I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but it's easy to see that there would be substantially long periods of the year when the satellite would suffer a significant eclipse every 24 hours, even if it's only in the earth's penumbral shadow.
How significant will that eclipse be? It has to be a 99.999999999% eclipse for this sail to generate less power than the earth currently uses. With a sail this big, I think such an event will be extremely rare. My wild guess is maybe once before the sun blows up.
A space elevator could only be built at Geosynchronous orbit. For various reasons, you wouldn't want to put a power generator like this in such an orbit.
First of all, this thing is huge.
It doesn't have to be. It only has to be 8000 km across if we really want 100 billion times as much energy as we're currently using. I think we'd do quite well with something slightly smaller.
Also, it might be easier to beam the energy from a lagrange point to geosynchronous orbit (or actually somewhere beyond it; I don't think a space elevator ends at geonsync orbit, it has its center of mass there), than to beam it through our atmosphere. Once you can handle the kind of megaconstruction projects to build space elevators and huge solar sails, it might also be within out capabilities to put a truly massive receiver at the end of the space elevator. (But how big will it have to be? I have no idea.)
Controlling population growth is less realistic than the freaking space elevator?
On a global scale? Yes.
I've got some news for you: lots of countries on earth are declining in population right now: Japan, Russia, lots of Europe.
But that's not controlled. In fact, a lot of people in those countries worry about how the shrinking younger generations will ever take care of the growing older generations.
The populations of these countries (Europe and Japan, at least) is not shrinking because people are actively limiting reproduction, but simply because of a high level of education and good pensions. People are independent enough to live without a partner, marry late, and don't need children to take care of them when they get old.
Meanwhile the world population as a whole is still growing, mostly because most of the world isn't that wealthy and educated. It is of course a great idea to solve poverty and give everybody in the whole world the same level of education as a European, but is that really easier than building a space elevator? Technology wise, yes, but politically and economically, not by a long shot.
China has cut population growth enormously.
And wouldn't you love to live under that kind of government control.
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.
No, that is not the cable they are talking about. That is a completely different cable.
It's talking about solar wind, so it'll probably have to be deployed outside the earth's magnetic field. Is geostationary good enough? Or is it going to be a orbit around the sun? It's a shame TFA doesn't specify that.
The first thing any government will ask is: "So who will be in control of all the world's power?"
Nobody. What would actually happen is that whoever controls the satellite would have to sell the power at a price it will sell at, i.e not more than other power generators are selling for.
"Not more"? Make that: a lot less. If this thing really produces more than enough power supply the entire world, it's going to make energy ridiculously cheap. Nothing would be able to compete with it.
You might wanna re-read the summary...it would be using a cable.
And how do you think that's going to help in getting the power to earth? Their idea does not include building a space elevator, or for that matter any other solution to this problem.
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.
Yes and no. Competition between stores is good, of course. But the OP expressed fears that manufacturers and networks might lock their devices to Amazon's store (in exchange for a piece of the pie, no doubt), and I think those fears are entirely justified.
Of course most of us will just root our phones and go elsewhere, but that's not something your average user is likely to do. And I'm sure Motorola would love to prevent it completely.
I keep hearing this more and more lately. Democrats are terrible at implementing their good ideas, Republicans are good at implementing their terrible ideas. You're screwed either way.
I don't know. The blaring ads can be useful. It's a good sign I need to go to bed when I'm woken up by the loud phone sex ads. (Other ads never seem to be as loud as those.)
I can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.
More accurately, WebP doesn't invent any additional detail. Look at the second image. Lots of artifacts on the background around his head. The WebP version is sharper, has less artifacts, and is a whopping 75% smaller.
Clearly WebP is especially good at photos with large areas of the same colour, something that JPEG has always been incredibly bad at.
Perhaps it would have been better if we'd switched to IPv6 before we got the entire world (and not just the US) on the internet. The enormous growth of the past 15 years seriously aggravates the problem.
In the '80s, they needed only a year to transition from one technology to a completely incompatible one. Switching from IPv4 to IPv6 should be easier, but the huge scale makes it a lot harder.
Why wouldn't they have set-aside a block of 4.2 billion addresses that mapped 1:1 with IPv4 addresses?
They did exactly that. The incompatibility problems are in other areas, and many of those are relatively recent additions to IPv4. Workarounds for the limitations of IPv4. Limitations that IPv6 doesn't have.
15 years ago I first heard about IPv6. IP4 was running out of address space, and IP6 would save the day. A bright new future with enough addresses for every single object on earth. For years I've lived in continuing surprise that it still hasn't bee implemented yet, and now it's too hard to implement because of weird crap that's been added to IP4 in last 15 years?
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Or what would happen to their neighbours if Israel got one first.
Ever heard of contraception?
Ever heard of freedom? You can't simply force people to not have children. Well, you can, but you'd be living in China then.
I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but it's easy to see that there would be substantially long periods of the year when the satellite would suffer a significant eclipse every 24 hours, even if it's only in the earth's penumbral shadow.
How significant will that eclipse be? It has to be a 99.999999999% eclipse for this sail to generate less power than the earth currently uses. With a sail this big, I think such an event will be extremely rare. My wild guess is maybe once before the sun blows up.
A space elevator could only be built at Geosynchronous orbit. For various reasons, you wouldn't want to put a power generator like this in such an orbit.
First of all, this thing is huge.
It doesn't have to be. It only has to be 8000 km across if we really want 100 billion times as much energy as we're currently using. I think we'd do quite well with something slightly smaller.
Also, it might be easier to beam the energy from a lagrange point to geosynchronous orbit (or actually somewhere beyond it; I don't think a space elevator ends at geonsync orbit, it has its center of mass there), than to beam it through our atmosphere. Once you can handle the kind of megaconstruction projects to build space elevators and huge solar sails, it might also be within out capabilities to put a truly massive receiver at the end of the space elevator. (But how big will it have to be? I have no idea.)
A 1000 meter cable obviously means that it's only orbiting 1000 meters off the ground.
It very obviously doesn't mean that.
Controlling population growth is less realistic than the freaking space elevator?
On a global scale? Yes.
I've got some news for you: lots of countries on earth are declining in population right now: Japan, Russia, lots of Europe.
But that's not controlled. In fact, a lot of people in those countries worry about how the shrinking younger generations will ever take care of the growing older generations.
The populations of these countries (Europe and Japan, at least) is not shrinking because people are actively limiting reproduction, but simply because of a high level of education and good pensions. People are independent enough to live without a partner, marry late, and don't need children to take care of them when they get old.
Meanwhile the world population as a whole is still growing, mostly because most of the world isn't that wealthy and educated. It is of course a great idea to solve poverty and give everybody in the whole world the same level of education as a European, but is that really easier than building a space elevator? Technology wise, yes, but politically and economically, not by a long shot.
China has cut population growth enormously.
And wouldn't you love to live under that kind of government control.
I'm not convinced that a totalitarian world government is really such a good idea.
How the hell is the federal gov't supposed to know how many fire departments are needed and where they should be and how large, etc.etc.etc.
It's a local issue, it should stay a local issue, it's not a federal issue at all.
So? You've got local governments, don't you? Why accept unnecessary damage by running it as a private business?
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.
No, that is not the cable they are talking about. That is a completely different cable.
It's talking about solar wind, so it'll probably have to be deployed outside the earth's magnetic field. Is geostationary good enough? Or is it going to be a orbit around the sun? It's a shame TFA doesn't specify that.
"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?
The English measurements are all between brackets after the more serious SI measurements.
It makes it a rather pointless link for most people.
The first thing any government will ask is: "So who will be in control of all the world's power?"
Nobody. What would actually happen is that whoever controls the satellite would have to sell the power at a price it will sell at, i.e not more than other power generators are selling for.
"Not more"? Make that: a lot less. If this thing really produces more than enough power supply the entire world, it's going to make energy ridiculously cheap. Nothing would be able to compete with it.
You might wanna re-read the summary...it would be using a cable.
And how do you think that's going to help in getting the power to earth? Their idea does not include building a space elevator, or for that matter any other solution to this problem.
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.
Then charge him $7500 for needing the FD without having paid the fee. Still better than letting the house burn down.
Yes and no. Competition between stores is good, of course. But the OP expressed fears that manufacturers and networks might lock their devices to Amazon's store (in exchange for a piece of the pie, no doubt), and I think those fears are entirely justified.
Of course most of us will just root our phones and go elsewhere, but that's not something your average user is likely to do. And I'm sure Motorola would love to prevent it completely.
I keep hearing this more and more lately. Democrats are terrible at implementing their good ideas, Republicans are good at implementing their terrible ideas. You're screwed either way.
I don't know. The blaring ads can be useful. It's a good sign I need to go to bed when I'm woken up by the loud phone sex ads. (Other ads never seem to be as loud as those.)
Not to mention the inane commentary on vids with cute animals.
I can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.
More accurately, WebP doesn't invent any additional detail. Look at the second image. Lots of artifacts on the background around his head. The WebP version is sharper, has less artifacts, and is a whopping 75% smaller.
Clearly WebP is especially good at photos with large areas of the same colour, something that JPEG has always been incredibly bad at.
Perhaps it would have been better if we'd switched to IPv6 before we got the entire world (and not just the US) on the internet. The enormous growth of the past 15 years seriously aggravates the problem.
In the '80s, they needed only a year to transition from one technology to a completely incompatible one. Switching from IPv4 to IPv6 should be easier, but the huge scale makes it a lot harder.
Why wouldn't they have set-aside a block of 4.2 billion addresses that mapped 1:1 with IPv4 addresses?
They did exactly that. The incompatibility problems are in other areas, and many of those are relatively recent additions to IPv4. Workarounds for the limitations of IPv4. Limitations that IPv6 doesn't have.
At least, that's as far as I understand it.
15 years ago I first heard about IPv6. IP4 was running out of address space, and IP6 would save the day. A bright new future with enough addresses for every single object on earth. For years I've lived in continuing surprise that it still hasn't bee implemented yet, and now it's too hard to implement because of weird crap that's been added to IP4 in last 15 years?
Yeah, you'd better use a magsail instead.
So how's the search for room-temperature super conductors going?