Lunar Power

An Anonymous Coward cites this article on ABC News, excerpting: "...the world would have access to a limitless power supply. The moon receives 13,000 terrawatts of power from the sun. Harnessing 1 percent of that energy, he calculates, could replace all fossil fuel power plants on Earth."

Comments

At What Cost?

[Galahad2]

It currently costs $10,000 to get 1 lb of material into orbit. How much would it take to get it to the moon? One hell of a lot.

It's going to be a heck of a lot cheaper to burn money to make power than use the moon for a long, long time.

uuh

[dmiller]

You don't take photovoltaic cells to the moon, you build a factory on the moon and make the cells there. Just about everything you need is there: water, minerals and even some things that you don't find that often on Earth.

This is probably as far beyond our immediate capability as getting to the moon was to people of the 1940's - just a matter of time, money and will. The latter seems to be the most lacking.

Re:doesnt seem economical

[slackergod]

Total nonsense?
Sure, you could pursue fusion.
But we may not get fusion. Should we wait
for the PERFECT energy source while we rely on
the bad ones, unstead of using a better one,
while we pursue the goal of fusion, which
(while theortically realizeable) doesn't even
have a timetable associated w/ it?

Furthermore, sure, the short-term costs would be
large, but what are the costs for building and planning a new nuclear reactor?

Solar cells on earth? We have clouds. We have day and night. The moon (thanks to an astronomical quirk) has permanent day and night. Much better
efficiency that we can get. Store it there.
Send it over, microwave style, when the terran
receiver is in place.
Or bounce it off a satellite.

Just because you can conceive of better long term ideas, why should we not pursue a better short term idea, rather than stick to one that's actually harming us?

-Slackergod

Re:Oh. My. God.

[greenius]

> The answer, of course, is to use less energy period

Using less energy is not a solution.

The future of humans can not survive by staying on earth. The only way to get to the next level of development required for interplanetary and insterstella travel will require huge amounts of energy compared to what we have on Earth. The sun is pumping out loads of wasted energy into space. The sooner we can start the technology development to grab some of this energy then the sooner we can expand off this planet and increase our chances of survival.