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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.
However, when you consider that the solar wind is the only thing keeping the aliens at bay, you might think twice about disrupting them.
The first thing any government will ask is: "So who will be in control of all the world's power?"
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.
Yes, you are. That makes about as much sense as Guam flipping over. The Earth is so large that this would never be able to move it. Further, as the article states, this isn't a sail, rather it's a collector of electrons.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Click me. This article is paywalled after you read a few stories, but the paywall is a javascript popup. Noscript lets you read the article.
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.
-1 Moronic
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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?
warning; it's goatse
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.
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
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.
"thousand meter cable, and 5,000 mile sail" Meters and miles. Isn't this use of mixed units the error that doomed a mars satellite?
That's ok, the energy unit that they use is the kilohome:
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.
You can convert that to English units using Home's Law.
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.
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 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
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
My question exactly. Or almost exactly -- from the number of zeroes you're using the European "billion" (million million) rather than the North American (thousand million).
But even assuming the latter, a 1 km square sail gives roughly 6 times the energy Earth uses currently (by their figures). And a 1 km square sail is a heck of a lot easier to build than an 8000 km square one.
That number, though, surprises me. Sunlight flux is less than 1.5 kW/square meter at Earth's distance. Call it 2 GW per square kilometer -- nowhere near Earth's energy use (in the 10-20 TW range)*. This is talking about tapping solar wind rather than sunlight, but I find it hard to believe that solar wind flux is that many orders of magnitude more energy intensive than sunlight. If it is -- and despite Earth's magnetic field -- global temperatures are going to be driven mostly by solar wind effects. The numbers in TFA must be wrong, i.e. typical popular science reportage.
(* TFA says an 8,400 km square sail will produce "a billion billion gigawatts", which works out to over 14 terawatts per square kilometer. The numbers are totally fucked up. Somewhere in there I think somebody confused meters with kilometers and/or watts with kilowatts.)
-- 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.
Until we find a way to add more fuel to the sun, the solar wind isn't renewable energy. Plus, it's nuclear man. Nuclear!