spend your pie-in-the-sky R&D money developing some sort of photovoltaic asphault.
Or hell, piezoelectric elements that generate power when compressed by cars rolling over them...
Or put a generator into the pistons on NYC bridges.. (or anywhere there's vibration, for that matter)
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Your average nuclear power plant is closer to 2 GIGAwatts
Yeah but by the time you're done fooling around in the old west or the fifties all you have left is 790MW left..
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
I suggest reading Just say "No" to Energy Plan from the Cato Institute. Here are some quick blurbs from the commentary:
"energy markets, like most commodity markets, are subject to boom and bust cycles. Energy prices after adjusting for inflation have been plummeting more or less for 15 years. Investors took money out of production and exploration budgets because profits were hard to come by. The bust suddenly ended last year, catching almost everyone by surprise, and the boom is now on. Investors are scrambling to expand supply, but capital investments take time...High prices = high profits = increased investment = price declines."
"...we're currently in the midst of a power-plant construction boom, with some 90,000 megawatts of new electricity capacity scheduled to come on line by 2002 and a staggering 150,000-200,000 megawatts by 2004. This will not only burst the electricity-price bubble but will probably produce an electricity glut in the near future. Similarly, so many billions are flooding into the natural-gas market today that futures contracts are being made at half the price of today's wholesale spot price. And high gasoline profit margins are inducing foreign refineries to enter the American market for the first time in decades and bringing new investment in domestic refining capacity as well. Barring some unforeseen supply disruption in the refining sector, gasoline prices will actually begin to decline slowly but steadily as the summer wears on."
All people who declare war on humanity (as I did that night) are great. We all have good intentions. But we're always wrong. There is no way to win the war on humanity.
MOD THIS UP!!!! I wish all the neo-anarchists protesting humanity finally linking up around the world would understand this.
the energy crisis is a myth, except in California, where the crisis was created not by a lack of resources but by a botched deregulation
The "Energy Crisis" in California is simple: there is more demand than supply. It has little to do with deregulation.
Had there not been deregulation, I bet there still would not have been new power plants built (enviromental BANAism) and artificial electricity price caps in place, just like the current situation.
Californians are (finally) going to have to pay the price for not building new powerplants. Of course, had true deregulation brought the actual cost of California energy to the ratepayers 10 years ago, I bet there would have been more public support (and more demand from power companies) for building new power plants.
As they often say on Usenet, TANSTAAFL.
However, California is only one state that disconnected the link between demand and supply. Expect that in other states whose regulatory bodies have tried to unliaterally "turn off economics" that there will be similar problems.
But then again, so are oil, coal, and nuclear power
People forget about the dangers of our existing fossil fuel based electrictal generation system in the US.
Coal fired plants release more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear plants. Coal-fired plants operate at far higher temperatures and pressures than nuclear, and the risk of explosion is far greater. There have been more deaths in the United States with coal-fired plant accidents than with nuclear-plant accidents. Coal-fired plants require a significant transportation system (railway, barge/dock) to feed the plant. A nuclear plant can be fed for 18 months with a single delivery by a flatbed truck.
What about frying birds and such? Any environmentalists wanna comment? :)
The smaller oil companies, the ones run by people like GWB, are the ones likely to be squashed if alternative fuels take off, and that is why they are buying . . . er, donating heavily do . . . politicians at the moment.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
(Okay, so follow-up posts have clarified that the actul diameter would be much larger, but for the sake of humor...)
A 10-foot diameter would be roughly the same size as the beam generated by the Sol satellite in
"Akira".
So if any would-be Tetsuos out there: Look out! =)
--
"Merging into heavy traffic at near light speed!"
"Merging into heavy traffic at near light speed!"
"Our inertial mass ever increasing!"
Apparently, though, the risks have been pretty carefully considered and the conclusion is that this isn't much of a problem compared to suntanning or eating a typical American diet. As pointed out elsewhere, this frequency is non-ionizing and therefore does not cause chemical reactions. It can heat you up in significant intensities but nothing more, and the intensities under consideration would cause only about as much heating as being outside on a hot day.
From the website cited above: What if the beam wanders off from the rectenna? The beam can't wander off target with a significant intensity because it needs constant feedback from the rectenna for focusing. (A phased-array system is necessary for successful focusing onto the rectenna at such distances.) If it wanders off, then it immediately defocusses and disperses to a tiny fraction of its operating intensity. It also can't be used as a weapon for this reason. Even if it were re-engineered to point anywhere with the same focussing, the transmitters would be designed to operate at a relatively benign frequency (e.g., 2.45 GHz) which would not pose a credible threat to anyone. Again, the only thing that will significantly absorb the 2.45 GHz frequency beam is a receiving antenna designed for it.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I think there's rhetoric coming from the President too - the other day he was comparing the current situation to the energy embargoes of the '70s. I agree with you that things aren't that bad, which means that the President is exaggerating things. The reasons for his statements I'll leave to the cynics in the audience to explain :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Because they know that when Bush says 'we need to produce more energy', he means 'we need to dig up and burn some more dinosaurs'. He don't believe in any of that alternative energy mumbo-jumbo.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I have no idea if such a thing is possible or feasible, of course... probably worth looking into though.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
WHAT? You would allow any old person to spend their time in a hole in the side of a mountain, under thousands of tons of rock?? Do you know what would happen to them during the next earthquake? Not to mention the obvious problems with grizzly bears, vampire bats, mold...
Sorry, couldn't resist...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
And what, pray tell, makes this any more fantastic than, say, nuclear power would have seemed to people in the 1920's, or airplanes to people in the 1700's? All the technology to make this happen is there, there is nothing in the plan that relies on new processes to be discovered. It's just a matter of willpower and investment.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Compared to the risk of melting the polar ice caps and flooding much of the world's landmass, or of fouling the world's atmosphere to the point that people can't breathe it without getting cancer or emphysema, maybe the risk isn't so bad.
Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
You must not have checked recently, because it's a very common practice. Anytime the military sets up a bombing range or testing ground out in the desert, the whole area gets marked as off-limits to civilian traffic, and everybody has to fly around it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
sounds like sour grapes to me, buddy. AYBABTU is always funny no matter how many times you see it and it's especially funny here because it's really happening. Poor little CA..... all high and mighty, self-righteous in your 'environmental' obsession at the expense of practical life. you made your legislative bed, now lie in it in the DARK! and think about what you've done before you cry to us to save you from the pit you so carefully designed all by yourself.
For a shiny healthy kernel: download. compile. reboot. repeat.
I bet you think that drilling in Alaska will solve our "energy crisis" RIGHT NOW?
I think you can make things much bigger in space.
It's difficult to have a few hundred square miles of land on earth to collect solar energy. It's quite costly, but not a problem aesthetically to have a huge solar array in orbit. There might be problems with meteorites and similar crud, but there's also problems with wind storms and animals on earth. (not to mention to local kids...)
Plus, you don't have as much energy loss in the atmosphere if you concentrate the energy in a tight beam.
I think.
-lf
So my preferred scheme for this is...
Satelite 1: Orbiting the Sun Mercury distance and focusing sunlight on...
Satelite 2: Orbiting the Sun Earth distance and transmitting the energy to...
Satelite 3: Orbiting the Earth and beaming the power to the ground station.
Figure this way you could collect large amounts of energy in a small space, while limiting the ability to boil away the oceans.
800 Gallons of Ethanol/acre
US & Canada = 18.8 million square miles
1 acre = 0.0015625 square mile
800 * 18,800,000 / 0.0015625 = 9,625,600,000,000 gallons
Now of course, ethanol isn't as dense as crude oil.
Crude Oil has 6 million BTUs/barrel, ethanol has 3.7 (From the same source, the US uses 1 million BTU every 1.1 days per capita.)
1 barrel = 42 gallons
So converting from gallons of ethanol to the equivalent barrels of oil:
9,625,600,000,000 * 3.7 / 6 / 42 = 141,328,253,968.254
the maximum average oil imports from February 1999 to February 2001 was 10,000 barrels / day.
This is 3,650,000 barrels per year. Or 0.002% of the theoretical maximum energy production of North America.
Of course, this doesn't allow any room for food, factories, homes, or people. Or account for mountains, lakes, and poor soil. But it is reassuring. Because if we were using more energy than we could ever produce in our wildest dreams, we would hit that wall extremely hard when the oil runs out.
From the article:
The direction of the beam's transmission was able to be changed.
Grrreat, it's bad enough that this big device is up there beaming down enough microwave energy to power homes, and it might get accidentally shot in the wrong direction, but you're telling me that these beams can actually be manipulated from the ground? Am I the only one who gets terrified at the thought of some scr1pt k1dd13 who "owns" his first power satellite? Forget testing the viability of the power generation, I wanna see testing of the security. These things are just begging to be hacked, and I'm not interested in waking up baked by microwaves.
What's your damage, Heather?
Surely the oil companies and their presidential puppet will not stand for this blasphemy.
I know I'm going to get marked as a troll or flamebait for this, but here it comes anyway: Clinton had two terms in office, and Mr. "I Invented The Internet" Gore did what for the California energy crisis? The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years. Never heard of Gore doing anything about it, did you? Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you? Wonder why that is? I don't.
What's your damage, Heather?
For all of Bush's rhetoric, his budget has already slashed funding for alternative energy research.
Exactly. NASA used to do a lot of alternative energy research. In the early 80s, the NASA Glenn Research Center (then called Lewis) was doing research on the "rectennas" need to receive microwave energy from space power systems, as well as photovoltaic cells, wind power, Stirling engines, high efficiency gas turbine engines, continuously variable transmissions, and advanced battery and fuel cell research. Reagan and Old Bush canceled almost all of that.
Today, NASA is fighting to keep their microgravity researchers from jumping ship since Bush II canned half the space station and there won't be enough people on board to do any science. NASA's administrator does whatever the White House says, so you won't see him proposing any alternative energy research. During administrator Goldin's recent congressional testimony he repeatedly turned down offers to restore some funding to cancelled research programs, saying that even if NASA were given the money, he "would stay within the President's budget".
The California energy crisis is the result of a horribly botched deregulation plan at the state level. The Bush and Clinton administrations have just about nothing to do with it.
What the Bush administration is doing is pushing the idea that's there's a nation-wide energy crisis, or the threat of one. This is nonsense, but Bush wants to let his Big Oil buddies drill wherever the hell they want, and hopes the threat of $3/gal gas will do a lot to put the public on his side.
Back on topic, I doubt that Bush would be interested in satellite power. First, there wouldn't be any significant progress made before the next election. Second, it doesn't help his big campaign contributors. Bush has shown no interest in alternative energy sources.
Gore, on the other hand, had a set of measures designed to encourage such things, such as money for research and tax breaks for people who drive ultra-low or zero emission vehicles.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
While a great ide, its also too dangerous a weapons system. I'm not concerned with the beams accidently drifting of the receiver, there are ways to fix that, but try to convinve the public of this.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Absolutely true, and it accounts for 3/4 of the two-fold difference in the energy it takes to make a dollar of GDP between Europe and the US.
The remaining quarter of the difference is in energy efficiency. Closing the energy efficiency gap would conclusively solve the energy "crisis", much more so than the small increment of production Bush is proposing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
there is a benifit to doing it in space. they dont have clouds in space. the power production would be constant. this is something that isnt always achieveable on earth.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Too many folks won't read the reference links, so to elaborate on the safety issues:
In other words, only when the emitter array is phased together can it be said to be transmitting a beam at all, rather than frittering away its microwaves in all directions, mostly into deep space. No pilot signal, no synchronization, no beam, no cities fried like anthills.
Sorry, Dr. Evil, but that's the way it is.
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Since solar cells can be made from sand, O' Neill's original plan called for lunar mass drivers to shoot bags of raw materials (selected regolith [i.e. sand, etc.]) into the Earth-Moon L1 (or maybe L2) point where a catcher net would collect them. The bags would be shipped to L4 or L5 by a solar powered mass driver propelled transfer ship. This was pretty neat -- the transfer ship would need no fuel, just sunlight and hurling some of the cargo out the back at Mach 29. [8^)
John S. Lewis and company at the U. of Arizona have since shown in Breaking the Bonds of Earth: Space Resources and other works, that it would be cheaper to get the needed regolith from certain Near Earth Asteroids. There are at least two asteroids from which you can return cargo capsules by applying a delta-V of less than 60 meters/sec (134 miles/hour). The launch windows only open once every few years for each asteroid, so we need to spot a couple more likely ones and get those automated dirt bagger robots on their way.
Either that or send larger missions that can shoot back more capsules when the launch windows are open.
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Yup. Intelligent design would allow for all that: The micro-meteorites aren't too much of a problem; they're moving so fast that they'll mostly punch clean holes through the paper-thin solar cells. Even if the hole shorts out the cell -- no problem. The panel is made up of a bunch of fairly small, independent solar cells. Losing a few isn't a big issue. Build it with more than required. (You'll need the extra capacity eventually. The radiation in space degrades the power output of solar cells over time. Commercial satellites are always sent up with enough extra solar cells to last the sat's design life.)
When too many cells are bad, either due to damage or radiation, it's time to send out the repair crew.
Space junk is a problem too, but more so in low orbit. Solar power sattelites would be put in geosynchronous orbit, about 23,000 miles up. Everyone who puts a satellite up there is supposed to minimize the amount of junk they drop. Plus, they should keep enough reserve fuel to send the sat out from geo synch to a "retirement" orbit when its useful life is over.
How much of a problem is this? I don't know, but someone must. Who collects statistics on comm sat and weather sat failures?
An earlier post was complaining about how we hadn't built anything huge in space. This is true, but the lack of wind means that large foil structures supported by springy wires can survive for years in space. Didn't the Russians try a huge folding space mirror a while back? They destroyed it afterwards, to avoid the ire of amateur astronomers.
Even in geosync orbit there are limits to how flimsy a structure can be before undamped vibrations or the feeble breath of low powered maneuvering thrusters rip it apart. But, very lightweight construction by Earth standards should be possible in space.
Think of the Echo 1 balloon, from the days before active comm sats. It was just a huge, spherical, aluminum coated balloon with a few pounds of volatile chemicals inside. Once launched and ejected from the rocket, the sun's heat vaporized the chemicals and inflated the balloon. Once inflated, it didn't matter much whether a meteorite punctured the balloon or not. There was no air to make it flatten out, no gravity to deflate it.
In low orbit with a huge cross section and almost no mass, even the faint traces of atmosphere present eventually brought Echo 1 back to Earth. And yes, the microwave reflections from the balloon did change a bit over time, showing that the bag was wrinkling some. Still, Echo 1 is an example of how a large, flimsy construction is possible in space -- and under harsher conditions to low mass objects than would be found out at geosynch orbit.
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"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
You could do better using laser light, which can be more precisely focused. See Robert Forrest's Flight of the Dragonfly for a fictional account in which he proposes to shoot industrial amounts of laser light across not just interplanetary, but interstellar distances. The scale of Doc Forrest's astro-engineering is not for the faint hearted. 8^)
But, if you're going to go to Mercury and set up a power station, why not make something so valuable that it is worth the effort to send it back to Earth? Why not make antimatter, bottle it, and ship it back? That would avoid transmission losses entirely.
(Of course, there is the little problem that current antimatter production techniques are fabulously inefficient. The best ratio of power in to potential-energy-of-antimatter out is millions to one!)
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"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
There are plants in the US that use the big bunch of mirrors system. It actually boils salt(!) which stays incredibly warm for incredible amounts of time. That is then used to boil water for turbine generators.
I think the current bottleneck of electrical energy production is the whole "lets make a bunch of magnets spin" solution. Solutions where you capture the energy from the breaking of atomic or nuclear bonds, will be what will give us boat loads of power. At that level of effeciency, we could even use oil and have it last a lot longer than we think. Right now its "lets get something really hot, make steam, have that steam spin a generator" or in the case of dams or windmills: lets use water / air to spin something.
dubya will carefully consider this... and then opt to drill for oil.
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
Sorry, this idea has already been patented by first right by the developers of Sim City 2000. (tm)
©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
They are the question. The answer is no. Read this site's analysis of the solar cells and why they won't work. The basic gist of their argument is that right now, it takes more energy to make a solar cell, than the solar cell will ever produce in its useful life. It's an energy sink. A solar cell would have to more efficient, a lot more efficient just to reach the break even point on energy in/energy out.
I'm afraid our realistic options are what they've always been - petroleum and nuclear. Petroleum production will be peaking in a few years, which leaves nuclear power. But even nuclear fuel supplies are limited. The only real solution is nuclear fusion. I hope the Farnsworth Fusor is the answer, because we're going to need one sooner than you think.
I don't know anyone who's protesting "humanity finally linking up around the world."
I know many people who protest control of the world's natural and economic resources falling into fewer and fewer hands; who protest multinational corporations exploiting workers in a race to the bottom; who protest the evaporation of national and locl sovereignty when they become inconvenient to corporate profits.
"Grassroots globalization" is a fine economic, political, and social concept, that can bring us a wonderful diversity of goods and ideas. I like being able to get imported beer at my corner store. (I just wish they had a wider selection of sake...) I like my palm leaf hat made by Guatemalan artisans. I like being able to share ideas on the net with people from around the world.
"Globalization" in the form of the growing hegemony of multinational corporations, however, sucks rocks; it seeks not to bring us diversity, but to put a McDonalds on every corner, a Coke in everyones hand, and the Backstreet Boys on everyone's radio.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...thinks that renewable alternative sources of energy are not "practical" enough to seriously research and fund, but a fancifal multibillion dollar ballistic missile shield is...
ok, that's my political troll for the day...just thought it was ironic
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I hear they got the idea after playing The Bouncer on ps2
With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?
I don't know, cause it's fantasia bullshit?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Fine - we (the rest of the world) will size all your assets outside of USA, then stop shipping you all those fine things used to enjoy, starting with cars & petrol, computers, TV, etc...
Neato science fiction idea that might be viable in 20 years on a NASA schedule & budget (read 40+ years and $200 billion additional).
Yeah - like the Star wars system ? If it can be done to stop missile that *might* come someday, but has 99.9999% of never happening, why can't it be done to solve an energy crisis that is 100% sure to happen ? Oh yeah, one is a weapon (Republican love weapon and guns) and the other is something that improve the life of everyone on the planet. That's a tough one (at least for Junior, who has the IQ of a pigeon)
NB : sorry for the pigeons out there.
Rebulicans are for less government, **NOT** more poverty, **NOT** more pollution, **NOT** more wars, and **NOT** more racism.
True - unless this goes against the all-sacred holy economy. If republicans must choose between economy vs (evironment, equality, peace, etc) they'll always pick economy. Not only that, they also want less governement but the only thing they offer instead is religion and mega-corporation.
I'll grant you many republicans have a 'gun' fetish. We all have our short commings we need to compensate for
;-)
I can already imagine what kind of "shortcomings" republican have that create this gun fetish
I'm not sofistikated enough to understand our President's foreward thinking energy policy,
"Bush" and "forward thinking". Isn't that contradicting ?
And your pathetic economies will shrivel and die without the American market place to sustain your industry
That's ok - 1,3 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians are just waiting to take your place as the largest consummer market. We can do without your measly 300 million consummers, they are all debt riddled anyways.
There's no such thing as a energy-crisis in California. There's an economy crisis, where some capitalist lunatics have deregulated an energy market that was working perfectly fine before, and made it into a mess where the middle-man (the one who buys power and distribute it) is bankrupt.
There's no need to dril for more oil anywhere in Alaska to bring back electricity in California (of course it's easier to claim so that say the truth : "I need to pay back the oil companies who bought my election" )
Well I'd say killing a few desert snakes vs raising the ocean level by 5 meters and changing the whole planet climate... would prefer killing the desert snakes anyday :-) . Especially since solar panel would reduce albedo, hence fight global warming.
Does anyone else feel Bush was voted in the wrong decade?
What is worst is that almost half the country voted for him - yet much more people than that oppose driling in Alaska. Now Bush Junior never hidden his pro-oil positions, so what where those electors thinking ? "oh he is a good christian, and has a nice tie, I'll vote for him ?". You have to wonder...
The world is at peace - period ! Russians don't give a shit about international politics anymore (they have enough problems getting food and heat for the winter). China is playing tiger with Taïwan, but that's part of the routine Chinese diplomacy. They won't invade Taïwan because they are too busy becoming a capitalist market and because Taïwan is busy doing business with China.
So what's left ? Israel ? Well if the US was not bent on supporting it beyond all decency, there would be peacekeepers there already. And eventhough, Palestinian don't have any nuke or any major military force, so they'll keep being oppressed and slaughtered by Israelians. We have seen this for decades, and it won't change unfortunately. There's also India vs Pakistan, but that's really between the two of them and the forces are balanced enough to keep everyone quiey. Iraq, Cuba ? Joke. North Korea ? A straw man used by the Pentagon to scare the WASP. Since Saddam, Ben Laden and Milosevic are useless to play the Bad Guy (TM) role, they picked North Korea. But this country is on its knees and they are even less equiped than Iraq before the Gulf War, which means that their hungry army is armed with sticks & stones and will surrender at the first sight of a BigMac. If N-Korea wasn't so important in keeping the bag guy seat for the US, it would already be a solved problem. It's not like you can't assasinate Kim Il Sung and it's familly or organised a fake revolution (CIA does this almost everyday in South America)
Basically, the whole world is so busy running after money and doing business that they keep their nuke in the closet. It would even be more stable if the stupid Bush Junior wasn't so stuborn on preparing war with the NMD. His father used to be the same too (Iraq here we go again). That's just a way to push lots of public money into the military sector and away from environement, eduction and health.
Not only is this NMD dangerous for world stability, it's effectiveness is highly doubtfull and yet to be proven. Don't forget the star wars project was started by Reagan (a real genius...).
And if missiles can be stopped - the enemy will just send a guy with a miniaturised nuke and blow the city that way. It's not like stopping missiles will make the country any safer. It'll just feel safer - which is even more dangerous...
Yes, but writing programs in java ( as unpleasant as it is ) doesn't cause respiratory distress, smog, or acid rain. Efficiency is not always better, but there are much bigger, more important issues here than efficiency. Fossil fuels have *no* serious long term prospects, and their widespread use is damaging the environment.
And here's the bush administration, cutting alternative energy research while increasing our commitment to fossil fuels. Where, do you suppose, are his priorities...
Andrew
Anyone remember that anime Doraemon movie episode "cloud kingdom" where Doraemon discovered this sky kingdom?
:) well, the Japanese anyway...
Well, they had this "central" cloud which is a solar power station in the pacific sky and it would "beam" its power to all the other clouds.. They even had a plan to flood everyone on earth, evil!
This shows that anime is the drive too many technologies
When a planet's civilisation reaches a certain level, they try to put up Solar Power Satellites.
Inevitably, putting this much mass in orbit is a disaster. Small collisions spawn larger clouds of debris until the entire planet is surrounded by a cloud of projectiles no spacecraft can traverse.
At this point the planet's civilisation, already depending on space technology, dies in violent spasms or by vegetating slowly away.
I just hope they calculated with the energy spent on bringing those solar panels in position. A rocket uses huge amounts of energy to enter orbit. :)
And what about maintaining.. they gonna send electritions up to the moon when things break... sounds rather costly
The first is a good point.
Actually, making the solar panels on the Moon isn't that bad an idea. Or at least grabbing more of the resources from there, a lot less costly (in energy) to move mass from the Lunar surface to geosysnc earth orbit than from the Earth's gravity well.
Same for electricians, really, given a lunar base/factory.
Mr. "I Invented The Internet" Gore
You know, every time someone trots out that tired phrase, they instantly lose credibility.
I'm not going to go into the reasons why his "claim" wasn't a claim at all, and even if it was, the people who *did* invent the Internet backed him. It's not worth the old arguments.
-Todd
---
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
This just makes me laugh. You're probably someone who is concerned with saving the environment, as you would rather have solar power than find more petroleum. Yet you want to roll the stuff across acres of the desert or the ocean. Do you know what this would do to the environment?
This would totally mess things up. Ocean temperature would go down since sunlight would be blocked. A change in temperature would kill lots of innocent fishies. You may think "oh it's just the desert nothing lives there" but there is quite a lot of wildlife in the desert. Your plan hurts the environment just as much as burning fossil fuels, if not more.
Not only that, but putting solar cells in orbit is expensive. Orders of magnitude more expensive than deploying them here on the ground.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just deploy solar cells here on the ground? If you don't want to set up miles of cells that cover the ground, put them on the roofs of buildings ...
That would cost orders of magnitude less per KWh produced, and it totally bypasses the need for the microwave-beaming-power-technology which I don't think even exists in a usable form yet. That, and we can do it TODAY.
You do realize, of course, that at one point the Soviets were *really* freaked because they had mistaken a satellite launch by a Norwegian vessel as a possible surprise solo nuclear missile strike on them. The world came fairly close to being obliterated -- which would have been avoided if the superpowers knew that they could down singleton birds.
No. Of course you didn't know that. You probably never research this sort of thing.
For that matter, you're probably not aware that a PRC military official pointedly made the statement that the US cared more about Los Angeles than Taiwan. It doesn't take a DIA analyst to know what THAT means. And why the PRC opposes NMD more vehemently than the Russians -- because the Russians *know* that they could overwhelm it, while the PRC isn't sure -- and it's important to their foreign policy that they *are* able to destroy large cities in the United States.
And I don't think you're going to be able to push "microwaves from space" on a population that's so scientifically illiterate that large segments are frightened by NMR (because of the word 'nuclear'), by irradiated food (it'll make you radioactive! Right.), and genetics (there are non-trivial numbers of people so un-clued that they believe that food doesn't even HAVE genes unless they're engineered to do so). It'll fry us, right?
*chortle*
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Hemp has 4 times the cellulose of corn and can make 4 times as much ethanol/methanol as corn. Corn ethanol would cost about $2.50/gal, I believe. 2.50/4 = $.625. So if we could legalize hemp, the gas "crisis" would be over, although people who buy the Excursion, which gets 3 mpg city/8mpg highway, write in letters to newspapers complaining about how they have no money.
Just a couple questions:
- How many square acres of land is suitable, within the US, for corn/hemp production?
- What percentage of that land area is needed to satisfy the food requirements of the population?
- What is the energy density of corn/hemp ethanol/methanol in comparison to gasoline?
- How many gallons of gasoline are consumed on an annual basis in the US?
- How much energy is required to extract ethanol/methanol from corn/hemp in comparison to the refinig of oil to obtain gasoline?
I don't know how the numbers would work out here, but I'm really tired of hearing wild speculation about energy alternatives without any discussion of feasibility.. Answer these questions, crunch through the numbers, and if it works out that hemp could be used as a replacement to oil then I'd recommend buying some land and sending a plan to Bush.. If he's got a brain in his skull he'll sell the oil rigs, buy farmland and push to get the legislation through congress..Slow down cowboy. The rhetoric is coming from the media, not the President. The media-mantra for the past three months has been that the energy crisis will bring down the presidency. Meanwhile gas prices are still cheaper than in 1999 under Clinton and considerably cheaper than in 1978 under Carter. As for the power crisis in California and the potential for a future shortage nationwide, I dont see any rehtoric at all. Clearly there is a short term crisis in California, and a long term problem for the rest of the country. While I am all for science R&D, statements like yours are rediculous. Commercial orbiting solar power stations are many years from becoming a reality along with fusion and mid-ocean tidal power plants. These technologies are exciting and certainly deserve funding and our interests. However, penciling in preposterous "unproven tech" in a national policy has already gotten Bush in trouble with Missile Defense. Do you suggest that he do the same will all of his policies?
There is no world conspiracy to drive up gas prices in the United States other than OPEC. Outside of the OPEC nations, the U.S. consumers enjoy the cheapest gas prices in the world. The energy crisis is one of refineries and a lack power plants.
Conservation is important, but what is more efficient, spending resources to become more efficient or spending resources to generate more power. Look at software engineering. Is /. authored with a custom C-solution. It would be alot faster than perl and appache. Why bother with an OS. Why not write an embedded system, it would be more efficient. Why use a generic relational database and not write something spesifically for your needs. Efficiency does not always translate into better (look at Java, Perl, Python, etc).
Someone you trust is one of us.
So far as I can see, O'Neill's approach -- that of using nonterrestrial materials -- is the only way solar power satellites will ever prove economical -- with the possible exception of some proposals for urban illumination from earth-oribing mirrors. Sadly, I've seen very little in the way of studies of how to make non-terrestrial resource utilization work coming from mainstream corporate (or governmental) sources.
Since the early 1980s, when it became apparent that NASA's predictions for Shuttle economy were enormously optimistic, there has been a lot of thought put into how to create human-guided self-replicating raw-material processing facilities on the lunar surface and in space as a way of bootstrapping a huge industrial manufacturing infrastructure in those locations. This at the same time as technology has advanced in the relevant areas, thus bringing the cost of such a self-replicating "seed" facility, put in place in space or on the lunar surface, much closer to the level that might make private investors interested.
Ergo, what is needed is a "technology development initiative" by the government, but a release from taxation, those businesses that are pursuing relevant milestones toward the establishment of these capabilities.
Seastead this.
Wow we can now cook birds in flight. I wonder what the effects of microwave radiation are on life? Does it disperse on particles in the atmosphere? Will it heat particles/clouds in the atmosphere? Does mild exposure mutagenic? Hmm, I'm totally skeptical of this technology. Perhaps we could use it in space to move around energy, but I don't know about space to earth..
-Moondog
You can see a breakdown of the new budget for renewable energy here. Funding for solar has been cut 49%, as has wind power.
At the same time, Bush plans to build 1,300 new power stations whilst opening the Alaska wildlife reserve for oil exploration.
Does anyone else feel Bush was voted in the wrong decade?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Whoops, we accidently pointed this thing at your house, sorry about that.. I'm scared by the thought of high power microwave beams being pointed at me.. Ask any Airplane Ground crew what they think of high power microwave.
Home on LaGrange
Words: Bill Higgins and Barry Gehm c. 1978
Music: "Home on the Range"
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
And the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects.
We possess, so it seems, two of man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound. CHORUS
You don't need no oil, nor a tokamak coil,
Solar stations provide Earth with juice.
Power beams are sublime, so nobody will mind
If we cook an occasional goose.
INTERLUDE (to Oh, What A Beautiful Morning)
All the cattle are standing like statues.
All the cattle are standing like statues.
They smell of roast beef every time I ride by,
And the hawks and the falcons are dropping like flies...
I've been feeling quite blue since the crystals I grew
Became too big to fit through the door.
But from slices I sold, Hewlett-Packard, I'm told,
Made a chip that was seven foot four. CHORUS
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch,
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart
If we just find a big enough wrench. CHORUS
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodby,
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
"The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years. Never heard of Gore doing anything about it, did you?"
Oh thats right, Gore was _planning_ on losing the election so he decided to screw the country over. Can't argue with that logic.
--Ryan
Masers have been proposed to focus a beam of microwaves and avoid interference. They would not be suitable for offensive use, because the beam diffuses out over several square kilometers by the time it hits the ground. Of course, to sell Bush on the idea, you would have to have a refocusable beam that could become small enough to do a simcity style kill.
It's my understaning that converting maser transmissions to electricity via antenna should be much more efficient than solar panels. Anyone have more up to date info on the research?
Most proposals have been to have a maser beam disperse over several kilometers of land onto a sunlight friendly wire mesh array antenna covering grazing land.
This avoids the weapon issue and the frying issue, since the energy concentration per square foot is low enough to be *mostly harmless*.
Conversion by antenna should be much more efficient than solar panel.
Follow up on non-net research mentioned at cited links for more details. A lot of people have been studying this idea for a long time, but of course the oil companies control all.
Actually, the reason why such a large antenna array is needed on the ground is due to the diffusion of the beam. By the time it gets to the surface, it is *mostly harmless* or so it has been said over the years by its proponents. O'Neill and others proposed the construction of a large mesh array antenna that would pass sunlight and could be situated over cattle grazing land. Feasibility studies have been done in the past, and the only real problem was the construction cost in space.
The atomspheric energy absorption is not high enough to make this inefficient and does not really contribute to making this *mostly harmless*. The reason it becomes *mostly harmless* is due to dispersion of the beam over a large area. So, a larger antenna is used to pick it up.
People need to check out the solar power satellites link cited in the post. The safety details have been addressed long ago.
Oh, you mean that one the two wealthy oilmen have been talking about? Please.
is nonsense, but Bush wants to let his Big Oil buddies drill wherever the hell they want, and hopes the threat of $3/gal gas will do a lot to put the public on his side.
Why do people say that?
Did you know that Mr. Bush had a bigger house in Texas then he did now? Did you know that Mr. Bush AND his vice president _SOLD_ all of their stocks and interests in ANY OUTSIDE INTEREST when they did not have to?
Did you know that the left rehashes the same arguments over and over and over again? Where exactly are Mr. Bush's oil buddies? What are their names? Why are the democrats insisting that Bush's plan is crap when they have NO PLAN of their own? Why are they avoiding a solution?
Why?
Even in circumstances where it is "aiming" properly, wouldn't this be a problem for bird and airplanes? If I can't even use my cellphone for fear of interferance in the plane, what about giant beams of microwave radiation??
There's also no ambassador to the United Nations. Not that that'll matter much without us debt payment, but still...
Linus has,in fact,grown,and explosively-JonKatz
For the foreseeable future, this is true... However, that's no reason not to develop new energy sources. What if something is found along the path to this 'power in the sky' scheme that makes it dirt cheap to get power down from orbit? 20 years of development money seems like a small investment..
---
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Since WWII, the biggest single factor in controlling brush-fire wars has been the control of the worlds oil supply. When alternative energy comes up,things get chaotic, and that makes vested interests nervous. Big money likes security and stability.
Basically, the guvvies aren't serious about space. The situation is as described in the film "Tucker a man an his dream". Major corporations does innovate until forced to do so by their competitors. The US only did space seriously when the Russians forced them do get in. As it is now, they are following the same failed strategy as they did with airflight by funding Langley(the man that couldn't do what the Wright brothers did despite lots of US Federal funding).
We'll know the guvvies are serious about space when the guvvies start funding prizes for space development similar to the bounties they used to promote aerial mapping of the American west. Until then--look at the folks like John Carmack(the game guru that now funds Armadillo Aerospace)--or Jim Bowery( http://come.to/croatan )-that are getting their money on the open market.
The "Manhattan Project" was really fundamentally a bad idea. The weapon produced, wasn't all _that_ useful--and has produced enormous problems the last 50 years--and the power source produced has simply not be economical--even before you take into account those nasty Russian accidents.
No solar panels increase albedo, big time. Hardly any of the solar energy that hits them is converted to electricity. Instead it's all converted to heat, solar panels are black after all. Plain sand has a very low albedo being very light color.
Didn't you read the artical and see what it said on how large-scale use of solar would cause a large increase in the absorbtion of sunlight?
Ummh, that was not the answer to his question.
I heard somewhere that if we planted the entire surface of the North American continent with corn/hemp/etc. and harvested it, it wouldn't amount to much in the fuel tanks of America's economic engine. For now, the black stuff is the best stuff. Its very hard to beat the energy density and resource extraction efficiency of oil.
TurboD
Dr. Jerry Pournelle, who has been involved in the field for many years, has some insights into this. It's do-able, it's safe, and let's get on with it already.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Well, the world isn't the United States. For one thing, the U.S. is home to the world's largest oil companies, which aren't all that interested in anything not coming out of the ground. Another, LAND. Solar farms don't work in Japan, which is, to put it gently, overpopulated. Countries like Japan or England or Germany can't unroll miles of mylar on the ground. Solarsats take all the infrastructure and move it into space, where's there's room.
They are also permanent. Besides the beaming equipment, which I assume burns out after time, the solar cells last for a long, long, time.
And a solarsat isn't fragile -- there is no wind, no rain, no earthquakes, no gekkos. It just works, year after year.
As for cheap, after the initial construction, whatevcer it costs, the sat just keeps paying for itself, without stopping. The well doesn't run dry, there are no spills. And we don't have to pave over the deserts, either.
Not that your idea isn't good! It is pretty cheap to panel desert areas.
Glad to comment: there will be no such problem, because of the spread of the beam. Birds aren't going to spend years flying through it, anyway.
If you read up on the subject, you'll find that the distribution of the beam makes the energy levels at any given point very low. It's not like a laser, in which the beam is focused, but rather is recieved at a large antenna farm.
In short, the birds aren't going to get hurt, and any potential long-term risks are much less than those of any alternatives.
"With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?"
1. So are you suggesting we're not in an energy crisis?
2. Yeah - let's use this project (due in 20 years) for our CURRENT energy problems. What the hell were you thinking?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Only if they pay up someone says. Bah, it wouldn't work. The eco loons will protest - they'll say the microwaves are killing migratory birds, or causing genital warts or something.
Derek
It doesn't require mind reading to come to Phil's conclusion. "Bush only wants to make the oil industry happy" because Bush is pushing for increased domestic oil and gas drilling. The assumption is that is bad. The assumption is only OPEC oil and gas production is acceptable. In other words, more of the NIMBYism that got California in its current debacle to begin with.
More domestic conservation. Like the conservation measures which are driving gas prices through the roof? 38 cents a gallon in federal taxes to discourage gas usage. Federal reformulated gasoline regulations which are causing widespread severe supply shortages, driving the price up. These kind of "conservation" measures? Ever consider that people dont WANT to conserve? Its one thing to pay high prices due to high demand, its another to pay artificially high prices due to some egghead who thinks he knows what's best for others.
Move to California and enjoy the logical conclusion of environmentalism. Hope you take lots of candles.
Derek
No geckos, but how about space debris?
There are great many pieces of small debris floating around in orbit after few decades of space program.That's why you have armor plating all over the place in ISS for example. 2mm piece of white paint can be a bitch if the Delta-V is several km/s.
So, yes, there will be wear and tear.
Because, there's no whizz bang gee whiz in it. Again, NASA is run by Morons who don't take risks and don't propose new ideas and concepts. Instead they're on the Congressional teat for more and more money every year. We could take 1/4 of the ISS budget and put systems into orbit on Titan IVs. Problem is NASA dosn't like the Titan IVs because their for the AF, NASA uses the shuttle. So, to deploy a low cost solution we spend $500 Million + to launch it not to mention the training costs associated with a manned mission. There needs to be a rethinking in the US Space strategy. The Air Force had it right in the 50's and 60's but NASA got all the funds. Look at project Man High which proved quite a few things that NASA didn't learn until it was well into Mercury. The X-Planes project, hell the X-15 is and was the fastest thing to fly in the atmosphere. Where's the X-33? Ohh, cancelled. Where's all the other stuff NASA is supposed to produce? Nowhere. To big, too cumbersome and too much money. Strip off the new technology research and give it back to the Air Force or MIT or somebody who can do something with it. Not Goldin and his bunch of morons. Just remember $95 Billion for ISS..... You could put up a lot of satellites.. Look at Iridium, although a bad business concept they lanched a lot of birds for a hell of a lot less.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Agreed.... NASA is too big and too stupid. Monies need to flow to the private sector to come up with innovation. There's a company in Arizona making inexpensive solar panels in rolls that can be used on roofs in lieu of shingles. I'm thinking of investing in them and buy some myself.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
just hack into one of these.
pick a logo for this thing :
"They plump when you cook 'em"
-or-
"Just like ants under a magnifying glass"
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I would think that the answer to this is obvious: it doesn't involve improving the lot of existing mineral extraction industries. Remember that Dubya is the guy who proposed cutting funding for alternative energy research by 30% as part of his overall energy program. After all, he doesn't want to risk hurting his friends in the oil industry. Something that could actually replace fossil fuels is exactly what Dubya doesnt' want.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
"Hey, did you hear? They're going to send a spacecraft to the Sun!"
"Wow... isn't that dangerous? The Sun is so hot!"
"Well yeah, normally. But they're going at night."
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Bob Zubrin does a great job of shooting down the concept of Solar Power Sats in his Entering Space -- it simply can't be done from Earth to orbit...the cost is too overwhelming, even when you reduce current launch costs by an order of magnitude.
He does show that it is feasible to build the panels on the Moon and launch them from there, but it seems to me that no one wants to invest in the infrastructure required to tap the energy sources and mineral sources. People seem to expect instant gratification from space because they get it from everyplace else in their lives...
Space is attainable. It's the changing the current mode of human thinking that I'm not so sure about...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the only geosynchronous orbits are above the equator. The further a satellite's orbit moves from the equator the wave pattern we typically see representing its traversal across the earths surface grows in amplitude.
If the reception site must be directly below the satelite, that means it will not be in the United States. I would suspect George W. Bush is loathe to put US funded energy sources outside US borders...(considering how critical energy is to the sustained growth of the US economy...)
However, I don't see why the beam would have to be perpendicular to the ground. If they do not have to be, a satellite in geosynchronous orbit could beam the energy to a facilities 30 degrees north of their position, which would put them within the continental US.
There are no clouds in space. No interruption of service.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Three that come to mind:
- Giant circular greenhouse with a huge tower in the middle. Air in the greenhouse gets hot and rushes up the tower which contains a turbine. Cool air enters round the edge. This works and there is a great big prototype somewhere in spain (anyone got any links?). You can grow crops in the green house except for the bit right in the middle where it gets a bit drafty.
- Mirrors like hugs bits if guttering which focus sunlight onto metal pipes with oil in. Oil gets very very hot, boils water, turbine etc. I believe that there are a number of plants like this working in the USA.
- Windmill. Sunlight heats ground, air rises, cold air rushes in and turns blades on great big fan up a tower. Quite a popular solution in many parts of the world.
I predict that all of these solutions will be substantially cheaper than this stupid space power idea until long after all of us are dead.
...that anyone takes this idea seriously. It's such an incredibly dangerous idea too -- you don't even need a terrorist attack, just a telemetry malfunction, to fry a city with one of those things.
/Brian
As others have pointed out, it's still a navigation hazard. And you do have to worry about birds falling out of the sky and all.
I remember reading about this idea in futurist books as a kid, and by the time I stopped being interested in this sort of literature (just don't pick much of it up anymore) the idea was already being dismissed. Okay, it diffuses. But that's not much help.
Over-the-air power transmission on any scale larger than what's needed to power a bug (I believe the Russians did this) is too much of a risk. It's an interesting idea that I think someone floated without really giving a lot of thought to it. You could probably do a ground-based version with a massive solar array and a waveguide to pipe the energy where it needs to go, but that would sort of miss the point of the technology, wouldn't it? Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
/Brian
now we just need them to send power to california.
if you want a space power facility -- you need a way to build them. http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/skyworker
I live on the other side of the Atlantic, so I don't hear any of the rhetoric - I just see the decisions this man makes, and from what I can see, he is behaving criminally.
Firstly, the US pays some of the lowest energy prices on the planet. Over here we pay almost three times more for our petrol. Maybe higher prices over there would be a good thing. They might force America to consider how much energy it uses and maybe think about efficiency for a change.
Secondly, you have no energy crisis in any real terms. That thing in California is a problem of administrative incompetence and bad planning, and in no way related to poor energy supplies.
Lastly, the things Bush have proposed are almost unbelievably irresponsible. Even forgetting about CO2 concerns, it is a fact that within the next 30-40 years, oil supply is going to fall behind demand, and gradually dry up altogether. Coal will follow not much later. It is foolish in the extreme to put a large part of investment in new energy infrastructure into fossil fuels - if you do you are going to run hard into a brick wall.
Even forgetting about this - because listening to Bush there is no way he will consider a non-fossil fuel based solution - the fact that he seems opposed to even basic environmental precautions like scrubber systems and good power plant location is incredible. He is such a bought-man that the fact that he seems to retain some respectability and support is hard to understand.
I hope that for the good of the rest of the world - and the US too - that his plans never make it through congress in any recognisable form.
Wow, when I purchased The Bouncer for my PS2, I thought that "satellites converting solar power to microwaves which are beamed down to earth" idea was pure technobabble hokum. Now I see it's not; the people at Squaresoft are clearly good at keeping track of current events. Kudos to Squaresoft for showing what can go wrong with one of these systems.
If there end up being problems with NASDA's system, well, we can just blame Dauragon C. Mikado.
My question is not "can it be done?" but (environmentally speaking) " should it be done?" Think of all the mile of nature destroyed on our already over-crowding planet. Some of the solution, of course, may involve population (which may "solve" itself with disease), but in mean time, perhap better plan would be more efficiency / less waste. It may be that this (alone) is not the best way -- but if it were efficient it might be help. And using on the massive wasteland of city and suburban roof tops might just be a good idea.
Of course, I suppose ecconomics could get in the way (damn if I don't hate captitalism and suspect its the best we can hope for at the same time).... :(
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And what about maintaining.. they gonna send electritions up to the moon when things break... sounds rather costly :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Don't give it to NASA, that's the place you send stuff you want to kill off.
We could put put bunches of this stuff along the desert near the US Mexican Border. Not only will we get power, but since the facilites each cover a mile or two, they will act as a natural wall stopping illegal immigration
Yes I know it's sick.
Quit it already with the baseball bats
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Because they know that Bush just wants to make the oil-industry happy.
That's politics for you. It's not what's best for the country (or the environment) that matters to bush. It's who will pay for his next election campaign.
it's cynical, but sadly it's probably a good idea.
Democracy, i love it!
Wham-O, there's your funding for manned missions to Mars, and so on and so forth.
And for our oil-industry nerds, please note that I'm not badmouthing you. Just two particular people who have erroneously been put in control of lots of big red buttons and stuff. :)
Hmmm... maybe I meant "Nasa Funding From Dummies."
--
if you can transmit enough energy to power a city, you can also transmit enough power to destroy a city. there is also the question of leakage. even if you use a maser format to transmit the energy, there will be a certain amount of bleed over. a standard satellite broadcasts 5 watts of signal, a dss about 35 watts. a solar satellite broadcasting a few megawatts may very well blank out all other satellite communication.
Besides, do you *really* want to be bombarded with high intensity man-made microwaves from the Clarke Belt?
If you *really* want free energy, insist that the Pentagon give up Tesla's technology that was seized "in the interest of national security" upon his death.
Ok, a slight error: Your average nuclear power plant is closer to 2 GIGAwatts, rather than 2 megawatts.
---------------
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Vpered na Mars!
This has been one of those Real Soon Now (tm) projects for years, for a simple reason - assuming your solar cells are made of silicon or something of similar density, the mass of an SPS (solar power satellite) big enough to generate useful amounts of power is prohibitive.
Here's my calculations:
Assuming a solar cell 1m to a side and 1mm thick, we get: 0.001m^3/cell * 2330 kg/m^3 (the density of silicon from Webelements ) = 2.33 kg per cell.
The solar irradiance at Earth's orbit is 1367.6 W/m^2 (from NASA National Space Science Data Center ). We currently have solar cells that can convert solar energy to electrical energy at about 30% efficiency in the labs. So, we'll assume that these can be made in bulk sometime in the near future. That yields 1367.6 * 0.3 = 410.28 W/m^2.
That seems like a lot, but consider - it four 100 watt light bulbs, or your computer (no monitor), if you have a system like mine. Lets say we aim for a generating capacity nearer to your average nuclear plant - 2 megawatts. Then we need 2,000,000 / 410.28 = 4,875 panels. At 2.33 kg each that's 11.4 metric tonnes. Not a huge amount, but then you have to add about that much in support structures, repair equipment, and the microwave emmitter, of course.
You will note that I have ignored losses in transmission, etc after the power is converted from solar to electrical. That is because these conversions are all very efficient, compared to the solar/electrical conversion, so they don't change any mass calculations by that much.
So how many SPS units would we need to power the world? From the CIA World FactBook , the US in 1998 used 3.365 trillion kWh, equivalent to a continous 384 million kW. We would therefore need about 200 thousand of the 2 megawatt stations considered above, for the US alone. If we wanted to be generous and extend this technology to the rest of the globe, we need over 2 million stations of this size.
Now, this is clearly not economical, not with launch costs in the neighborhood of $500/kg for the Shuttle (some dumb boosters can haul more for only $100/kg), but there is still hope. John S. Lewis, in his book Mining The Sky shows that building SPS units is economical, if you don't have to launch the mass of the solar cells. Instead, you bootstrap - launch a processing facility to a target Near Earth Object, set down and start making solar cells. The facility would have to be unmanned, but it would in a few years time produce enough cells to build a SPS.
One thing's for sure: You sure won't see any of this from NASA. They'd like it if you gave them the trillions of dollars it would take to build one of these, so they could fail miserably and call the whole idea impossible.
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Vpered na Mars!
It couldn't be because NASA still doesn't have a new Administrator, could it?
Seriously, the fact that we're 100+ days into the Bush Administration [which I helped vote into office] yet do not have a NASA Administrator--despite having plenty of excellent candidates inside and outside of NASA--is a travesty. It's high time for Bush and his staff to make their pick and get rid of Dan Goldin, who's set NASA back at least ten years.
-- Geof F. Morris
Actually, the story says the target would be "a ground-based receiving antenna 4 kilometers in diameter". Why isn't made clear, but I expect the intention is to have a big target area and thus spread the microwaves fairly thinly over that area.
It strikes me that diffusing the beam might be a good idea for a couple other reasons. One being that even if the beam control is perfect, there's still the possibility that things would fly through the beam and get fried. Birds being one, unwary airplane pilots being another.
Incidentally, my first reaction was that a 4-km-diameter *anything* would be insanely expensive to build, but then again, it probably isn't that expensive in comparison with, say, a new nuclear plant.
Anyway, I'm nit-picking -- I think your analysis of the safety-system engineering is right on the money. Thanks.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Ok everyone, relax. :)...The waves would be directed so that it bathes a small target on the ground (less than 10 feet in diameter). So even if the guidance cutoff failed and the satellite were to hit a city with microwaves, the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood - not a nuclear or biological weapon event).
Well probably not that reassuring to everyone. The saftey cutoff measures you describe are probably reasonable, but it is more of a "I've lost my keys" than a "747 crashing into neighbourhood" disaster.
Because of the long wavelength of microwaves they are not that easy to focus. Because the satelites are in geostationary orbit (36,000 miles away or so) that means the beam is a lot more than 10 foot across when it arrives -- about 5 miles is the figure I have in mind
In fact most realistic(?) schemes place the overall intensity of beam at the collector at about half that of natural sunlight. The reasons that this low intensity microwave beam is so useful is that A) in contrast to the sunlight it would be there all the time (day or night, and microwaves penetrate cloud pretty well too), and that B) microwaves can be converted into electricity far cheaper and with a much higher efficiency than sunlight. The only figure I have is from O'Neil's book which gives a 55% efficiency rate -- but that was 35 years ago.
The cities are safe./P.
If memory serves (and it's usually fuzzy), we see about 1500 W/m^2 in orbit, 1200 W/m^2 at ground level of total areal energy flow. So you're getting a 25% bonus for getting above the atmosphere. Great. It would have to be HHHUUUUGGGEEE to amortize the launch and maintenance costs, even if you used the cheapest method of orbiting stuff.
Let's be generous with the efficiencies and tally this up:
Solar to electric (80%+ loss)
Electric to microwave (15-25% loss?)
Microwave through the atmosphere (20-30% loss)
- absorption/reflection/scattering/divergence
Microwave to electric (another 20-50%?)
C'mon folks, we're looking at 10% of 1500W best case.
Let's scrap the space mumbo jumbo. The collector dish is 4km in diameter. Thats...um...let me think...12.5 million square meters. If we figure we use nice photoelectric cells - call 'em 12% efficiency - that's about 1800 MW of power ready to be inverted and fed into the grid. No space flights, no space junk, no orbital maintenance woes (nothing gets serviced in GEO), no tracking problems, no dish to build, no microwave to electric conversion step.
The only advantage I see in space is that you don't have cloudy days. Don't feed me the "there are no nights" argument, though. The attitiude control system will need to be active to point at the sun all the time, and for a large item you're talking a nightmare.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The problem is threefold: (1) Large solar panels are expensive and extremely fragile, not something you can easily replace if broken... As it goes, the materials themselves are expensive, rare earth metals and compounds that add to the cost... Amorphous solar panels are even more expensive, and inefficient to boot, leading to: (2) Solar panels are extremely inefficient due to several factors, namely daylight time, clouds and weather, pollution, and that's just the visible culprits... Now I know what you're asking, how can we power the ISS with solar panels but not a city on earth with the same? (3) The earth's atmosphere effectively screens out close to 1/3-1/2 of full spectrum sunlight, which is why our planet isn't (currently) like Venus, and why astronauts have to wear those kewl gold visors during EVA's... The fact that a solar station can be set for a sun facing orbit at all times also means there is no night, no weather, no pollution... Or so we would think... The only downfall will be our existing space junk pollution punching holes through the panels, not to mention micrometeoroids and other stellar debris...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I will use my orbiting solar power stations of death to destroy the world's cities, unless you pay me 10... Million dollars!
C'mon, throw me a fricking bone here...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Obviously one of the necessary ingredients for an expanding economy is to have access to the necessary energy resources. Liken it to fighting a war by cutting off the enemies supply of natural resources. I believe it's a poor idea to experiment with new energy resources by blasting holes in our atmosphere with microwaves. I have spent many months of my life playing various SimCity editions, and if it's taught me one thing that thing is the answer to our problem is fusion. Why aren't we devoting our government research dollars to the one energy source that is the panacea to all our problems? This one sounds to me like a lot of dead birds, and huge potential risks. Personally I'm not opposed to nuclear power plants. I think in conjunction with a national power grid we would have something akin to a client/server energy system. Either that or a peer to peer system with manditory solar cells on everyone's homes. You can complain of the danger of nuclear power, but they're environmentally safe, and I think with the necessary precautions they won't explode. The bigger danger is the unemployment and the de-evolution of society that we risk without energy. Not to mention the burnt out condemned buildings that will pop up with those lightning bolts over them.
The ABM Treaty was between the USA and the USSR. There is no longer a USSR. How is there still a treaty?
--
Daniel J. Kelly
Uh that's just a little bit inaccurate, because from what I've seen lately, more republicans are taking the initiative to decriminalize marijuana than democrats. I can think of at least 2 examples. I believe it was a republican legislator in Maryland who got it legalized (or is trying to) for medicinal uses, and I think the governor of Arizona is fighting to get it decriminalized down there. Drug legalization is actually an ultra-conservative belief. Notable conservative thinker William F. Buckley is even for it. Take a look at the Libertarian Party's beliefs, and you will see.
--
Daniel J. Kelly
Not that greenhouse gases & whatnot aren't speeding global warming along enough on their own - we'll just lend them a helping hand by superheating a few more cubic miles of atmosphere.
Sheesh!
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
Nineteen years until the SPS appears over the horizon?!? Once again, here's the corporate and governmental lack of vision. We could have seen one of these in orbit in 1983!!!
I guess electricity at 1/10th the price isn't sufficient motivation until the lights start going out (if I lived in California, I'd be marching to Sacramento to kick ass and take names, and, oops, I can't write in the dark!)
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
Ellen
PS: I've always wanted to ask you about this: "All men are great before declaring war on humanity." Where is it from?
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
there's no light in space dammit...you remember all the space pictures from nasa...no light
that was meant to be a joke...forgot to write: ...joke
Heh. Surprised the government hasn't already
put one up. Just think what you could do with
a multi-gigawatt directed energy beam. "Lemme
see. Saddam is annoying us again? He wants
power does he?! Well let's give him some!!!!
MUHAHAHAHAHA."
C//
I doubt that targeting would be the problem, unless the collection site was in a geologically unstable site. Suppose for a moment, that equipment was setup in California, to recieve microwaves and convert them to usable electricity. Suppose now that there was seismic activity which cause the reception equipment to go out of alignment with the space based delivery mechanism. Not only would the area have been ravaged by an earthquake, but also the power generation capability of the region would be disabled. Not only would I not be able to get power to my house because the lines were severed, but there would simply be no power to be had. This will make for difficult selection of reception sites for this system. It must be in a geologically stable region, with consistant weather conditions (for predictable gain) and there are probably a number ofother similar considerations.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
It's very simple. The goons that run the show cannot monopolize sunlight, therefore it will be opposed at every level. Is it not always thus? Read yer Chomsky! Oil, coal, nuclear, someone can say "I own this", and can eventually acquire a monopoly. Do you really think that there is any real competition between Shell and Exxon? Hell, I'm not even sure they're different companies anymore... Bush is from Texas, big oil money, as I am sure many have alrady pointed out (sorry, I did not read ALL the posts previous to mine...), so this should come as no surprise; however, apply this logic to any other commodity/process/resource and you will see the same results. Paper/hemp, oil/sunlight, tobacco/marijuana, .NET/P2P (for all you M$ bashers!), the list goes on.
There are a myriad of sources to which you can refer, but the best is, of course, Chomsky. Also try Galbraith (J. K.), and to really blow your mind: http://www.rawilson.com/illuminatus.html
uh, back to Quake...
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
and try not to hit any PENGUINS :-)
we could go solar on the ground, but too much land would be covered by solar pannels. I lookied into getting solar this year as the bill for my house has been as high as 400$/month. around 1500-2000kwhs/month.
turns out I'd need about 60-80 solar pannels, each about 2 by 4 feet. so figure it out, not let me do that...
2x4=8 square feet X80=640 square feet. it's a big array for someone in an apartment building. I have 1 acre I could've done it but here's the kicker, installed system would be about $40,000-$60,000 US Dollars, and that's after the energy rebates offered by California. overall, I'd switch to making payments on the loan rather than a utility bill, for about 20 years before I started really saving.(don't forget that interest rate that means it's twice that amount once it's all done.)All in all, I didn't do it because it would only be cheaper if we never get out of this crisis, and that I can heat water and my home using solar gain (fans to distibute heat for the home and tanks for water heating) for less money because of the loss of going from solar, to electricity, to heat energy.
think of all the heat energy we now use to get electricity, coal FIREd plants release lots of heat, Nuclear plants release even more heat. even if we didn't have to dig for coal or there was no radiation from nuclear power, there's still this tremedous amount of heat. What about all the heat released from our CARS? drive awhile and go stand by the radiator, and then imagine all this heat from your car and multiply it by however many millions of cars cruise around your city, then think globally. Greenhouse gasses are an issue, but we have a serious problem with BTU (heat)emmisions. add to that all the body heat from us people and the exploding population.
.see why this makes great sense? we tap the light energy before it gets here(removing some heat in the process by virture of shade) and then beam down the juice to be used on the ground. I think all our countries should colaborate, put something up high over a area like the south pole or in the middle of the pacific. Can you imagine if we all had as much electricity as we could use and there were no polution side effects? what about the ecconomy of electricity being like the roads you drive on, meaning, you don't pay per play, it's just there for everyone who wants to use it?
or would it be cheaper to do a Moon base to grab solar energy and beam it from there?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
>a sphere has a surface area of 4/3*pi*r^3. Nope. A sphere has a surface are of 4*pi*r^2. You have written the formula for the volume of a sphere.
I could have missed it, but did anyone look at the cost of the proposed idea? I'll bet it's riciculously expensive. I'll bet it would cost about 100 times the cost of nuclear power (per unit of energy), but that's just a WAG.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
closed minded is as closed minded does
Just locate them in a empty area. The desert is prime for that. If it misses, we loose a few cacti.
I think you're right about the transmit and receive angles.. that throws a wrench into my theory. :)
But about my "all men are great before declaring war on humanity," it's actually something that I uttered on IRC while I was talking to my brother. I kind of snapped one night while reading something (I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something about a person who was imprisoned for something that I don't consider to be wrong). I'm one of those liberal anarchist apologists. :)
Anyway I always considered myself to be a good person.. but every time I read something about a grevious misjustice (guy thrown in jail for 5 years for smoking weed.. 15 year old thrown in jail for "abusing" 16 year old girlfriend (because consent is not possible when you're only 16. Ahem.) or intellectuals threatened or jailed for speaking their mind) I would feel this hate for the perpetrators (read: conservative/religious folks in a position of power). Anyway this one night I was talking casually (on IRC) to my bro about this article I was reading, and it eventually degenerated into a heated argument (only for the sake of argument; he agreed completely) and I started to imagine myself killing the judge.. the police officers.. and anyone involved with removing this person from society. I was totally convinced that I was right, and that the only way to stop the world from destroying itself was to kill all the people who aggressively hunt people they disagree with (whether or not the "criminals" were hurting anyone). This article really fucked me up at the time.
I was in this sort of quiet rage for about half an hour.. when suddenly I realized.. what the hell makes me so damned special? What differentiates me from the people I'm fantasizing about killing (while yelling fuck you agressor - you incarcerate innocent people, you die). It was like.. bam.. everything that I believed I was.. was.. not right.
I kinda dropped a level of conciousness at this point. I think this is what happens before people go insane. :) I don't remember what happened, but apparently I starting saying weird shit for like 15 minutes (that quotation is one of the things I said). When I came to, I was crying. Wierd night, to say the least. :)
I thought.. so this is how it happens.. If you're strong, when you go insane like this, you throw yourself out the window. If you're weak, you grab a shotgun and maul 100 innocent bystandards. If you're lucky like me, you realize that it's time to relax. The world is a fucked up place, and the best you can hope to do is talk.. tolerate.. and try to understand.
All people who declare war on humanity (as I did that night) are great. We all have good intentions. But we're always wrong. There is no way to win the war on humanity. Anyway. That's the story behind my quotation.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
There is no possibility a city will get fried by microwave energy. First of all, any system beaming energy from orbit would use a laser based targetting system. There would be an electrical cutoff if the laser failed to reach the satellite along the return path (which would presumably not be software controllable). So, if the microwave emitter lost the laser "signal" from earth (which would presumably only be receivable on a perpendicular to the ground) by drifting off course or because of a mechanical failure, the microwave emitter would shut down.
Second of all - the microwave beam would not be wide enough to cause mass destruction anyway. The waves would be directed so that it bathes a small target on the ground (less than 10 feet in diameter). So even if the guidance cutoff failed and the satellite were to hit a city with microwaves, the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood - not a nuclear or biological weapon event).
All in all I think this will be an interesting project. Best of luck to them.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Oddly, I don't believe there is a "real" energy crisis (certainly not with petrolium). And if there is, how on earth will shipping oil from a wildlife refuge in the extream reaches of Alaska predominantly to Japan solve our shortages? Maybe I'm not sofistikated enough to understand our President's foreward thinking energy policy, or maybe I was just dazzled by the pretty pictures.
On a totally unrelated note, would you pay a buck to reduce your risk of cancer 1%. President Bush, and Christine Todd Whitman think you may not be worth it. So they'll study arsenic concentrations and its effects at its 1942 level while the rest of the reasonable world moves to a standard 5 times more stringent. more here
But really. Who did people think they were voting for? I know people who voted for Bush, and worse yet I know people who couldn't be convinced to vote at all.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Dubya was beginning
Davis: What happen?
SoCal Edison: Somebody set up us the blackout.
PG&E: We get banruptcy.
Davis: What !
PG&E: Electricity turn off.
Davis: It's you !!
BC Hydro: How are you gentlemen !!
BC Hydro: All your power are belong to us.
BC Hydro: You are on the way to Stone Age.
Davis: What you say !!
BC Hydro: You have no chance to Chapter 11 make your payment.
PG&E: Governor !!
Davis: Take off every 'regulation' !!
Davis: You know what you doing.
Davis: Move 'regulation'.
Davis: For great darkness.
--
Do I play Hockey?
Posting at -1 since April 18/01.
Do I play Hockey?
What you say!!
More like: When you're a hammer salesman, everything looks like a nail...
(Starts drumroll) ...then a dildo salesmen see everyone as dicks?
(Ends drumroll)
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
what is all the dark stuff in space, eh? we are not alone.
There are many tons of oil being created every year. It's really not so strange; take a bunch of algae, ferment it under high pressure and temperature, and it turns to oil. Even if it were true that no more oil were being created constantly, there are enourmous organic energy reserves on Earth. I refer you to an 8 November 1999 post from sci.physic's "Uncle Al."
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=oil++group:sci.p hysics&num=30&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&scoring=r&as_drrb =b&as_mind=29&as_minm=3&as_miny=1999&as_maxd=19&as _maxm=5&as_maxy=2001&rnum=16&ic=1&selm=382612B4.1C 77F37D%40hate.spam.net
One embarrassment of Environmentalism is that, like a rabbit, it leaves little pellets of its waste wherever it goes. We turn to "World Energy Outlook" published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development of the International Energy Agency (Rue de Andre-Pascal, Paris CEDEX 16, France). This compost heap of Socialist hallucination and money mastication is supported by the governments of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States - your tax money at work. The scholarly 473 page tome is dated 1982. We can verify how dire predictions of the End of the World came to fruition.
Natural Gas: The International Energy Agency's worst case projections of natural gas consumption were generously exceeded by a decade of vigorous global growth and wastrel devourment. By the book - page 365 - the world runs short of natural gas in 2010. In 1999 planetary natural gas reserves are at an all time high and booming. "These scenarios, which are based on detailed production assessment through 1990 and on hypothetical developments thereafter..." are meaningless. Any economic policy based upon these "expert" projections would have been ruinous (as per expert prediction). Note the magnitude of error: 1996 annual planetary natural gas production was 82 trillion cubic feet, 22% of all energy produced. Who are these fools, and why were/are we paying them to be protractedly, loudly stupid?
(More available from the link)
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I have often heard of European Socialists making that claim; G. Gordon Liddy has often mentioned it over the last 5 years when denouncing Socialism, for example. What he points out, and CNN and other news sources have confirmed, is that European gas is so expensive because it is so highly taxed. Here is a CNN news comment from just a year ago:
"Tax and duties make up about 75 percent of the price of a litre of premium unleaded petrol, currently about 0.85 pounds ($1.21), but recent crude oil price rises have squeezed drivers even further."
So, you people in England are paying about 4 times the value of gas, mostly because of the taxes your government puts on it. That's insane! It shows that US gas isn't "abnormally cheap"; rather, European gas is abnormally, outrageously overpriced!
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Don't forget biomass power solutions, which are essentially another way of harnessing solar power (of course, you could argue that oil is as well, but it tends to be non-renewable :)
Yes, they've been brewing since the 80s, when some silly people of Bush's political persuasion carelessly deregulated a monopoly and everything slowly went to shit. And as Bush has made clear, the problems in CA are not a Federal issue, they are explicitly a state problem. And as very little electricity is derived from Oil, an aggressive oil policy isn't going to help anyone.
Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you?
Well, I hate to point this out... But Gore is not the President of the United States, he's a private citizen. He "lost" the election, and the only upshot of that for him is that he doesn't have to be compared to Bush anymore. Al Gore could die his hair orange and become a Hari Krishna, and it wouldn't make Bush's silly political machinations any more justified.
Even if it were true that no more oil were being created constantly, there are enourmous organic energy reserves on Earth
We think that there are enormous reserves on Earth. Traditional models, as you pointed out, show us running out sometime this century. Those models have (not surprisingly) been shown to be somewhat innaccurate. Why this is seems to be a mystery to a lot of scientists; some of them have gone so far as to postulate that our entire understanding of the creation of fossile fuel is wrong, and that perhaps it's created by unknown geological processes.
Whether they're crackpots or not, the point is simply that nobody knows how much oil is out there-- not even Uncle Al. We could have enough for three centuries, or we could run out in twenty years. We just don't have enough information to justify betting our whole future on it.
And this all ignores the other issue of carbon dioxide production. There's some pretty good evidence that we've begun to make serious changes to our atmosphere just over the past 50 years. There are certainly people who believe that global warming is a fiction, or that the planet will just take care of itself (the cloud cover theory), but I don't see any evidence for this belief, and even if the planet does somehow compensate for our CO2 production, it's beyond optimistic to think that the ecosystem is solely designed to keep human beings (and their coastal cities) comfortable.
In any case, don't take your scientific advice from people with a political goal, whether they're Dick Cheney or myself. There are similar arguments similar to the one above deriding evolution, general relativity, etc. if you talk to the right people.
Excuse me, I don't much like political flame-wars on Slashdot. But what you just said is wildly untrue. Dick Cheney still has multi-millions of dollars of options in Halliburton oil, many of which don't vest for several years.
There was a flap about this, and he made some noise about getting rid of them, but then it blew over and he quietly went ahead owning them. So please do some basic research before posting.
As far as the energy crisis... I'm not sure I see any solutions in the Bush plan except drilling the ANWR (a relatively small amount of oil, 10 years out), reducing emissions standards (which simply exacerbates the Not-In-My-Backyard phenomenon which is responsible for a lot of the power companies' troubles, not wild eyed environmentalists or democrats) and of course, Eminant Domain (which pisses off a lot of Bush's key supporters and is rife with legal difficulty.)
I should elaborate that drilling for oil in the ANWR does not mean that America will have more oil, as oil is sold on a global market. It simply means that a few American companies will make more money than they do now. OPEC will still be able to maintain the price, even if the most optimistic estimates of production are met. Simply raising efficiency standards on new cars would save an amount of oil that easily eclipses what's going to come out of ANWR. Now, if we could realistically find a lot more oil, maybe it'd be a real plan, but it's just silliness as it stands.
For all of Bush's rhetoric, his budget has already slashed funding for alternative energy research. I think this particular idea would fall under the same axe. I'm not going to draw the obvious conclusion as to what his priorities really are.
Now, if we could bill these solar satellites as some sort of missile-defense...
nothing like stating the obvious
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
It would cost a lot less, but you probably can't get the gov't to fund it(not sexy enough), and doing it yourself is out of most people's financial reach. Up here, in Maine, it costs over $18,000 for a basic setup to run a house--that's a years wages for me(before taxes). So what ya gonna do? I personally think that we won't have solar satellites or every roof covered with solar cells, because nobody really gives a shit--I guess that's just the cynic in me, though.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Actually $18,000 isn't poverty--just makes it hard to live. Like you assholes would know.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Don't forget, this could be used as a weapon. I actually like the idea of being able to attack with _almost_ total impunity.
I think this sort of space-based weapontry is banned under The ABM Treaty.
As this Website demonstrates.
Our missile defense program is also banned by That same Treaty.
Also, I think one day a men will all but destroy the world. It's in our nature.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
I saw in a report if we covered a part of the sahara with photocells.
Convert that enegy in place to hydorgen (needing water piping and desalination in the desert).
Then ship the hydrogen to the overpopulated countries like japan who cannot have huge solar powerplants.
The area needing to be covered to supply the WHOLE earth energy need was a tiny square in the huge sahara. perhaps 1%.
And if those cells get much hotter than the desert around, there will be some nice wind which can be used by windmills. Double use!
I'm shure this will cost less than the sattelite.
And maintenance will cost less than the maintenance of the microwave reception station and sattelite control.
But it will never be build. The sahara is not in a country swimming in money.
George
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
i would be more impressed by a cheaper easier to install set of efficient solar panels
think about how much energy would be saved if every house and business in cali had solar panels on their roofs
would their still be rolling blackouts ?
besides i'd like to see my own power bill drop below car payment level
Certainly a valid idea, yet if you goal is to save energy, then much more basic stuff needs to happen first.
I seem to recall reading in the Wall Street Journal recently that automotive fleet miles per gallon figures had reached a 20 year low. Looking at the piece of shit SUV's (and I note their drivers as well) this comes as no suprise. Detroit's marketing drone's have created a buzz over the last 10 years moving everyone up to SUV's/Pickup's as the standard transporation (as they can sell more metal). Yes, and of course look at these SUV's during rush hour. How many of these 3000+ lb. monsters are used to haul one driver? And look at the bed of the SUV driver's pickup truck.... he ain't a real man unless is is scratched and rusted.
Yeah, and don't give me this crap about how the big SUV's are safer then the compact cars. The large size difference is the real safety issue. Go back to your high school physics, and it is easy to see how much more energy is contained in a 3000+ lb. monster as compared to a 1700lb compact car. SUV's are a hazard to the road.
This is the real issue.... being able to see what a bill of goods the marketing folks at the car maker's have sold the American public. This is the quickest and cheapest way to save energy. Our compact cars of the early 80's now would be getting over 50mpg if we had continued the trend.
If you were to say take a sizeable portion of Germany and turned that into US territory you'd probably have to build a wall around it. The difference in standard of living would just be too great for such geographic proximity.
But then again, so are oil, coal, and nuclear power. Everytime there's a new tech advance posted here on Slashdot, 50 people reply to the story pointing out how deadly the new tech is. Imagine the replies to the post about Ford releasing the Model T: "So we're just going to let anyone that has $500 drive around some thousand pound chunk of metal powered by EXPLODING GASOLINE! No thanks, I'm sticking to horses!" All technology is dangerous. If you discount a new idea because it's possible to accidentally kill people with it, well, enjoy your cave.
Today is a good day to die. They all are, though.
Like I said, it would take an amount of area similar to current paved roads. That's not a drastic impact on the enviromnent; nobody's claiming that today's pavement is causing Antarctica to melt.
As to finding more petroleum, that's probably not a big deal. We'll run out before doubling the current impact, and we'd need alot of it to make plastic tarp collectors anyway. The real disaster will be if we stupidly manage to burn all the coal that we could potentially scratch out of the ground. That's orders of magnitude more CO2. Have you checked the weather on Venus lately?
It wouldn't have to be especially efficient, just cheap. Unroll acres of the stuff directly onto the desert floor, or float it on the ocean. Maybe put it in the diamond-shape gaps between those circular irrigated crop fields out west.
My math estimates a few thousand square miles of 5% efficient (at 1% overall system efficiency) collectors would satisfy all our energy needs. (If you think that's too much area, imagine explaining how much area would be paved over in 2001 to a guy from the 19th century. It can be done.)
If this was treated like the Manhatten project, I'd bet they could get production started in 7 years or so. By contrast, in 7 years, NASA would still only be doing feasiblity studies on a space-based solution.
It won't be the reactor that's melting down ... ;-)
Well I guess that everyone is finally going to see what your mother-in-law does when she is being microwaved after all.
...and if I remember correctly, the news report generated alongside the accident would be alongside the lines of...
"Oops."
There are zillions of places on our planet that are very useful for harnessing energy. Here are my ideas...
Many of these ideas could be implemented, making it possible for communities to be free of ugly power lines (above and below ground). Also, none of these ideas use any pollution.
One great invention that my friend has is a radio that plays loudly for two hours if he turns a handle around 25 times.
Even if a disaster didn't occur because of the beam drifting off target, any bird that flies in the path of the beam and stays for too long becomes Kentucky Fried Chicken. GreenPeace won't be happy.
Maybe you don't understand the way it works, - but we don't owe you, - WE never owe ANYBODY. On the contrary ANYBODY owes US!
Once you understood that primary principle, we can talk about you becoming part of the empire again...
Isn't the large receiver area the same problem as with ordinary ground-based solar panels? (see here)
43rd Law of Computing:
Um. They're using solar panels to make the maser.
True, but with the exception of the increased risk of splattage from space crud, you can put far larger solar panels in space than on Earth. What we were talking about is getting it from the orbiting panels down to Earth.
43rd Law of Computing:
There are plenty of people living in the sahara desert who would not like it if you pave their land with solar panels.
- Singpolyma