| ▲ | aorloff 5 hours ago |
| Reliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth) |
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| ▲ | brd529 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Overview energy has done interesting work in this area. |
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| ▲ | mkull 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why would you transfer the energy to earth? The energy powers ai compute = $ |
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| ▲ | Sparyjerry 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Dead on, You can transmit data to and from space and have the compute completed at potentially fractions of the cost. | | | |
| ▲ | rlt 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not sure why this is downvoted. Much cheaper to transfer data than energy. |
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| ▲ | mlindner 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's always better to generate electricity on the ground than attempt to beam it to the ground from space. The efficiency loss of beamed power is huge. |
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| ▲ | amluto 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The efficiency loss of nighttime is approximately 100% if we’re talking about solar energy. At least at a most basic level, it’s not totally absurd to stick some kind of power beaming contraption in space where it is mostly not shadowed by the Earth and beam power to a ground station. | | |
| ▲ | aaronharnly 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I concur it’s not necessarily totally absurd — but when you consider that such contraptions require large — very large! — receiving arrays to be built on the ground, it’s hard to avoid concluding that building gigantic photovoltaic arrays in, say Arizona (for the US) along with batteries for overnight buffering and transmission lines would still be massively more efficient. | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | hdjrudni 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is that more or less absurd than making deals with our neighbours to share their electricity? Build some solar farms around the planet and then distribute it over wire. I honestly don't know the answer. I know there's some efficiency loss running over long wires too but I don't know what's more realistic. | | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul an hour ago | parent [-] | | There is absolutely nothing realistic about power transmission from space to earth, wired or wireless. |
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| ▲ | queenkjuul an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | We have these things called batteries, you charge them during the day, and drain them at night. A solar+battery setup is already cheaper than a new gas plant. Beaming power from space is absolutely asinine, quite frankly. The losses are absurd, the sun already does it 24/7, and we know how to make wires and batteries to shuffle the sun's power around however we need to. Why on earth would we involve satellites? |
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