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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.
If the satellite is attached to a 5000km sail, which is spread so as to catch the solar wind, what's to stop it from blowing away?
Also, who gets to volunteer to have the bazillo-watt microwave laser pointed at them? I've played sim city. I know it's only a matter of time before the satellite moves and cuts a firey swatch through my town!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So I always thought fusion would be the first thing to provide an infinite resource (electricity), but it looks like this is a more viable (read: closer) solution.
If humanity gets one resource that is in essence, infinite, it would seriously change our race. I hope, for the better.
OK, if we put up a rectangle 8,000 kilometers by 8,000 kilometers, it'll produce 100,000,000,000,000 times the energy we need.
WHY DON'T THEY SUGGEST A 1 KILOMETER BY 1 KILOMETER SAIL?
What's going on here? Did the guys being interviewed say something reasonable, and then also abstract it to a high number for the reporter, and the reporter only decided to write up the insane, absurd, bizarrely huge number? Or were the guys being interviewed just nuts?
Why don't they test this by powering the ISS?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm pretty sure you mean 'whoever can secure the receiver'. Here in the USA we don't just sit around and let people control their oil just because they built a nation and infrastructure on top of it. If we want a better price, we'll topple their regime.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Civilizations thrive and prosper if there are plenty of cheap resources and energy available. The more of it the better. Right now we're heading for a shock in energy prices, so any creative idea, initiative is certainly welcome. "Depopulation" (whatever that means) has a dark side as well. Just watch Japan in the coming decades. They certainly aren't having lots of children. If they don't build a population of robots/cyborgs, whatever to support them, in a few decades they will have a crippled economy full of old people. While I can be accused of not looking at the big picture here (like centuries), the best thing we can do is to maintain the population level. And while efficiency is certainly welcome in places (why the hell is the US using so much energy with almost identical living standards?), we will not need less, but more cheap energy in the future.
They could store the energy in really big springs and bring them back to Earth in the space shuttle.
Actually all these SPSS plans are all a big shuck. They tell the groundhogs that they're going to send back orders of magnitude more energy than civilization needs. When really, it makes more sense to use the power in situ and build space colonies to take advantage of it. It's all just a stalking horse to get the flatlanders to pay for their zero-G love hotels.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
IIRC, the big trouble is that the solar winds are not right next to the earth. You have to go very far away to another spot and then the beaming back problem becomes even bigger. So this just won't work with current technology. As usualy, it's something for 30 years from now.
Currently hooked on AMP
Unless every country had a space elevator, we would quickly see denial attacks against said space elevators (or attempts to control them). "Free, unlimited energy" is a game changer.
A saner approach would probably be narrow band microwave, I'd think.
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