Quote:
Originally Posted by donquixote99
SPS simply represents, in my view, a relatively near term payoff to the long-term strategy of expanding the human economy off the planet. A huge payoff, that is. If getting from here to there is expensive, so are resource wars down here. For a trillion or two, that is, within the scale of the Iraq debacle, we could accomplish quite a lot I expect....
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Couldn't agree more in a 100 to 150 year time scale, when we can move off-planet with production so the power can be directly transfered to the factories in space.
As I'm trying and obviously failing to point out here, to beam the power to earth the array must be in geostationary orbit. It's impossible to maintain a large array in geostationary orbit without shading the earth if that power has to be beamed to earth, despite contracycles memories of Arthur C Clarkes writings.
I'm also trying to point out that with current technology, to make any
meaningful contribution to earths power requirements that array has to be very large indeed.
So, in the current context of the desire of large amounts of the worlds population to drastically reduce our oil based economy, you either have to drastically reduce production of all types, or develop alternatives in the immediate, not long term. The arrays are a future posibility, not something that can be deployed now, hence to claim them as an alternative to say Nuclear power now, isn't even close to being an option.
Perhaps another way of looking at it without having to go into the physics is this: The ISS, a project America, Canada, the EU, Russia and Japan are all actively involved with is still not completed 9 years after it started, and that is a tiny fraction of a percentage of the effort necessary to build an array just to provide for the US's energy needs.