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If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. (europe.pub)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 5 points 8 months ago (14 children)

Still don't understand how this could possibly generate energy.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    Right, but like... whatever you're doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.

    As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn't really impede it.

    I won't say it's not a silly idea, because it is. It's fun to think about though.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's nonsense, for cooling reasons alone

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    yeah had a whole convo with a neighbor about how much cooling tech the ISS depends on.

    at least it won't need separate water/ammonia loop setup like the ISS. radiators are pretty figured out. I just can't see how they make it economical with all the launch and space logistics - and don't get me wrong spacex can deliver to orbit - but can they make it profitable?

    also, where's the grunt for this supposed AI cloud gonna come from? what chips can survive for 1000s of hours of compute in that environment? and from what he's said (24/7 sunlight) are they thinking lagrange points or what? also xmit/receive of massive amounts of data would need to be crucial to making it work and we got none of that infrastructure....

    all leads me to think his ketamine is showing.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    It basically doesn't work out.

    Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.

    But you'd still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.

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