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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?"
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.
Just boil the Atlantic and harvest energy from the larger, more predictable hurricanes.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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
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.
In the way that 'non-depleting' is too hard to say.
In the exact same way that solar power is considered renewable, and hyrdo power is considered renewable, and wood burning power is considered renewable.
Yes when the sun comes to the end of its life all of those stop. But there are bigger issues at that point...
Obviously, you just remember to plant a new star so it'll be ready by the time the old one burns out.
That's just common sense.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
Whenever I hear someone mention depopulation as a good idea I shudder. Just HOW do you suppose you are going to accomplish that?
A death ray powered by a solar wind collector, obviously.
It's right there in the summary, sheesh.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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
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