Early morning skimming

"Just Jeepin'" (macintux) 05/09/2020 at 06:00 • Filed to: Planelopnik, Spacelopnik

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My sleep schedule was thrown off by a rough couple of days at work, so I’m just poking around online, and I’m reminded that if pandemics and global climate change don’t kill us, we really are building an amazing future. Power transmission from space ftw.

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pip bip - choose Corrour > Just Jeepin' 05/09/2020 at 06:09

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evening/morning.

Just Jeepin' > pip bip - choose Corrour 05/09/2020 at 06:15

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facw > Just Jeepin' 05/09/2020 at 06:21

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Just watch out for those mistargeted beams:

https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)

Of course the military would probably be into deathrays from space.

In any event, bring on the vast constellations of powersats providing clean energy! Probably do have to figure out how to build them in the asteroid belt, unless we can drastically reduce launch costs.

My bird IS the word > Just Jeepin' 05/09/2020 at 08:47

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I thought microwaves werent suitable  for transmission due to heat problems. Wouldn't that accelerate global warming?

Just Jeepin' > My bird IS the word 05/09/2020 at 09:04

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Can’t speak to the first question, but I’d wager that any power we can transmit from outer space would be less significant than the CO2 we’ re generating for all the rest. It’s not the heat per se that’s the problem, it’s the fact that we’re trapping it.

But, not a scientist.

facw > My bird IS the word 05/09/2020 at 09:32

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Microwaves aren’t going to interact much with the atmosphere. They’ll heat up water vapor they pass through, which might have interesting effects on a cloudy day if you are transmitting enough power , but in general they’ll go right through air (which is why they are desirable for an application like this).

If you had enough power sats, they would increase heating. Essentially it would be like pointing a mirror at Earth the capture more light (though smaller than the power sat solar panel array size, since they are nowhere near 100% efficient) . The energy from the beam might not immediately be converted to heat, but it will probably become waste heat eventually. But as a global warming concern, the important question is whether we’d be adding more heat than we would from other sources. Fossil fuels add heat both by trapping it with greenhouse gasses, by directly adding energy through the heat of burning, and by the waste heat from use of the electricity, while a microwave solution only has the last one (maybe the second if you generate power by using your microwave to heat water into steam and then release the steam after spinning a turbine). Regardless, it’s clearly a better situation than fossil fuels.