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What would the health implications be? I can't imagine that it wouldn't have any effect.

I C A R U S

It doesn't seem that they've settled on a power delivery method yet, but there are so many safe options I don't see why they'd ever need to consider any option that has health risks.

but maybe instead of a destruction beam, it’ll be a concentrated solar beam.. which could destroy stuff but is contained in a special facility on earth…

but it also can be used as a death ray if needed. multifunctional, 🤷🏿

Why not nuclear energy

Wow, a similar report said that it's controversial and harmful because China was thinking of it. But here the wording is so positive.

Funny how that happens, right?

Nuclear power plants:Stares

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This would be really handy if you could get it to work. Beaming solar power down to earth any time of day

Are you going to stand in the beam? No? Then all good

Honestly, this solution will not scale. They should spend that money on stellarator research or/and safer minified fission reactors.

Reminds me of the web comic where one of the characters is a futuristic historian pouring over the records of the 20th century using some VR machine which puts you in the history, he goes back to look at all the evil things that the fictional country of Arland did, including illegal wars, political assassinations and a horde of other atrocities.

At the end of the comic just as he’s about to publish the holo-book entitled something like “The Evils of Arland” he realises the VR machine thingy was set to “fictionalise”, when he turns it off he realises that all the evil things Arland did were actually done by the US, things like the My Lai massacre and Tulsa Race Massacre become clear to the reader as the character in the comic snaps the holo-book in half and throws it away.

Europe can't even put usb-c on iPhones.... they are talking the same shit for ages.

Dyson swarms should be possible on paper. Dyson swarm when!?

In the palm of their hands?

No, but I don't stand in front of my wifi router but the signal is still all around me. I'm just curious whether it would be something similar or something stronger and potentially harmful. It's a cool concept, I just don't know how it would even begin to work.

I recently completed constructing a Dyson swarm, only took 50 hours or so, I don’t see what the big deal is. Let’s get it done

Imagine setting up a global solar array, just like gps satellites…….

Big oil would never let that happen.

Reminds me of a really corny Bond movies plot.

too dangerous to harness the power from the sun by bringing it to Earth

There seems to be more research on nuclear reactors. Specialists expect nuclear and renewable energy combined should be enough power for our grids.

Your wifi router doesn't use beams.

I was at a space conference a couple of months ago, and there was company there promoting this very technology. They plan to beam the power back down to Earth at ~1/4 that of the sun's power. So it's not likely to cause significant damage to the land surrounding the site, and very likely couldn't be weaponised at those powers.

Thank you for answering the question. I appreciate it.

Gundam 00 anyone?

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You're welcome, I know that when they first started that presentation I was very skeptical of the safety of it too.

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Wouldnt the process of sending the power down to earth be again weather dependant? Or what am I missing here?

This exactly. I’m surprised that not many are talking about this.

Thanks for sharing this

Yeah totally the same situation

I can't imagine an orbital elevator being feasible

Depends on the frequency used.

Which frequency do we need then to be weather Independent and meanwhile not heating up the atmosphere?

Going into business as an extension cord salesman!

I get about 4GW with swarms but my efficiency with photon generation is so low that my antimatter cells are not being produced fast enough. I eventually have to manually feed a few hydrogen fuel power plants to kickstart my planet. I'm limping to complete the sphere.

big oil would like a word

Each satellite would generate about 2 GigaWatts of power. I didn't see in the article where it stated how many satellites would be built and launched. Let's assume 1,000, which I think is a pretty large number for what is being planned. No sources for that, I'm just guessing. I could be off by a lot. Those 1,000 satellites would generate 2 terawatts of power. If we assume that these satellites generate power all day long, that comes out to 2 TW * 365 * 24 hours = 17,520 TWh

According to this page, the total amount of sunlight power hitting earth at any given time is 173,000 terawatts.

I used to think similarly about nuclear power since it is converting mass to energy. Let's look at that too.

This page indicates 885 million terawatt hours of power reaches Earth from the sun.

This page indicates that in 2021, all nuclear energy produced added up to about 2653 terawatt hours.

Energy from the sun: 885,000,000 terawatt hours
Nuclear energy: 2,653 terawatt hours
1,000 solar satellites: 17,520 terawatt hours

Even at that absurd number of satellites, we're still only generating (capturing and transmitting) less that 0.002% of the sunlight that is already hitting the Earth.

Greenhouse gasses are estimated to capture/hold 5-6% of the sunlight energy that reaches Earth. That works out to 44,250,000 terawatthours of captured energy.

If my numbers are off, please correct them. But the amount of energy that humans can generate or capture is a pittance compared to what is captured by greenhouse gas emissions.

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Anybody asked Kenneth?

Or they could just use nuclear, if the tree huggers weren’t scared to death of nuclear energy (which is carbon free btw) then we could probably be years ahead of our carbon neutral goals.

Geothermal is also a good option.

"With the ancient emerald they found in the attic!"

Here's the reason Nuclear isn't supported as much as everyone on Reddit wants it to be: they have a history of not reaching completion.

This means it isn't a safe investment. Overnight and construction costs are unstable and rise above projections. At a certain stage of inflated costs it becomes more profitable to abandon the project as a company's or government's 20 year ROI becomes a 50 year ROI.

Concrete isn't getting less expensive any time soon.

Isn't this a Bond villain plan?

The sheer amount of mass you gave to put way up in geostationary orbit is laughable. Gonna use kerosene rockets?

> and meanwhile not heating up the atmosphere?

Interesting shower thought; Rerouting any solar energy that would have otherwise not hit earth down to earth will always heat up the earth faster than it otherwise would have regardless of the method or frequency used to do so. This change probably will not be very significant though (drop in the ocean kind of thing) but its not zero.

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SimCity taught me this is not a good idea.

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Sooo… doesn’t all solar come from “space”? 😅

I hope this happens, and soon.

Heating up the atmosphere wont be much of an issue. The fact that the beam is functionally an orbital weapon could be a bigger issue

All these super expensive fantasy mega projects, even IF they did work, are less effective that just mass producing cheap effective PV and wind as fast as we can right now. All kinds of realistic affordable storage solutions are coming online right now too.

Same arguments can be deployed against this idea too. Expensive, long build time, massive outlay of cash and resources before any power is received and a long time to get ROI on money and carbon sunk into it.

Let's be real here. The primary barrier to nuclear development is the fossil fuel industry. They spend money to shape public sentiment and for them, it's money well spent. Ditto for the meat industry towards environmentally positive notions like veganism or even eating less meat.

To be fair, which of those two options sounds less scary to you? An EU based orbital energy system or a Chinese one?

It uses light, so technically it does. It's just on the same order of magnitude as the light from a bright star for a useable signal.

Do not fuck with the sun please dummies thank you

So I'm thinking about a possibility to the great filter that involves Von Neuman probes which you can see about here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHMIv_zAbrM&t=363s

The possibility I'm considering is that this network got made a long long time ago and it's basically everywhere. So what happens is that well before an emerging civilization can send out an interstellar colony it gets advanced enough to capture, dismantle and capture the data that's on the network. The probe network might even cooperate with this in some way. Once you get access to the probe network it's already full of all the things you might have discovered by exploring. Want an up close of the Pillars of Creation? The probe network has been studying that for millions of years. Network is also full of information from other civilizations, many of which no longer exist. You can also see that most habitable planets are already taken so you just end up improving your own system with all the new tech you just got and putting all your own knowledge on the system. So very few civilizations bother to go out very far into space, you already learned what's out there and how to optimize what's easily available nearby. Anyway just a thought.

Or just build a few nuclear reactors and have more clean energy than the continent can use.

After thinking about it a bit, my main question is how to be sure that only the receiver is hit by the beam and no one and never will be able to 'hack' the system to use it as a weapon.

Literally just build nuclear plants. We invented them in the 60s.

Veganism has nothing to do with environmental sustainability. Palm oil is vegan. Pleather is vegan.

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Can we send our brightest minds to space to figure this out? I nominate Tucker Carlson and Steven Crowder to both be launched into space so they can figure out the feasibility

Compare a a laser pointer with the bulb lighting your room. Maybe it can help you understand what the word means.

I totally built this in SimCity 2000

isnt the entire issue with global warming that too much of the suns energy is being trapped within the earths system? Wouldnt this just add more energy?

Wifi can be and is beamed just like any other light we manipulate or produce. The more relevant aspect of the discussion is magnitude, not the shape of emission.

You can't make it 100% safe. It's no different than the nukes around the world right now. They're as safe as the governments watching over them. And most likely the best place to put a ground station for something like this is the Sahara. Far less of a problem with weather. But a bit more politically problematic.

Put a big shade in front of the sun, that will cool the earth.

<I don't fisiks much>

Damn North Africa just can’t get a break when it comes to its energy production

Yes but It would heat the earth less that burning fossil fuels ☺️

I thought the biggest issue with scaling nuclear energy was that we don’t have a way to dispose of the waste. Genuinely curious, as it isn’t a topic I’ve dived in to all that much.

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Right now the biggest problem is that it's really expensive, and takes a long time to build. Investing billions that won't start pay interest for at least 10 years isn't attractive to banks that need to show a profit every year, or governments that have to face an election every 4 years.

That's one of the reasons why small modular reactors are interesting. You don't have to invest so much before you start to see a return.

It's also why wind is doing so well. It's easy to borrow the cost of a turbine, or even a wind farm, and it starts making money pretty quickly.

Because it’s not price competitive against renewables.

IDK let me check alibaba for an orbital death ray and I'll get back to you

And neither is space based solar.

Wind and solar are winning on the economic front. Batteries are just about good enough to solve the intermittency problem. Geothermal and/or tidal are likely to become cost competitive soon enough.

The biggest scaling problems with nuclear are that we are building basically none of it right now so scaling it up means pretty much building the industrial base up from scratch, and the lack of qualified people which will need decades to train enough. It takes years to train up qualified nuclear technicians, and you'd need to scale up the schools too.

Meanwhile, the industrial base for wind and solar are massive now and increasing almost exponentially, and educating new workers takes months at most because there's nothing really complicated about them.

> to be sure that only the receiver is hit by the beam and no one and never will be able to 'hack' the system to use it as a weapon.

You don't. Nothing is "hack proof". If it can be controlled from the ground, it can be hacked. Even if it can't be controlled, someone might find a way.

Which game?

The biggest reason is ignorance. People are scared of nuclear, wrongly so.

Dyson Sphere Program. It’s a good one if you like factory building games — not quite as perfect as Factorio is but it’s really good.

Miss me with that ignorant bullshit.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study

>Batteries are just about good enough to solve the intermittency problem

No they aren't... We aren't even sure we can meet EV needs let alone powering the whole grid.

That has nothing to do with what I said. Which was "Veganism has nothing to do with environmental sustainability. Palm oil is vegan. Pleather is vegan."

It's about feeling morally superior.

This is you right now: " There are examples of unsustainable practices that qualify as vegan, therefore the meat industry and their influence on federal policy is as harmless to the environment as any alternative." Sounds a lot like the conclusions we reach on the policy level in regards to fossil fuels vs. nuclear or any alternative.

Build solar blankets over the ocean. Cool the ocean while getting that enviro-friendly juice

Or just letting the sun rays come down to earth where it will anyway.. it isn’t like collecting it in geo will make it stronger, still free space path loss radiating the energy from the satellite.

Well if veganism was about sustainability wouldn't it be included in the entire ethos? it's not though. It's only about animals. I didn't make the rules, they did. You can eat animals sustainably and you can not eat animals and still use unsustainable practices. Don't be mad at me because your ideology is inconsistent with itself.

Funny how our politicians claim it takes to long to build nuclear plants and that it’s already too late, then come up some completely unrealistic idea which would take far longer.

I like your funny words, magic man

Recycle is 95% un-fissioned. Need either recycling infrastructure (like France but newer tech available now) or fast-spectrum reactors (Russia in the lead, god damnit).

Geological repository for what is left, or just put it all underground.

Oklo natural reactors 2 billion years ago show random geology capable of trapping “used” nuclear fuel, so picking good geology not a challenge.

These were the “Jewish space lasers” that Marjorie Taylor Green suggested could’ve started forest fires in CA lol.

Every day we are getting closer to a death star.

Its a dyson sphere (energy collecting part) AND a death star (energy transmitting part).

It would be cool if the death Star actually had a sun in the middle of it but I believe the lore says that it has kyber crystals or something? (Not sure)

Remembering faxes that when scanned actually containedalicious code embedded when converted into the digital format by the old school PTSN fax machines.

Warning description may be slightly off with how yhe fax machines and faxes were used as malware on corporate networks but I'm thinking it was back 2010-2016 time frame. So you can think your air gapped and then usb scan a picture printed from a fax machine and potentially still become infected or have your machine contain a bot it just won't reach the internet but should be scary AF for security researchers.

I think if we look at any spectrum for data transmission (abd I mean format not frequency spectrum specifically) but USB versions, RF transceivers or transmitters and receivers, old non-broadband, cellular infrastructures, network infrastructures built on current rj45 based and fiber networking all the way to satellite based and low frequency 900mhz up to 5 ghz and beyond all have some some weakness somewhere or can find a weakness in combination with other technology that device or system uses.

We have to work 10x harder than the hacker now especially people sell cryptolockers, private info and botnets on the dark web although I do think tor and .i2p are needed for people to feel safe online once they are more user friendly. At least firr .i2p where tor browser is user friendly but you gotta do your due diligence on dns potential vpns or multiple no log vpns etc. C hanging identities and randomized MAC IDs and dns and PGP encryption.

China are the baddies though

Yeah, for sure. My point about nuclear plants is not an endorsement of this satellite solar beam.

Everyone here always thinks they are being argued with, you're not.

Meanwhile in Italy, the cost of installing solar panels exceeds 3k per kw, while the average wage is about 1.6k per month. Just put solar panels on every roof, you clowns and then we talk about space solar panels.

Another one of those stories that endlessly repeats over decades and decades. To give you an example of how long this has been proposed a guy named Gerard O'Neill wrote a book about space stations that were going to be launched that were big cylinders that rotated that his Princeton students helped him devise and whose primary function was going to be giant solar panels in space which used microwave beams to direct that power back down to earth.

That was in the late 1970s. And even in the 1970s with that technology that seemed like one of those ideas that was well within the technology reach of the day if only somebody just decided to do it. So no improvements in solar technology or rocket technology have really done much more than make a practical system more practical today. But that's not why it won't ever get done. It won't ever get done because it's always going to be cheaper to have that power from the ground.

Or you can just buy 3 100 watt solar panels on Amazon for $89 each and nail them to the side of your house or the top of your shed and buy a 10 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery for $30 and buy a inverter which is going to be able to run your window air conditioner or your other daily implements or charge all your devices or keep your computer running during the day when you're awake and actually using it. All for less than $500.

This isn't actually about veganism, it's about the meat mega industry, the influence it has on shaping public opinion, and how that is parallel to the way big oil operates in regards to threats to their respective market caps.

Oh, I agree. I plan to install a 7kw system myself, although it’s hard to get someone for the certification. But I just wanted to let you know where Europes heart actually is. Especially in Italy and Spain which have a stupid amount of light available all year. Space solar panels, smh..

/r/dysonsphereprogram is great if you enjoy games like Factorio, Satisfactory and such. It is in early access. They added a lot of QoL, and biggest one is probably blueprints. You can cut paste people's saved blueprints into your came and it just works. Saves so much time. And it's also very pretty to look at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEpTaXRIhE0

Your problem seems to be with capitalism. Trying to convince me capitalism is bad is just preaching to the choir.

It's like how socialism has nothing to do with democracy because one is an economic system and the other is political. You can be a democratic socialist or a Fascist socialist.

You're the one who brought up veganism in regards to environmentalism in the first place. I just pointed out the truth that environmentalism has no standing on weather or not something is vegan. Take it up with PETA or the Vice Admiral Vegan or whoever is in charge of that shit if you have a problem with that.

You don't understand where I'm coming from because apparently it's like me trying to talk about water to a fish. It might be easier to wrap your head around by looking at the tobacco industry and where we would be if we let them write the rules on how much influence they can have. We're doing this right now, but with fossil fuels and meat instead of cigarettes and asbestos.

I understand exactly where you're coming from. You're upset that being vegan doesn't automatically give you a free pass to being environmentally conscious and you want to have all the moral superiorities. You collect them like Pokémon.

Big Oil will suppress it.

The real key in my experience is to build the sphere around an o type star big enough to encompass the innermost planet and the your photon generation is always active for the receivers on that planet. One planet around an average otype star can do 400ish gigawatts of photon output. From there you'll never have a power problem unless it's rod subcomponent related (not photons though obviously). This methodology got me to 150 antimatter rods a minute before my framerates started to crumble

Or you could just skip certification and mount the panels on the ground outside or above a little shock you built and run a gorilla cord from your inverter into the window of your house and run whatever you want it off that cord and never ever tie into the grid. In fact I highly recommend people don't tie into the grid for their first solar installation. If you tied into the grid you have a whole lot more cost and you lose some Independence if the grid goes down and you've got a lot of people monitoring what you're doing. If you just have a large thick extension cord running from your solar panels and an outdoor inverter to go into your window then that can be considered a temporary use which you can do with what you want.