What is Digg?222 Comments
- PinkChicken, on 05/31/2008, -0/+120Didn't they have this in sim city 2000?
- clayh, on 06/01/2008, -0/+76yeah and it kept setting my city on fire.
- grumpyrain, on 06/01/2008, -4/+61Anyone who has played Simcity knows why this is a bad idea.
- listrophy, on 06/01/2008, -2/+58As an aerospace engineer, allow me to insert my opinion: This orbiting mirror idea makes the ordinarily difficult task of landing a probe on Mars seem like child's play. As an aside, I did a short presentation on the feasibility of this idea back in college.
As was seen in SimCity, the beam can go off-course. This would happen because of the tremendously tight tolerances on the pointing vector (no, not the Poynting vector). You can fix this by making your receiver arbitrarily large. This, of course, introduces some significant machining tolerancing. Plus, you now have a gigantic receiver.
That's not the only reason why this idea is currently infeasible. The other reason is the solar pressure that continually acts on the satellites. Since the mirrors are always pointing at the sun, they effectively act as solar sails. This force needs to be offset with thrusters. From what I remember, an effectively-sized mirror satellite would need about 10 lbs of continual thrust. Continual thrust is generally achieved with ion thrusters, the best of which produce 0.5 lbs max. So, you'd need a bunch of them. Besides the incredibly difficult task of modulating the thrust among multiple ion thrusters to prevent low-frequency resonance, we don't know what the effect of the highly-energized plume will have on Earth or lower-orbiting satellites.
Basically, saying "we have the technology, just not the money" is not really correct. We have the physical objects that can achieve this, but we cannot control them to the accuracy required.... and we don't have the money. - ferrariman60, on 06/01/2008, -0/+36Yeah, we should obviously skip this and just wait for fusion power. Right?
- twishart, on 06/01/2008, -3/+35YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!!
- DeskFlyer, on 06/01/2008, -3/+33Nikola Tesla approves.
- Snarfy, on 06/01/2008, -3/+26What could possibly go wrong
- 1337Dude, on 06/01/2008, -0/+18Frankly I would prefer to thank Multivac for the eventual implementation of this technology.
"American scientist Peter Glaser introduced the idea of space solar power in 1968."
And, for the record, though Peter Glaser may have been the first scientist to propose the idea, Asimov had his story "The Last Question" published in 1956. Great story.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html - headzoo, on 06/01/2008, -1/+19Anyone who can't spot a joke should leave Digg forever.
- playuhh, on 06/01/2008, -0/+17You forgot to check the "No Disasters" box :)
- bty2047, on 06/01/2008, -1/+17and how do you decrease a population? NO CHILD FOR YOU! (In soup nazi voice)
- bracketdash, on 06/01/2008, -0/+15I thought this all sounded too familiar. Those Maxis guys were really innovative. I say we jump to African Swallow!
- thenonhacker, on 05/31/2008, -7/+21Wireless electricity.
- thcobbs, on 06/01/2008, -1/+15Actually, Tesla.
- Terasiel, on 06/01/2008, -2/+15Ah *****! Meteors hit the satellite again! Oh...don't worry, it just cut through Africa and stopped in Iran.
- kazjag, on 06/01/2008, -0/+11Seems like Gundam 00
- MrDoug, on 06/01/2008, -5/+15Can you imagine if they aimed it wrong?
I picture some guy on a farm in Nebraska sun-bathing in his back yard....with 1.21 gigawatt of sunlight being beamed at him and cooking the poor guy like a hot-dog.
Cool concept though! - diceau, on 06/01/2008, -16/+24"By 2030, India's Planning Commission estimates that the country will have to generate at least 700,000 megawatts of additional power to meet the demands of its expanding economy and growing population."
Here's a tip ... decrease your population. - jmnx12, on 06/01/2008, -0/+8Cheetah speed and wait a few minutes :)
- Diggtatorship, on 06/01/2008, -2/+10I always thought we should just build a few gigantic tesla coils in outer space and power everything wirelessly all over the world.
- blackjack75, on 06/01/2008, -0/+7If the light we have in space reached earth... I'd definitely get myself a hat. A big one.
- Terr01, on 06/01/2008, -0/+6INDUSTRIALIZE. Most first-world nations have low or negative population growth. While that's correlation rather than causation, there are some credible theories floating around as to why the environment leads to a different innate calculus of child-rearing.
- budsstud26, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5seriously, wtf were you trying to say here?
- wolfkeeper, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5All joking aside, the microwave intensity they're planning for this is only slightly higher than that emitted by a cell phone- and I'm talking about the intensity right in the middle of the beam on the ground. Walking around the perimeter fence it would be below the legal maximum power which in turn is stupidly lower than that needed to kill people.
Birds and aircraft in the middle wouldn't even notice the beam. You could stand in the middle without any problems (although it's above the legal maximum power, it's still below that known to hurt people). - thcobbs, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5Nah, they will just put AI robots into the control spaces who develop a quasi-religion to keep the array aligned and performing at max efficiency.
- cmapes2, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5It would cost 1 trillion dollars to build the whole infrastructure, so I guess the US could have had 2.3 of them with the money that the pentagon "misplaced".
Great way to rape humanity. - xxMarka, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5i don't think it would beam actual light, but energy that comes from the light
- kh99, on 06/01/2008, -1/+6Except for the minor issues of clouds, night, and using the land for other things.
- thebellmaster1x, on 06/01/2008, -0/+5Thanks; now I feel like a huge nerd for laughing at "no, not the Poynting vector." Damn you and your science puns, sir.
- thcobbs, on 06/01/2008, -0/+4Yeah, its not like he went around killing people's pets to make a point.
(Edison was a good inventor.... but an ***** of a man.) - RogerStrong, on 06/01/2008, -4/+8You're making up stuff that doesn't even make any sense.
There's no "reinventing the sun".
The "electromagnetic/electric field" (microwaves) come down in a small area. The metal grid used to receive the mocirwaves will still let through enough sunlight to grow crops under it.
And there are no X-rays involved. - Terr01, on 06/01/2008, -2/+6If you mean in terms of power usage, you have a point. In terms of population growth, your post makes no sense.
- headzoo, on 06/01/2008, -1/+5Digging you down. I believe sc0rpi0n is replying to Diggtatorship's remark "power everything wirelessly all over the world". My impression of that statement is Diggtatorship wants the energy from the tesla coils to be spread out all over the world, and not funneled down to a single source like the technology mentioned in this story.
- cnldelta, on 06/01/2008, -0/+4or not have enough electricity left over to run condom making machines.
- zyklon, on 06/01/2008, -1/+5I *****' love Tesla!
- santaliqueur, on 06/01/2008, -1/+5Yeah, we saw that movie too.
- xxMarka, on 06/01/2008, -2/+6rape
- Terr01, on 06/01/2008, -1/+4Yeah, instead we should be causing wild chemical composition swings and changing the pH of the oceans!
- slicerace, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3It's not complete science fiction at all. It is, however, expensive.
Solar works great on Earth except we have an atmosphere and weather. A space power station would be unaffected by the atmosphere and unaffected by weather patterns, and would be illuminated almost all of the time (greater than 95%), delivering a constant stream of energy to Earth.
"Just chose the longest lasting generation method with the lowest cost per killowatt... based on renewable energy which won't increase in price." The longest lasting isn't necessarily the cheapest, the cleanest, or the the most energy efficient. Same thing goes for all the other qualities you listed.
Wind is great but can it satisfy the capacity that coal does? This is exactly why we don't want to choose one thing and do that - we want to diversify our renewable energy sources.
"Democracy is not about infinate [sic] individual choice. It's about doing whats best for the majority."
Well thank God we live in a republic and not a democracy, for surely we would be under the mob rule.
P.S. "Get real... I don't stupid people who have children, but NONE THE LESS... I have to put up with them and their kids. " What does this sentence even mean? I can't believe I'm even responding to your comment... - x0epyon0x, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3I was actually thinking of Gundam X, with the Satellite Cannon. God, I'm a nerd.
- dood, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3So what we need is a way to beam our waste heat from Earth into space, or more appropriately, into some heat-capacitor, should we decide to tap the waste heat.</not a physicist>
- PhantomJM, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3Sure, this is a great idea! Let's build a giant death-ray in space to power the world. What could possibly go wrong?
- xxMarka, on 06/01/2008, -1/+4and once the sun quits shining, we won't need the energy anyways.
sounds good - diceau, on 06/02/2008, -0/+3Probably wouldn't understand an emotional condition? Oh dear, I'd wager you wouldn't understand what emotions even are just yet, not because you're female, but because you lack that education.
"I need. I need."
It's all about what you 'need' emotionally ...
By that logic, you're like a person you told to stop smoking who said they're too stressed to stop and needed it to relax and enjoy themselves a bit, who then demand your sympathy by some unspoken moral code and then ask you to help them when they developed lung cancer.
Should we care? I say no ... you want freedom? Deal with the consequences. - weizbox, on 06/01/2008, -1/+4Tesla ftw!
- diceau, on 06/02/2008, -0/+3Both China and India have over 1.15 billion each ... so I agree with Terr01, your post makes no sense.
And yes, if it were a western country I'd be saying the same thing. Obviously you're still dealing with racial hang ups, let me know when you mature past that point, then you might have more of a chance to see where I'm actually coming from instead of assuming nonsense and then insulting me with false accusations. - starkruzr, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3Except that after launch, it provides free energy essentially forever (or until you have to repair the panels).
- dsmx, on 06/01/2008, -1/+4Simcity 2000 approves.
- Terr01, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3I bet you think you're being reallllly clever, eh?
The current debate/issue has to do with heat retention from that atmosphere.
Any use of the energy means we get thermodynamic waste heat.
It's just that with fossil fuels, we get that waste heat PLUS increasing the retention effect.
If anything, orbital solar power will COOL the earth, for the same amount of energy usage. -
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