What’s everyone’s thoughts on using space-based solar power to help solve the climate crisis?
Now that we’re hitting the 1.5 degree mark, I notice a lot of news articles coming out in favor of such things, but I want to know how you think of it.
Short- and medium-term, anything that leads away from fossil fuel is a good thing. Long-term, though, it seems like taking energy that would normally have bypassed the Earth, capturing it, and then adding it into our ecosystem is probably a bad idea. I’m a total layman, here, though, mostly going off of what I’ve read in science fiction.
Also, yeah, the weapons potential is a problem, though I sort of feel like we’ve already got all the weapons we need to intentionally eliminate human life, so further refinements don’t matter much. It’s the accidental extermination we’re worried about, and this might help with that for awhile.
We still have plenty of space down here where we could put solar-panels and I doubt the efficiency gains from space based solar PV will ever make up for the difficulties in getting them up there and beaming the energy back down.
And I am a little suspicious that this will be turned into weapon technology as the potential for that is certainly there.
Having rectennas for those things on the Earth instead of solar farms would benefit conservation though, as it’s essentially just chicken wire you can hang over farms and forested areas that won’t disturb wildlife. Actually if memory serves, those things can’t efficiently transmit at frequencies that would damage life. It uses like, the same frequency as wifi. I’d be worried about it causing cell phone interference.
I can imagine some shitty government deliberately building microwave MASERs using the tech specifically to burninate opponents though. All the more reason for everybody to organize and take power away from them so they can’t.
Why do I get the feeling China or Russia would try though?
well if it was a 1:1 replacement with zero growth it will be fine;
The problem is the goal economy is structured around a 10% per year (compounding) growth rate in energy use; which means we have a rather short doubling time. And it only takes 120 doubling before we exceed the total energy of the sun and long before that the Earth would be hotter than the surface of the Sun. (Even if we removed 100% of all green house gases and blocked out the Sun entirely and distributed pure electricity only)
That being said if we build a Dyson Sphere and do some Star lifting to convert it to a white dwarf star https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U
and cut our growth rate significantly, we might be able to have a civilization of growth for about a billion years.
I would imagine the population will stabilize itself and/or we will begin human expansion into space before that becomes an issue, but that is a thing I read about. There is a hard maximum number of people that could live on this planet in modernity. 🤔 I’m not sure how having space solar power now would make that an issue though. The heat issue is something we’ll have to think about down the line.
Well yes there is a hard limit, we just don’t know what the exact carrying capacity is (there may be multiple different values).
https://bsidneysmith.com/writings/essays/all-the-bunnies-in-the-meadow-die
Space based solar power is going to be a lot more expensive than ground based solar power.
The issues that it solve are distribution and night time production. I think we can solve those with a combination of various types of renewables and storage in a much cheaper way if we really wanted to.
It’s an interesting technology but it’s way too expensive and it might have unknown consequences. Like the other poster said, I also don’t think it’s a great idea to add massive amounts of energy from space to earth. It would probably be better than fossils that we dig out of the ground and turn into energy, but it’s still introduce energy and thereby heat into our atmosphere.
Let’s not imagine everything in waves, sometimes it could be a packet or particle
People can already get internet from space with Tesla’s new starlink, we could always just have solar panels with a detachable lithium battery in the orbit of earth, then astronauts arrange to drop it back down to earth with the same technology they use for dropping drones and miners onto Mars
It’s rocket science not magic lol
I don’t know if it will be great for actually helping out with the climate crisis, but there’s probably a lot of asteroids, moons and other stuff out there in space which we may come to need in the future, and effective space travel and navigation would be preferable so that when or if that time comes, we don’t wind up like the aliens in the District 9 movie.
Using solar and lithium storage to power a space station could allow energy usage for running heavy machinery in a confined space. Think of the Vikings, leverage, rudders and rowboats.
