Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization"

Posted by samzenpus on from the to-the-stars dept.

MarkWhittington writes Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for "bootstrapping a solar system civilization." Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose. The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.

1 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Solar insolation is 150,000 TW, we need 22 TW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The subject line says it all, but just to clarify it a bit more, the global power requirement for 2020 is projected to be under 22 TW (we use 20 TW or so right now, depending on how you measure it).

    In contrast, mean solar insolation on the planet is around 150,000 TW at ground level. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out from this that our civilization's power needs are completely insignificant compared to the power arriving from the Sun, by orders of magnitude.

    Of course we can't harness those 150,000 TW, but 22 TW could be captured using very little acreage (0.015% of the Earth's surface) in any sunny desert, and there are lots of those available. Only a tiny fraction would be needed.

    So, I don't know where someone got the idea that solar energy cannot meet our needs, it's so hugely wrong that it's funny.

    But wait, the above figures are at ground level . Do you realize how much power could be harnessed in Low Earth Orbit and beamed down safely at low power density? (Design studies for this have already been made.) The amount of power available in LEO is so mind-blowingly enormous that doing a calculation becomes completely pointless. It's astronomic. And we don't have to stop at LEO.

    Sorry to burst the bubble of your misconceptions, but you're wrong. Solar energy is, for all human intents and purposes, limitless.