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Simcity Microwave Power by 2050?
Politburo writes "The Drudge Report supplies this interesting Senate testimony. Dr. David Criswell, director of the University of Houston's Institute for Space Systems Operations, proposes that we develop robots to assist in the construction of a lunar solar array. The power from this array would be beamed to recievers on Earth, either directly or via relay satellites. Dr. Criswell predicts that with this project, "the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person." He also attempts to put to rest the idea that microwave power is unsafe, saying, "Each power beam can be safely received, for example, in an industrially zoned area." I wonder if he's ever played SimCity 2000" And coming soon, Godzilla from a drop-down menu.
He should stop telling everyone how safe it is and start telling the military that it could be adapted into a weapon "in times of crisis". He might actually get some funding that way. ;)
Not only was this rejected when I first submitted it ... it's now been posted twice since then. Nice to see consistency on slashdot. SNAFU.
Remember, averages are highly skewed by outliers.
"The average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person."
Unfortunately, he doesn't exactly say how besides "increased investment opportunities". Uh huh. Ditto for the comment about raising the average third world income to $20k.
In fact, the entire testimony is rather short on details, and seems to omit such essential items as how much it would take to build the whole system.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person.
:)
I'm willing to bet that inflation will have more to do with it than microware power
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
This is a non-idea if ever I heard one. What is the point of going to all that trouble when we have ample power supplies here on earth (contra to our current moral panic about power supplies). Fair enough to try to build a justification to increasing lunar exploration but this is far too easily shot down.
I think we need more political imaginaries - if you try to justify most space projects in terms of economic benefits likes this you are liable to look a fool. Space projects are fundamentally state financed projects (due to their horrific costs and risks) and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But we should be seizing the possibility of exploring space as a project for mankind.. dreaming the impossible..
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
The main problem would more likely be what if a cold current of air changes the refractivity of some part of the atmosphere just a little bit so that the beam goes just .1 of a degree off and cooks up a residential neighbourhood instead of providing it with electricity...
Before you answer that microwaves don't get refracted that much by air, please recall the scale of volume we're talking about, as well as the fact that the beam also has to go through the upper atomsphere which, full of ions, probably does scatter microwaves.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
They could, you know....turn it off.
It's not hard to think of very robust failsafes. The microwave satellite could have a modest optical laser pointing exactly parallel to the microwave beam. This would bounce off a mirror at the receiving station on the ground and back to a detector on the satellite. If that signal was interrupted, then the assumption is that the laser is no longer hitting the mirror, so you have a pointing error. So then you immediately shut down the microwave beam, or divert it harmlessly into space. Okay, it wouldn't work on a cloudy day, but this could be one of several failsafes; I'm sure people can think of more (GPS, temperature sensors placed around the receiving dish, IR camera on the satellite monitoring the surface temperature around the receiver, etc.).
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
including some commentary here
Excerpts:
Not everyone is ready to hook up to Criswell's lunar power supply, however.
"My own feeling is that he may well be right, but the idea is downstream," said Bryan Erb, president of the Sunsat Energy Council, based in Houston, Texas. The group backs a first-things-first approach, namely the building of satellite power stations in Earth orbit.
"It takes a big investment to get back to the moon," Erb said. "I just don't see a graceful migration path to get to a lunar power system without a massive up-front investment," he said.
Taking a wait-and-see attitude is Paul Werbos, program director for control networks and computational intelligence at the National Science Foundation. He recently co-sponsored with NASA a workshop that looked over the Criswell plan, among other space-research issues.
Werbos said that a critical aspect of Criswell's idea is use of tele-autonomy, that is, how to coordinate human beings on Earth with on-the-job robots stationed on the moon.
"That's the key concept in my mind in order to build any kind of large-scale space power system -- on the Earth or on the moon," he said. "How do you get robots smart enough to do their job under a kind of loose supervision arrangement?"
What if an angry country figures out a way to fire a missile up there?
Yeah, cos that's much easier than firing a missile into America... :-)
Considering that it took a Saturn 5 to get a command module and a lunar module up there, I don't think we have to worry too much about that. With no atmosphere, meteorites from space are going to be hammering it far worse than we could from earth.
And when the dead birds, bats, and butterflies ( etc. ) start piling up around the reception point, ( not to mention the random idiot in an aircraft that just happens to forget about "restricted airspace" ) what do we do then?
Oh, and lets not forget the satellites and other spacecraft that might fly through the beam while orbiting the earth.
TheVampire
This is so preventable that it makes me laugh.
Make the communication two-way. If the reception dish loses its lock on the power beam or if the transmitter loses its lock on the communication beam, the whole apparatus shuts off until it can be inspected.
The paranoia around such a non-issue just goes to show how stinkin' awful humans are at gut-feel cost-benefit analysis. You've seen it happen (as a Disaster) in SimCity 2000; therefore, it must be a real risk.
Ditto for those who are afraid of flying, living near a modern fission plant, or sharing files on KaZaA.
Solar panels on the moon?
How about arrays on each dwelling? Solar panels on the moon keeps control of electricity in the hands of the Enrons of the world; solar panels on your roof keeps control of the power in YOUR hands.
Wasn't this a Simpsons episode?
I'm already seeing several problems with this.
First of all, the moon is not geosynchronous. Since the moon does not stay in a fixed position over the surface of Earth, how are you going to be able to have a centralized power station receive this energy? Oh you could build hundreds of them, but everyone would have to take their turn. And besides that this sounds like an "American" project. I'd love to hear about how they plan on getting power when the moon happens to be on the other side of the planet.
Relay satellites will not work. Yes, I read the bit about the relay satellites, but that's ridiculous. They would work fine for radio, which only needs miniscule amounts of current in order to work, but if you want to generate enough electricity to power even a lightbulb, you are talking about an enormous amount of radio power. There are only two ways a radio beam can be "bent": Either you bounce it off of something, or you have a station repeat the signal. In the case of power generation, the latter will not work...How are you going to regenerate that much power in a tiny satellite? And if you could, what would be the point of having the lunar base to begin with? Using the satellite as a passive relay would cause enormous power loss.
Besides all this, there's just too much complexity here. Every time you convert from one kind of energy to another there is always some loss involved. So what this guy's proposing is that you have a solar array on the moon, which converts sunlight to electricity at about 20% efficiency, which then converts this electricity to microwaves, which is then beamed down to earth, but never to a fixed location because the moon doesn't stay in one place relative to the surface of the earth, so then you could possibly go though relay satellites which would cause insane power loss. When the beam gets to earth, probably about 4% of its original strength, it's then converted to electricty again and might be able to power some blinky LED's, if you're lucky.
Wouldn't it be easier just to build a massive solar array HERE ON EARTH??
-R
If anything, the wealth gaps in Africa is ridiculously large. You have people in most African countries that are close to the wealth levels of the richest people in the developed countries, yet the poorest people live on much less than most poor people in the developed countries, and make up
And I just can't agree with you about the "rewards". Most of the wealth held by the richest couple of percent today are in the hands of people who INHERITED their fortune or significant parts of it, and who might have grown that fortune mostly by letting investment advisors shuffle paper, and dictators or ex dictators who STOLE IT from their people.
There are a few exceptions, but often their stories will be about people who takes someone elses inventions and understand how to sell it better. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, for instance, both fall in that category. Very few people have become wealthy as a result of true innovation of product as opposed to innovation in product placement.
Wont that be fun, "Whoopsie, we missed this horrible terrorist, and ACCIDENTLY hit that poor innocent anti-ourparty activist! such a pity..." or better yet, when the government can flash fry anyone on the planet in an instant, wait and see how wide the definition of terrorist gets.
Why doesn't anyone understand this? He means that the $150,000 figure is in today's dollars. It's the present value of the future salary.
At the power transmitter, the beam from the ground is captured at many points along the array. The pseudo-random phase changes are subtracted, and the result determines the shape of the wavefront as it's arriving from the ground. This wave-front is then reversed, sending a stream of energy directly back to the transmitter which sent the alignment (actually, phase-reference) beam up to the satellite. Safety features:
- The system is cryptographically secured against redirecting the beam.
- The use of the phase-reference beam automatically compensates for variations in the refractive index of the atmosphere.
- If the reference beam is lost, the myriad small emitters which form the power-transmitter phased array go out of coherence and effectively transmit all over space in a half-dipole pattern.
This addresses all of the major concerns. The real crime is that this was being written about in the late 1970's, and 20 years later people still have no clue about the groundwork. For this, I blame over-simplified games like... Sim City.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
There have been a number of attempts to use ground based lasers to send smal objects into space without the additional burden of the fuel payload. But with a system like this in place it's not too hard to imagine designs of vessles that could harness the energy for flight.
We already have a stable fusion reactor producing power. It just happens to be 93,000,000 miles away.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Depends on what the terrorist is doing. If the terrorist is running out to buy a bagel and coffee, then yes, he should be arrested and tried. On the other hand, if he's got a trunkload of sarin gas and is on his way to give everyone in Manhattan a very bad day, then we should simply kill him before he has a chance to activate his weapons.
Anyone who advocates giving EVEY terrorist a trial is a misguided idealist. Anyone who advocates killing every terrorist without a trial is a coldhearted fascist. Reality, as always, demands a solution somewhere in the middle.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Do you really need any weapon more powerful than offering the whole world power at less than a tenth of current prices and then be the one that can pull the plug?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Is the NASA curator of the moon rocks brought back by Apollo. He'd better know what resources are in moon rocks. He also spent the last 20 years figuring out what they can be used to produce using other moon resources such as hard vacuum and plentiful solar energy. Low gravity and having no clouds, dust or wind also helps build lightweight structures and with minimal maintenance.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The problem with this is that intelligence can be wrong. We saw the US bomb several places thinking that Saddam or is cronies were there. They weren't. If we just start zapping people out of the sky, innocent people are going to get zapped from false intelligence.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
look, the actual -numbers- don't matter in this debate. what the dipshit scientist probably meant was that people would make 'the equivilant' of 150k/year. what does that mean? it means that a person working in a typical wage paying job would be able to buy nicer washing machines, a nicer computer, a new car more often (or a nicer car just as often as before, or a really nice car less often than before). you could get nicer silverware. maybe nicer warm clothes. maybe McDonald's would become a more luxurious restaurant - the equivilant of your local 'nice' burger place, while your local burger place becomes just that much better. the country clubs could use kobe beef in their burgers. just look at the past and your questions will be answered. throughout the past century, we had some of the largest innovations in the history of man. at the beginning of the century, people lived in slummy apartments or on rotting farms (we're talking in the US here, btw). by mid-century, people all had their own car and lived in their own little houses or bigger/nicer apartments (i am talking about changes in the middle class, of course). it was as if every class got "bumped up" a notch. poor people (at or below $20k) now buy cars. you must realize that 100 years ago, even 70 years ago, that was inconcievable - for the poorest class of full-time workers to afford their own car. what the doctor in this article is referring to are changes in people's consumption abilities; being able to buy nicer things. he does not mean that everyone will suddenly be freed of their wage-slave lives, only that they will be able to buy more cool stuff with that money. for the cost of a 1950's record player, telephone, and big TV set (or what passed for a big TV set in those days), we get a cheap computer, color tv, CD player, and cell phone. people used to put fans and wood-burning stoves in their houses, now we have air conditioning and electric heating (and, of course, the wood-burning stoves are still pretty nice).
Then consider the following: They claim an efficiency approaching 50%; so, 50% is becoming waste heat. In a typical power plant, there's a bunch of efficiencies that have to be added up: 85% for boiler, 95% for turbine and 95% for generation. That yields 75% system efficiency. Not quite as good for beamed solar; but, not terrible.
The real nightmare occurs when you realize the transmission system is only 70% efficient. So, if we fix that, we can account for quite a bit
Now, here's where you should be concerned about warming: The Earth's heat budget assumes a certain amount of sunlight striking it's surface -- based simply on the amount of surface area facing the Sun. We'd be increasing the heat energy the Earth would be receiving because we'd be increasing the exposed surface area by the area of the collectors. If they remain small (few sq miles) it will be insignificant. If we start building really big ones (100's sq miles) then it might become a real problem.
If I lived in the middle ages, I would be one of the oldest living people in my village. I'd likely be regarded with suspicion of witchcraft because I still have all my teeth, and despite my advanced age, both my mother and my grandmother, are still alive. The Devil Himself must be protecting them, for how else would they live past the unearthly ages fifty - sixty - seventy - eighty - years?
My humble apartment affords me better protection from the elements than that of any Lord, and I pay for it with about a week's work. The food I cook every night with the help of my $12.99 spice rack would be something the King himself could only fantasize about. That's less than a day's wages, after tax, even at minimum wage.
In the palm of my hand, in the form of a $49.99 flash ROM, I can hold a library rivaling that of Alexandria, for it contains not only every book that had been printed until 1200, but every book that would ever be printed for the next five centuries.
So in answer to your question, having more "stuff" really does make it better.
In reading the original article, the Space.com article and some of the other posts I have seen some people say that we should use Orbital Power satellites instead of Moon based ones.
I would agree, but as we see in the ISS, it is very expensive to build such massive projects. The Space.com article mentions that the Moon based project could be built in stages and in pieces.
This gave me an idea. What if small orbital power satellites were built. I mean small, less than a square foot in area. The solar array on them would be hexagonal and they would be designed to plug into other copies on either side.
Then, everytime anyone launches anything you stick a couple of these in any free space in the launch module. NASA launches would require you to add one to each launch as a cost of doing business or in return for a tax break or other incentive.
Each unit would have a small booster on them and they would fly slowly up to a predefined location and hook up with their brothers into a larger array, maybe built around a prelaunched rectenna unit. Maybe the booster would be an ion rocket powered by the solar array. If you are patient you would only need to get them to LEO.
If the Xbox prize guys come through they could go into a side business of launching these units also, maybe get a % of any money generated by selling the resulting electricity.
The big advantage is that if any unit fails or gets blown up during launch you're not out a lot of money. If they are mass produced and optimized they should be cheaper than one large station and maybe more than one company could make them.
Slowly, eventually a huge array would be built.
It's not just the cost of making it you need to calculate, but also of lifetime maintenance (cleaning products, and the damage to nature done by cleaning products), and of the cost of disposal. The real cost of a solar panel is probably an order of magnitude larger than the cost of production. But then this applies to just about anything humanity makes.
On the other hand, if he's got a trunkload of sarin gas and is on his way to give everyone in Manhattan a very bad day, then we should simply kill him before he has a chance to activate his weapons.
And that giant space laser will just take out the driver's seat right, not the trunk full of sarin gas? Gas under pressure + heat = baaaad idea.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Right, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You, AC absolutely suck at making intelligent risk management decisions. Seriously: pay someone else to make them for you.
EVERYTHING is a risk. You can't get around it. Breathing our atmosphere puts you at some risk for respiratory ailments. Letting the sunlight touch your skin increases your risk for skin cancer. Stepping into an automobile is a TREMENDOUS risk, absolutely DWARFING the combined risks faced by a man who travels twice every day by plane, lives IN a nuclear power plant, and shares his music on KaZaA.
Yes, it DOES happen that any and all of these will lead to at least one consequence worldwide. We aren't interested in a categorical "has it killed people?" but rather in a question of degree: "What proportion of people exposed to this risk suffers the consequences?" We're interested in expected values. And the probability of suffering the much-feared consequences of flying, living near a power plant, or sharing music is VIRTUALLY NIL.
Review insurance policies. Living near a plant does not increase your life insurance premiums. Neither does flying. Are you better equipped to assess these risks than paid actuaries?
No...
Anyone who advocates giving EVEY terrorist a trial is a misguided idealist.
Our constitution requires it. There is a difference between sniping someone before he can activate the switch on a bomb and in killing a known terrorist just because we can get away with it.
Everyone who can be brought to justice, should be brought to justice. In a court of law. Pure and simple.
I hate child molestors even more than terrorists, and those perverts should have their day in court with a fair trial.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Well... I wouldn't be quite so quick to write off fusion power. See, there's a point at which a fusion reaction generates power and becomes self-sustaining. Since the first tokamaks were built in the 1970s, there has been pretty much logarithmic progress toward that point.
See?
(I saw a more detailed picture with points drawn for major reactor projects like JET in my quantum book, but have been unable to find another since. Foo. Anyone out there seen it?)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In my stupid macroeconomics class we learned that prices will "adjust" themselves to people's income levels. (if they don't, you get depression)
So if everyone, including the person who's serving your food, starting making $150k, then big mac's price would go up to $25 and possibly more.
Also, just because McDonalds and Burger King got their actual cost to make one glass of soda down to 1 cent, it doesn't mean they should or would pass down the savings to you.
Soaring profits would cause their stock price to go up and in turn, that would boost people's "worth", assuming they invested in the stock market. Inflation would hit soon thereafter and everyone would be bitching (again) how expensive [fill-in-the-blank] is and how expensive their mega-mansion was.
(BIG cars and big homes is the American way, so if the energy prices dropped, we would build BIGGER to make up the difference...)