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Tapping Solar Wind's Renewable Energy
A few folks noted a story making the rounds about the huge energy potential just blowing past the planet in the form of solar wind. This research involves putting a satellite into orbit with a thousand-meter cable and a 5,000-mile sail to generate more power than the earth currently uses.
The first thing any government will ask is: "So who will be in control of all the world's power?"
You understand that the Earth is already out in the solar wind, right? With a surface area vastly larger than the proposed sail? If we were going to blow away, it'd have already happened.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
A few folks noted a story making the rounds about the huge energy potential just blowing passed the planet in the form of solar winds.
Really? Editors don't read the first sentence of a submission?
The first two men on the moon are world famous, but very few people can name who the third or fourth are, or indeed any of the others. Clearly, being first is hugely important. If you're first, you get bragging rights and endless book deals even if you're not a very good writer (I'm looking at you, Buzz). If you're not first, all you get to do is go around telling everyone you hit golf balls on the moon in hopes of getting invited to speak at an elementary school assembly.
With this in mind, deciding who will be the first on Mars is hugely important. When the time comes, everyone is going to be fighting to be the first person to set foot on Mars, and since the mission will likely be international in nature, global politics also will come into play in making the decision. Therefore, the perfect solution was devised: Let everyone be first! So, we're going to tie a huge solar sail to the Earth and bring the entire planet to Mars at once. This way there's no arguing, and everyone will be happy.
Er, in what way do you suppose the solar wind is "renewable"?
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
According to the team's calculations, 300 meters (984 feet) of copper wire, attached to a two-meter-wide (6.6-foot-wide) receiver and a 10-meter (32.8-foot) sail, would generate enough power for 1,000 homes.
So why would we build one sail, which would be a target and fought over by countries and an untold number of businessess when you could run up a bunch of smaller sails? Easier to build and maintain, which lowers the barrier to entry and stops the wars and lawsuits which would inevitably break out over THE sail. I guess you have to dream big, but like anything, start small.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
They're proposing we build a sail that when viewed two-dimensionally next to Earth is over half the size of the entire planet? Even if you ignore the issue of space debris punching holes in this thing left and right the logistics of creating and "stitching" this together in space are unbelievable.
This seems like it would be more applicable to powering a future moon base and manufacturing fuel for interplanetary travel there.
I vote they point that honking big power laser at the moon for a couple of years so they can work out any bugs in the targeting control system.
They can always use the power to work on in-situ zone refinement of lunar material.
Or carve honking big glowing letters into the moon and sell the advertising space to fund the work.
The article gives a 10 m x 10 m sail (1000 homes) as an example, and then goes off the deep end. It SOUNDS like it might be practical if you could figure out the power beaming problem, but in order to arrive at that conclusion you have to do your own math.
Microwaves can be attenuated so they don't react with critters on the ground but only are picked up by specially calibrated receiver.
I think we need MORE energy, how else do you suppose we should climb the Kardashev scale from Type 0 to Type 1 civilisation?
I think we could increase the population by expanding out to space so that we have a couple hundred Trillion people living in our solar system and expand to other solar systems at least until we run into other intelligent life.
Whenever I hear someone mention depopulation as a good idea I shudder. Just HOW do you suppose you are going to accomplish that?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Lets play with the heat idea a bit, but from another perspective.
From TFA:
The rest of the energy would power an infrared laser beam, which would help fulfill the whole planet's energy needs day and night regardless of environmental conditions.
The main shortfall of this approach is that over the millions of miles between the satellite and Earth, even the tightest laser beam would spread out and lose a lot of its original energy.
So the tight infrared laser would diffuse in the atmosphere? infrared = heat right? and that energy lost is into the earths atmosphere, right?
Think about the french fries under the infrared heat lamp at the fast food place down the road...
they also ignored any engineering difficulties. Probably the problem of building a sail 5000 miles wide. ... that and redundancy in case of accident or failed components. I'd rather have several smaller ones than one humungously large one that produces more Watts than I can count.
Fusion power have always been about 20 years in the future. The cable they are talking about have been considered for space elevators and are about 50 years in the future.
We already have a working plasma reactor, placed approximately 93,000,000 miles away for safety reasons. You can see it if you look East in the morning. I know! Why not just... use THAT one!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is a great idea for powering space stations and such, but how the heck do you get the power back to the ground? You'll lose a lot of power during transmission from satellite to ground. More importantly how do you avoid killing people with the heat wave?
Would be nice if you could just string a cable from orbit to the ground, wouldn't it? Another reason to start working on that space elevator.
What would should be doing is looking for realistic solutions:
- Depopulate: Less babies == less humans == less need for energy
How is this realistic? Want to start a war to wipe out most of the population? Your other suggestions are a lot better, fortunately.
how do you successfully attack someone who controls a 30 million billion jiggiewatt deathray?
Get some farm kid to fire a torpedo down a vent shaft from his X-wing?
-- Alastair
That's one of the reasons you use microwave power transmission, and have your antennas be a mile or two in diameter. No tight focus killer ray needed. And microwave transmissions are (relatively) lossless. (Better than 90%, but I'm not sure how much better.)
You site your antennas in the middle of a desert so there isn't much water to adsorb the radiation. This improves things a couple of ways. It is likely that it will make the area warmer, but this is an area that's warmer than the surrounding area anyway. If you're really worried about leakage, you could put reflectors under your antenna, but that's probably a waste of effort.
I do, however, believe that the power intensities projected are excessive. I don't think we can handle transmitting that much power. It's still probably a good idea, just not as good as it's being painted. (And this thing wouldn't be in geo-stationary orbit, so you need several of them and several ground stations. And a positive feedback so that it will only send energy down to where it's receiving an up signal from. (That one *could* be a laser, to make it easy to home in on.)
P.S.: Test versions of this kind of power transmission didn't bother the cows grazing under the receiving antenna.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.