And soak up all the sun and leave us in the dark?
No we can just pave the dark side of the moon with solar panels, and beam it back to earth
It would, eh, take some time to soak up all the sun with whatever they can put there.
This is stupid as hell. Fortunately the article covers the reasons why. Points to Tobias for proper journalism instead of just breathlessly repeating their slop.
I expected reurgitated marketing points, but then saw which site this is.
This idea is just so dumb.
But they didn’t tell bozo, apparently.
On the other hand, using heat pumps, couldn’t heat panels be pumped to 1000+ °C, where infrared cooling is more effective?
Sure, but engineering materials still start to break down at such high continuous service temps. And mechanical heat pumps become very impractical above 250C as things like compressors and phase change refrigerants also break down under extreme temperatures and pressures required to force a phase change at such a high temp.
But they didn’t tell bozo, apparently.
Since when do billionaires listen to anybody other than the sycophants they surround themselves with?
Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future. Especially Musk, since he thinks he’s so transcendental, but apparently Bezos can’t help himself now either.
It doesn’t look like Star Trek.
It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.
I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: https://www.orionsarm.com/
Interestingly, this is a neat idea waaay down the line, in the way a Dyson Swarm is interesting. But not anytime in the near future, not until humanity is very, very different (assuming we survive that long).
Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future.
That’s cause due to network effects people who are making such projects are equivalent to grocers in qualification. Just were in the right place at the right time. They are not engineers, not philosophers. But since they’ve read and seen in sci-fi that they have to show something engineer-philosopher-like, they are doing all this bullshit.
Our world’s problem is in these monopolies which should be busted. After they are busted, we’ll see a lot of goodness through the usual normal competition.
And also I don’t think the sequence of events that led to the current state of things should be treated as some proof of “capitalism not working” or “computer-driven futurism being a dead end” or even “space travel not ever happening” or anything as radical. Every time is different. It’s like living all your life alone after one bad relationship.
We should dream, and we should make, and we should try, and we should tell those who think it’s their “vision” or none to go kick rocks.
It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.
The real world looks surprisingly like a cyberpunk movie already.
I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: https://www.orionsarm.com/
Man… if the Technopocolpyse is what you consider optimistic, I’d hate to find out what you consider pessimism!
AI will turn all of us into paperclips before long unless the AI jihad succeeds.
Humanity survived though. Even with ‘humans’ dying out, I’d like some form of life to expand and go on.
My biggest fear is Earth ‘fizzling’ and never expanding before the Sun eats it, and the odds of that happening are pretty high.
Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.
Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.
On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.
I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.
It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:
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The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)
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They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).
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They are not that exceptional (eg more intelligent vertebrates will rise, and would rise on other planets), but there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).
Another suspicious coincidence I’d point out is that we are, seemingly, the only advanced civilization from Earth so far. If we died out soon, other vertebrates that rise would find evidence of us by this point, wouldn’t they? Hence odds are we wouldnt be the first and we would have found precursors if ‘vertebrates rising and then killing themselves off’ was a likely scenario.
TL;DR: I suspect vertebrates -> our tech level is a difficult jump.
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mfw Bezos wants to build Mikoshi
Spot on. Bezos stole the ideal from cyberpunk
Please don’t forget to put some strong lasers together with AI on that orbit too
We’ve had the template for this for decades. Put the solar panels in space where the thick soupy gunky spunky atmosphere doesn’t stop the little energy things from the sun. Collect the power in orbit. You just do that up there up in orbit okay? And then you fucking beam the power down to the surface you numpty fucks. Use a maser to send the power down to the surface and you can pick a frequency that isn’t affected by the gunky spunky and then the receivers on the ground can pick it up and they send the power through these things called wires to a building that uses the power and the building can use this neat little thing called CONVECTION to more efficiently remove the heat from the things using the electricity wow.
Or just, y’know, use less power and make use of ground based solar. We don’t need fucking AI data centers in space. Don’t get me wrong, I think it might be useful to, say, have some compute up in geostationary orbit that other satellites could punt some data to for computation. You could have an evenly spaced ring of the fuckers so the users up there can get some data crunching done with a RTT of like 50ms instead of 700ms. That seems like a hard sell, but it at least seems a bit tenable if you needed to reduce the data you’re sending back to the earth down to a more manageable amount with some preprocessing. That is still not fuckass gigawatt AI data centers. Fuck
That’s a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.
It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.
Also, transmission is a huge problem. It’s easy to say ‘make a maser,’ but making giant one and aiming it reliably (lest one fries nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order. Geosync is super far away.
There’s plenty of space on the ground, for now.
Yeah, I think it’d be a pretty silly thing for us to ever try to do. My goal was to take their stupid idea, provide a slightly less stupid idea, and then say “or just don’t do space power at all and keep everything terrestrial.” Orbital solar power stations were lots of fun in science fiction, but panels are cheap, there’s plenty of land, and giant death masers that cook any birds flying into the beam are, uh, suboptimal.
And efficiency, too. Even at a really good 50%, both for the solar panels and the maser, that’s still a fuckton of heat being generated.
YES. That’s a HUGE one, for the maser in particular. I can’t even think of a precedent for operating (and cooling) something so high power in space, so its likely to fail, too.
It’s honestly all a bad idea, lol. It’s way less safe than nuclear, way more expensive than ground solar, so…
Proportionally though, there is far more space in space.
When total morons win the capitalist lottery… aka always.
It’s not a lottery. Very few rich people weren’t born already rich. Bezos himself came from a wealthy family.
Only good capitalist is a dead capitalist.
Send him there. Not in a suit or a ship, just him.
I think it’s more likely we’ll put solar reflectors in space that enhance power absorption on earth. But there’s no way solving heat dissipation in space is more efficient than getting energy from space to earth. Maybe it would work on the moon where we could dissipate heat into rock, but not in space.
