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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. ;)
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?"
The cost of energy is gradually built into pretty much everything in the current economy. It would take some time, but the cost of any consumer good or service you can imagine would come down considerably if the cost of energy drops to near zero. Consider housing manufactured and erected in a zero energy cost environment. Most of the costs of concrete, and anything made of concrete are energy costs. The cost of energy is built in at every level of the construction process. Brick? Basically cooked (with energy) silica. Steel? Melted (again with energy) ore. All the transportation costs? Oil can be made from coal, or shale the reason it isn't done now is that the expense of the energy to do it is higher then the cost of oil. And anyway electrolysis can make perfectly clean hydrogen and oxygen should we choose to go that route.
The point is that when you are thinking of energy costs you are thinking mostly about your electric or gas bill, which is small compared to your total expenses. But the cost of energy overall to the economy is almost omnipresent. The cost of paper is pretty much the cost of trees + cost of energy to make paper + cost of labor. The cost of trees is cost of labor + cost of energy used by vehicles, machines etc + cost of logging rights. The cost of the vehicles is cost of energy used to make them + labor + capital costs, etc, etc.
The reason that people don't realize the true expense of energy to the economy is that it is implicit in the cost of everything.
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.
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.