This is one of the reasons I'm heavy into space stocks and space development in general. From my perspective, the dangers of climate change are real, BUT we're well past the point where a strictly Earth-based humanity has the ability and (more importantly) will to reverse course. In short, humanity is in the process of outgrowing this planet, and absent some MAJOR catastrophe that reorders human civilization globally, we won't lift ourselves onto that next step that the climate advocates keep preaching at us, as (you rightly point out), we're not collectively willing to stabilize our population levels (witness the angst around developed nations not having enough kids) and consign others back into subsistence-levels of living that would reduce their carbon footprints (nevermind voluntarily adopting a subsistence lifestyle OURSELVES).
Sci-fi writer Charles Stross (a fellow who thinks and writes heavily on these topics) paints a picture that seems to become more plausible every day[1]:
"So. What kind of vertically integrated business synergy could Musk be planning to exploit to cover the roll-out costs of Starship?"
"Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he's going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. By my back of the envelope calculation, a Starship can put roughly 5-10MW of space-rate photovoltaic cells into orbit in one shot. ROSA—Roll Out Solar Arrays now installed on the ISS are ridiculously light by historic standards, and flexible: they can be rolled up for launch, then unrolled on orbit. Current ROSA panels have a mass of 325kg and three pairs provide 120kW of power to the ISS: 2 tonnes for 120KW suggests that a 100 tonne Starship payload could produce 6MW using current generation panels, and I suspect a lot of that weight is structural overhead. The PV material used in ROSA reportedly weighs a mere 50 grams per square metre, comparable to lightweight laser printer paper, so a payload of pure PV material could have an area of up to 20 million square metres. At 100 watts of usable sunlight per square metre at Earth's orbit, that translates to 2GW. So Starship is definitely getting into the payload ball-park we'd need to make orbital SBSP stations practical. 1970s proposals foundered on the costs of the Space Shuttle, which was billed as offering $300/lb launch costs (a sad and pathetic joke), but Musk is selling Starship as a $2M/launch system, which works out at $20/kg."
"So: disruptive launch system meets disruptive power technology, and if Tesla Energy isn't currently brainstorming how to build lightweight space-rated PV sheeting in gigawatt-up quantities I'll eat my hat."
And Jeff Bezos' vision[2]:
"The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space."
"'I think space is chock full of resources,' Bezos told reporters. 'This is all my view, and I’ll be dead before I’m proved wrong, so it’s a very safe prediction to make. But my view is that there will be a ‘Great Inversion.''"
"Today, huge industrial complexes on Earth build components that are sent into space, at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound. Bezos foresees an inversion in that flow of goods. 'We’ll make the microprocessors in space, and then we’ll send the little tiny bits to Earth,' Bezos said."
"In the long term, Blue Origin could set the stage for moving heavy industries completely off Earth, leaving our planet zoned strictly for 'residential and light industrial' use."
"The trends pushing in that direction include the need for space-based energy generation to fill industrial demands, the need to reduce the pollution caused by industrial activity, the falling cost of access to space and the eventual ability to use asteroids and other space resources."
So, to me - it seems like we're on the edge of a VERY important inflection point, likely more significant than the haydrocarbon revolution that occurred almost two hundred years ago that's powered mankind for the last two centuries. Renewables are part of that equation, but given that most renewables (not geothermal) ultimately derive their electricity-generation ability from raw solar power (directly for PV systems, indirectly for wind-based systems) AND the energy loss solar power suffers before it gets to a place where renewable technologies can exploit it, this indicates to me that there's great progress to be made by getting the bulk of our power generation outside the atmosphere and soak up those sun rays as directly as possible.
Looking it it from a technology development perspective, we're on the cusp of it being affordable to begin building and testing prototypes for the types of systems that Stross identifies, and we just need to figure out safe and effective ways to beaming the energy we're collecting in orbit down to Earth where it can be used. In terms of manufacturing, the first company that manages to identify and capture a metal-rich asteroid will bootstrap an industrial economy that makes our current output look like a cute effort from a handful of artisans. (And instead of bringing the asteroid to Earth to mine, it may make sense to send the refinery and factory to the asteroid as the mass of the former will be much smaller than the latter.)
In terms of climate change, I'm VERY bullish that we have the means to manage Earth's and make this planet a garden - I just hope that we don't run out terrestrial petrochemicals that we use for rocket fuel before we find a way to synthesize it independently of long-extinct megafauna and other prehistoric biomass.
And just to add another thought - just because I think we're past the point of no return climate-wise (if we don't move energy generation and polluting industries into space), I still think there's a TON of value in continuing to develop and deploy climate-friendly technologies. Not so much to head off catastrophe on Earth, but more so to be developing technologies we'll need to meaningfully establish colonies beyond Earth. The more energy efficient we can make our technology and find ways to generate some energy planet-side without the presence of hydrocarbons, will only make our colonies on Mars and beyond more robust and viable.
You may be able to move energy generation into space but you will not be able to use that energy here on earth. I do believe that stabilizing the population is critical.
That was my question. How would you? Beaming it down is no small matter, the physics alone are daunting and many other factors make it nigh impossible. I suppose you could focus a wide enough dispersal beam over a solar farm the size of Rhode Island out in the ocean and burn through the clouds. But the efficiency loss would be devastating.
Pity the fool who strays into a 2-megawatt transmission beam. Nikola Tesla. a true genius, was serious about transmitting electricity without wires but failed at low power levels. When I was an Army signal test officer 55 years ago, we could disturb flocks of birds with high power radios.
To answer Curtis' question, the first technical goal is to move high-energy consumption / high pollution industries out into space and have them do that work out there. This should be goal #1 before worrying about beaming power back to Earth, if only to reduce the planet-side energy demand in the first place.
As for leveraging energy gathered in space, this remains an active field of development. I've seen a couple of proposals, one utilizing microwaves or lasers[1]:
"Microwave transmitting satellites orbit Earth in geostationary orbit (GEO), about 35,000 km above Earth’s surface. Designs for microwave transmitting satellites are massive, with solar reflectors spanning up to 3 km and weighing over 80,000 metric tons. They would be capable of generating multiple gigawatts of power, enough to power a major U.S. city."
"The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the Earth’s atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths."
"The estimated cost of launching, assembling and operating a microwave-equipped GEO satellite is in the tens of billions of dollars. It would likely require as many as 40 launches for all necessary materials to reach space. On Earth, the rectenna used for collecting the microwave beam would be anywhere between 3 and 10 km in diameter, a huge area of land, and a challenge to purchase and develop."
Note that the military is already investigating this[2], as a means of keeping aircraft aloft indefinitely, as well as other applications:
"As far as the aforementioned applications of this capability, research or military outposts in remote locations would no longer have to rely on low-power solar systems or haul heavy generators and large amounts of fuel, but instead could bring a rectifying antenna, or rectenna, to capture energy in the form of microwaves beamed from satellites overhead. In addition, areas ravaged by natural disasters could use the system to generate electricity to aid in reconstruction efforts long before traditional electrical infrastructure is rebuilt. It could even power autonomous ships at sea."
"Dr. Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who is leading the NRL’s research into power beaming, says that the technology will open up entirely new frontiers in terms of long-endurance unmanned aircraft. 'If you have an electric drone that can fly more than an hour, you're doing pretty well,' Jaffe said. 'If we had a way to keep those drones and UAVs flying indefinitely, that would have really far-reaching implications. With power beaming, we have a path toward being able to do that.' The Navy was granted a patent for a similar system in 2016 invented by Jaffe."
We're decades (or maybe even a century away) from a space-based approach fulfilling humanity's terrestrial energy needs, but the barrier to achieving this isn't the physics (we've already demonstrated the feasibility planet-side), but the economics of getting enough capital resources into orbit to build the thing. If you were asking me to place a bet one which technological path reaches maturity first, I'd place by bet on the space-based satellites using physics and engineering we already have over fusion, which seems close, but has seemed to be on the cusp of realization for as long as I've been alive.
Thanks for the links. The X-37B story was very informative. Without doing a lot of research, I think I can safely say that most of the endeavors you describe will require enormous amounts of earth-based energy. The technology has not yet reached its limits and I wish I could see some of the major breakthroughs sure to come. My bet is still on fusion which is inherently safe if low masses of fusionable materials are involved.
"I think I can safely say that most of the endeavors you describe will require enormous amounts of earth-based energy."
Absolutely - the energy cost of getting this stuff established will not be small. That said, the sooner we can start harvesting energy from outside the bounds of our planet and atmosphere, the sooner we can start realizing the compounding nature of what that kind of energy availability enables, as opposed to waiting to run out of limited resources that we can mine. I just hope that we have enough energy Earth-side to make that jump.
This is one of the reasons I'm heavy into space stocks and space development in general. From my perspective, the dangers of climate change are real, BUT we're well past the point where a strictly Earth-based humanity has the ability and (more importantly) will to reverse course. In short, humanity is in the process of outgrowing this planet, and absent some MAJOR catastrophe that reorders human civilization globally, we won't lift ourselves onto that next step that the climate advocates keep preaching at us, as (you rightly point out), we're not collectively willing to stabilize our population levels (witness the angst around developed nations not having enough kids) and consign others back into subsistence-levels of living that would reduce their carbon footprints (nevermind voluntarily adopting a subsistence lifestyle OURSELVES).
Sci-fi writer Charles Stross (a fellow who thinks and writes heavily on these topics) paints a picture that seems to become more plausible every day[1]:
"So. What kind of vertically integrated business synergy could Musk be planning to exploit to cover the roll-out costs of Starship?"
"Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he's going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. By my back of the envelope calculation, a Starship can put roughly 5-10MW of space-rate photovoltaic cells into orbit in one shot. ROSA—Roll Out Solar Arrays now installed on the ISS are ridiculously light by historic standards, and flexible: they can be rolled up for launch, then unrolled on orbit. Current ROSA panels have a mass of 325kg and three pairs provide 120kW of power to the ISS: 2 tonnes for 120KW suggests that a 100 tonne Starship payload could produce 6MW using current generation panels, and I suspect a lot of that weight is structural overhead. The PV material used in ROSA reportedly weighs a mere 50 grams per square metre, comparable to lightweight laser printer paper, so a payload of pure PV material could have an area of up to 20 million square metres. At 100 watts of usable sunlight per square metre at Earth's orbit, that translates to 2GW. So Starship is definitely getting into the payload ball-park we'd need to make orbital SBSP stations practical. 1970s proposals foundered on the costs of the Space Shuttle, which was billed as offering $300/lb launch costs (a sad and pathetic joke), but Musk is selling Starship as a $2M/launch system, which works out at $20/kg."
"So: disruptive launch system meets disruptive power technology, and if Tesla Energy isn't currently brainstorming how to build lightweight space-rated PV sheeting in gigawatt-up quantities I'll eat my hat."
And Jeff Bezos' vision[2]:
"The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space."
"'I think space is chock full of resources,' Bezos told reporters. 'This is all my view, and I’ll be dead before I’m proved wrong, so it’s a very safe prediction to make. But my view is that there will be a ‘Great Inversion.''"
"Today, huge industrial complexes on Earth build components that are sent into space, at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound. Bezos foresees an inversion in that flow of goods. 'We’ll make the microprocessors in space, and then we’ll send the little tiny bits to Earth,' Bezos said."
"In the long term, Blue Origin could set the stage for moving heavy industries completely off Earth, leaving our planet zoned strictly for 'residential and light industrial' use."
"The trends pushing in that direction include the need for space-based energy generation to fill industrial demands, the need to reduce the pollution caused by industrial activity, the falling cost of access to space and the eventual ability to use asteroids and other space resources."
So, to me - it seems like we're on the edge of a VERY important inflection point, likely more significant than the haydrocarbon revolution that occurred almost two hundred years ago that's powered mankind for the last two centuries. Renewables are part of that equation, but given that most renewables (not geothermal) ultimately derive their electricity-generation ability from raw solar power (directly for PV systems, indirectly for wind-based systems) AND the energy loss solar power suffers before it gets to a place where renewable technologies can exploit it, this indicates to me that there's great progress to be made by getting the bulk of our power generation outside the atmosphere and soak up those sun rays as directly as possible.
Looking it it from a technology development perspective, we're on the cusp of it being affordable to begin building and testing prototypes for the types of systems that Stross identifies, and we just need to figure out safe and effective ways to beaming the energy we're collecting in orbit down to Earth where it can be used. In terms of manufacturing, the first company that manages to identify and capture a metal-rich asteroid will bootstrap an industrial economy that makes our current output look like a cute effort from a handful of artisans. (And instead of bringing the asteroid to Earth to mine, it may make sense to send the refinery and factory to the asteroid as the mass of the former will be much smaller than the latter.)
In terms of climate change, I'm VERY bullish that we have the means to manage Earth's and make this planet a garden - I just hope that we don't run out terrestrial petrochemicals that we use for rocket fuel before we find a way to synthesize it independently of long-extinct megafauna and other prehistoric biomass.
[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-fuels-are-dead.html
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-origin-rocket-factory-vision-space/
And just to add another thought - just because I think we're past the point of no return climate-wise (if we don't move energy generation and polluting industries into space), I still think there's a TON of value in continuing to develop and deploy climate-friendly technologies. Not so much to head off catastrophe on Earth, but more so to be developing technologies we'll need to meaningfully establish colonies beyond Earth. The more energy efficient we can make our technology and find ways to generate some energy planet-side without the presence of hydrocarbons, will only make our colonies on Mars and beyond more robust and viable.
You may be able to move energy generation into space but you will not be able to use that energy here on earth. I do believe that stabilizing the population is critical.
That was my question. How would you? Beaming it down is no small matter, the physics alone are daunting and many other factors make it nigh impossible. I suppose you could focus a wide enough dispersal beam over a solar farm the size of Rhode Island out in the ocean and burn through the clouds. But the efficiency loss would be devastating.
Pity the fool who strays into a 2-megawatt transmission beam. Nikola Tesla. a true genius, was serious about transmitting electricity without wires but failed at low power levels. When I was an Army signal test officer 55 years ago, we could disturb flocks of birds with high power radios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9THqrXd4I
To answer Curtis' question, the first technical goal is to move high-energy consumption / high pollution industries out into space and have them do that work out there. This should be goal #1 before worrying about beaming power back to Earth, if only to reduce the planet-side energy demand in the first place.
As for leveraging energy gathered in space, this remains an active field of development. I've seen a couple of proposals, one utilizing microwaves or lasers[1]:
"Microwave transmitting satellites orbit Earth in geostationary orbit (GEO), about 35,000 km above Earth’s surface. Designs for microwave transmitting satellites are massive, with solar reflectors spanning up to 3 km and weighing over 80,000 metric tons. They would be capable of generating multiple gigawatts of power, enough to power a major U.S. city."
"The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the Earth’s atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths."
"The estimated cost of launching, assembling and operating a microwave-equipped GEO satellite is in the tens of billions of dollars. It would likely require as many as 40 launches for all necessary materials to reach space. On Earth, the rectenna used for collecting the microwave beam would be anywhere between 3 and 10 km in diameter, a huge area of land, and a challenge to purchase and develop."
Note that the military is already investigating this[2], as a means of keeping aircraft aloft indefinitely, as well as other applications:
"As far as the aforementioned applications of this capability, research or military outposts in remote locations would no longer have to rely on low-power solar systems or haul heavy generators and large amounts of fuel, but instead could bring a rectifying antenna, or rectenna, to capture energy in the form of microwaves beamed from satellites overhead. In addition, areas ravaged by natural disasters could use the system to generate electricity to aid in reconstruction efforts long before traditional electrical infrastructure is rebuilt. It could even power autonomous ships at sea."
"Dr. Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who is leading the NRL’s research into power beaming, says that the technology will open up entirely new frontiers in terms of long-endurance unmanned aircraft. 'If you have an electric drone that can fly more than an hour, you're doing pretty well,' Jaffe said. 'If we had a way to keep those drones and UAVs flying indefinitely, that would have really far-reaching implications. With power beaming, we have a path toward being able to do that.' The Navy was granted a patent for a similar system in 2016 invented by Jaffe."
We're decades (or maybe even a century away) from a space-based approach fulfilling humanity's terrestrial energy needs, but the barrier to achieving this isn't the physics (we've already demonstrated the feasibility planet-side), but the economics of getting enough capital resources into orbit to build the thing. If you were asking me to place a bet one which technological path reaches maturity first, I'd place by bet on the space-based satellites using physics and engineering we already have over fusion, which seems close, but has seemed to be on the cusp of realization for as long as I've been alive.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power
[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33339/x-37b-space-planes-microwave-power-beam-experiment-is-a-way-bigger-deal-than-it-seems
Thanks for the links. The X-37B story was very informative. Without doing a lot of research, I think I can safely say that most of the endeavors you describe will require enormous amounts of earth-based energy. The technology has not yet reached its limits and I wish I could see some of the major breakthroughs sure to come. My bet is still on fusion which is inherently safe if low masses of fusionable materials are involved.
"I think I can safely say that most of the endeavors you describe will require enormous amounts of earth-based energy."
Absolutely - the energy cost of getting this stuff established will not be small. That said, the sooner we can start harvesting energy from outside the bounds of our planet and atmosphere, the sooner we can start realizing the compounding nature of what that kind of energy availability enables, as opposed to waiting to run out of limited resources that we can mine. I just hope that we have enough energy Earth-side to make that jump.