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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.
the fire department on stand-by...
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. ;)
...ants and a magnifying glass.
Energy Conversion Devices has developed a 30 Megawatt solar machine the size of a football field. The device produces nine miles of solar cell at a time. The amorphous solar cells are not great in terms of ultimate conversion efficiency, but they are unique in that they will put out much more power over their life time than the energy used to produce them. They are great on a watt per dollar basis.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
"...proposes that we develop robots to assist in the construction of a lunar solar array..."
Yup. We're screwed.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
Will it explode after exactly fifty years like my power plants in Sim City do?
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I got an idea, Let's hack it and make it pop massive amounts of popcorn in an evil professor's house!
the ecofundamentalists will shut this project down because these invisible rays interfere with the morphic field of their crystal beads and their carrots.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Just another weapon for the machines when they rise.
What, the unstoppable cyborgs sent from the past to kill our future leaders wasn't enough? Controlling our nuclear arsenal not enough?
Why don't we just send up the robots to build the solar array in a big ass cube and call it a day?
"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.
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..
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Details of that new income figure were a little light. Anybody got a more detailed explanation of what he meant by that, or should I chalk it up as "ooo people'll wanna make 150k, I'll get their vote!"
Can't say I'm terribly worried about mishaps relating to this type of technology. We've been working with Microwaves for a very long time. I'm sure a reasonably safe system can be developed and launched cheaply. I'm more concerned with construction on the moon. Seems like it'd be a PITA to both construct and maintain. Do we really want to put our energy dependency in a very difficult to reach place? What if an angry country figures out a way to fire a missile up there?
"Derp de derp."
the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person
It better be a lot more than that. By 2050 inflation alone should push a $35,000/year income to $225,000/year (assuming the inflation rates of the last 47 years stay about the same over the next 47).
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
For all those that are "too cool" for SimCity... Microwave power was a great way to provide good-level, affordable-cost power to the citizens of your city. An array in space would power your land-bound power-station nicely, but the downside to this was that every so often it would miss the power station (oops) and fry something in your city.
Maybe if they play Simcity for awhile, they'll realize that this invention might work much better if they do, in fact, build such a power plant with a few fire-stations nearby... but I'd imagine a real-world application would have some form of laser-alignment system that has the array blocked until it's properly aligned with the receiving station.
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.).
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handmadehands.co.uk
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?"
I remember the early ideas for solar power sats way back when, and they almost always involved geosynchronous satellites so you don't have to aim at a moving target. Not as optimal as an LEO, but I believe for a focused beam most of your losses are in the atmosphere anyway, so another 20,000 miles or so of space is a good trade for the issues of aiming or relaying.
Now in the past few years we keep seeing these wacky plans to put the arrays on the moon (very far away and down in another gravity well making servicing a really big issue, robots or not), and beam the energy around via realy satellites. It just seems so wastetful. The only advantage I can think of is that the lunar array could *maybe* be built so large that the transmission losses don't matter.
It just seems like geosync is such a better solution, though. You could incorporate the next generation of communication satellites into the power arrays.
--- Ban humanity.
150 = 35 * (1 + x) ^ 47
x = 3.14%
Yep, that's not an unreasonable average rate of inflation over the next half century. So implementing this project will result in wages only matching inflation, not growing along with GDP (about 5% - can't be bothered to lookup). As someone else pointed out - "a few billion apiece for the people who control the power".
But please, don't give the machines a power source that is solar based...
This reminds me of the nuclear debates of the late 1940s. Do we use one of the most efficient energy transmitters conceiveable to power our planet or empower our government? Though it sounds like science fiction, the US army toyed with the idea of using focus solar energy as a weapons system early in the cold war (I've seen the films where they built a prototype complex and incinerated large I-beams of steel as if they were Dreamsicles next to a lighter). The US Army proved that microwave solar technology could be used to relay electricity from extraordinary altitudes in the mid 1960s. In Japan the University of Kyoto is already toying with development of a space-based satellite using an area of 1km^2 to generate solar power then beam it back to earth. The potential for near-limitless energy is especially appealing, though fossil fules would sitll be used in most of our transportation systems for some time to come (no one I know has a mass-market purely-electrical car with over a 150 mile range or better speed than 60 MPH, please send in any info on e-cars that are better).
My concern is that any nation putting this sort of system into place risks misalignment of the beams and having a solar laser of incredible power strafing across the landscape. It would be extremely tempting for terrorists or rogue governments to either put these is orbit themselves, or more likely sabotage/take over those already in place. We would then be forced to either destroy the satellite or launch military strikes on the offending parties, mandating the development and refinement of rapid-deployment and anti-space missile technology. Granted, this is a dual use system whose benefits far outweigh the detractions, but the military application of such a solar energy system seems so obvious that it must be considered.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Now I can heat my food by just holding it out the window
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
This site also has some interesting information on beamed-power research.
There are even competitions!
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
well, actually yes I do but then that may be because I work in KFC
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...
Lets check the math on this one. Air has an index of refraction of about 1.000292. The .000292 portion is roughly proportional to the density of the air, which is roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Assuming a 40,000 foot air column and a beam-to-atmosphere incidence angle of 50 degreees (power to a city in the far north or south from an equatorial-orbit power station), the deflection angle due to refraction is about 0.02 degrees or about 14 feet in total.
This 14 foot refraction is also roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Between summer (35 C) and winter(-35 C), we have a temperature range of about 23%. So the beam will wander about only about 3 feet over the most extreme temperature variations that are likely. (This calculation is only an approximation, but I am sure it is accurate enough to show that refraction is not a big deal.)
Others will have to comment on scattering.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Just kidding. We should do this and do it right. More megawatts is better megawatts. Grow, Grow, Grow!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Yes, consumer goods would become much cheaper with cheaper energy, but the majority of people's paychecks go to pay for housing (and taxes). That's not going to get any cheaper no matter how cheap energy gets, because most of the cost of a house is in the land value (which has nothing to do with energy), and in the labor of building the house. Building materials aren't that expensive, but paying laborers US-scale wages to put them together is. And since land value is dictated by location, location, location, that's not going to change with energy costs either.
Uh, we bounce lasers from earth to the moon, all day long, every day. They are measuring the distance to the moon, using the speed of light. It doesn't diverge any practical distance at all.
Read here
We are hitting a reflectr 46cm^2 thats A LOT less than a mile deviation. the 46cm is just for things like vibration, and aiming issues.
BTW, this laster tells us the moon is drifting away from the earth, at 3.8cm per year!
Been tried before. Probably still not a good idea.
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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.
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.
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.
Er... Wait...