Will we eventualy colonise other planets? (43)

22 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2008-06-26 13:33 ID:hQVuY88W

>>21
There is a science fiction author named Jerry Pournelle (Google for him, he has a blog) who has been pushing for the US government to create orbiting solar power satellites to capture solar power and beam it down as microwaves. It involves constructing satellites in orbit with square miles of solar panels on each one, so they can get the sun's full output unfiltered by the Earth's atmosphere which blocks most of it. They then beam down the power as focused coherent microwaves (Google for "maser") and they boil an artificial lake that's been constructed in some uninhabited region, maybe in one of the vast alkali salt flats in the Southwest that's almost as sterile as the surface of the Moon. The steam thus created turns hundreds of gigantic turbines which power generators and feed power into North America's power grid.

He has done the math and says this all could have been done with off-the-shelf technology thirty years ago.

I worry about the possibility of terrorists hacking one of the satellites and cooking a city with it. Other than that, the idea seems at first glance to be feasible. I wonder how many of these satellites we could have constructed in orbit for what the Iraq war has cost us.

It is not magic, and it would cost a lot of money to start it up, but it might help.

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