271 comments on Solar Satellite Power with Laser Propulsion and Reusable Launch Vehicle
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271 comments on Solar Satellite Power with Laser Propulsion and Reusable Launch Vehicle
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Far out. On what basis do you predicate a Singularity as inevitable? And why would we need to muck about in LEO if we're due to be uploaded soon?
Forgive me for being skeptical. We have a historical record chock full of collapsed civilizations owing to overshoot, after all; also decades of predictions of inevitable breakthroughs in all manner of tech including Kurzweil's nano-based solar. Prudence is warranted when making decisions as to what directions mankind should head in to secure energy supplies sufficient for people to lead a comfortable lifestyle; should we spend $60 billion on SPS or a program for switching the OECD shipping fleet over to alternate fuels we can secure domestically?
As others have commented at present funding options are limited, and many believe the crude oil price runup/spike was a major factor in the present recession. If they are correct, bets are that, in the short term at the least, money will be thrown at solutions that are literally more mundane than SPS.
Where is Hirsch saying that he foresees dieoff? All I've ever heard him predict is that peak oil will lead to extreme hardship, economically and socially. This doesn't equate with mass starvation at all.
"On what basis do you predicate a Singularity as inevitable?"
I don't see any way to avoid it. Singularity is AI and molecular nanotechnology. If we got AI one of the first things to do with it would be to develop nanotechnology. If we got nanotech, one of the things we could do is brute force AI by scanning brains. I knew Eric Drexler from the mid 70s on, been thinking about this for 30 years.
But an energy induced fall in the population looks like it will start decades sooner than mid 2040s--which is where Kurzweil (who has studied it more than anyone) thinks it will happen.
"And why would we need to muck about in LEO if we're due to be uploaded soon?"
It's GEO that's interesting, not LEO. And if I could be certain the singularity would happen before mass starvation and wars start taking the population down I wouldn't bother to think about energy.
The only page I know about that touches on both issues is here: http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
"Which will arrive first? Ecological overshoot and collapse (Malthus), or
a "techno-fix" (Kurzweil)?
No one knows.
But, we probably won't have to wait long to find out. One of these two scenarios will likely
occur within the next several decades. But, which one?
Generally it is healthy to be optimistic.
But optimism can be deadly if it produces a Pollyannaish denial of real problems.
We should not ignore problems by assuming "someone else" will take care
of it, or that "the market" or "technological breakthroughs" will always come
to the rescue in time.
Solutions may not come in time, and we may get a quite rude Malthusian
smack down later. (In my opinion, should the internet go down due to
energy shortages, the Mathusian writing will be on the wall... )
To avoid this, we must solve the transition from our finite, depleting oil resources
to renewable energy.
Technological civilization runs on energy.
****************(end of quote)
". . . should we spend $60 billion on SPS or a program for switching the OECD shipping fleet over to alternate fuels we can secure domestically?"
This *is* a program for alternate fuels. Power at a penny a kWh (what else can you do with off peak power?) can be used to make hydrogen. Hydrogen and C02 reacts just fine to make synthetic oil. True, you only get 56% of the energy in the liquid fuels, but at a dollar a gallon who cares?
Going for SBSP is unlikely to be our decision. (as in the US)
I see no evidence the US could go back to the moon, much less cope with something of this scale.
"extreme hardship, economically and socially"
Is a euphemism for mass death due to wars, famines, epidemics due to weakened immune systems and freezing in the dark. Consider figure 14 here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3091 I am sure Hirsch is familiar with it. Hirsch may not be willing to consider a ray of energy hope (for emotional reasons tied to his commitment to this grim future) but he is nobody's fool. When he talks about coming out on the far side in better shape, he is talking about a world with far fewer people.
In some ways that might be a better world. It also might be rather radioactive. In any case, it's going to be a bad time I had rather avoid if possible.
From a strategic point of view this would appear to be an easy system to knock out. In a war situation a belligerant could launch debris or individual satellite killing devices. Anyone dependent on such power sources would immediately be in the dark. In an instant all of that investment could be wiped out. Any proposed energy system should have source diversity (lack of a single kill switch) as one of its requirements.
"From a strategic point of view this would appear to be an easy system to knock out. In a war situation a belligerant could launch debris or individual satellite killing devices."
I am a bit curious as to why someone with the capacity to do it would do it. In a very short time I expect every advanced country would have hundreds of power sats.
One point of this project is to reduce resource competition and therefor the basic reason for wars.
Energy is not the only cause of war or scarce resource in the world. What about ideology - the cause of most wars?
The threat of war will never be eliminated. The only way the threat can be reduced is to have diversity in power sources. If a single madman can wipe out the world then it would have been done many times already. The reason it has not occurred is that we have had diverse ideologies and power sources. Making people dependent on a single kill switch solution (such as your satellites) renders everyone easily vulnerable to such a madman scenario.
"Energy is not the only cause of war or scarce resource in the world. What about ideology (cause of most wars)"
I make the case in "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War" that ideology is the result of anticipated resource shortages rather than a cause.
"and access to metals?"
With loads of energy you can make metals out of country rock.
North Korea (if it wished) has the same access to scarce resources (including energy) as South Korea. Ideology is the only difference between North and South. Extremist ideology has minimal relationship to energy resources. North Korea could easily wipe out your suggested satellite system many times over with their existing technology.
Assuming they could (a stretch) and they wiped out a Chinese power sat, how long do you think they would last?
The Chinese would be in cahoots and would have the North Koreans knock out US and European satellites on their behalf. Proxy wars are old.
I suppose that's possible. Remind me to have my power sat insured by a Chinese company.
If you want diversity of power sources, which I agree with, then introducing SSP is certainly a good thing. SSP certainly has no single "kill switch". For starters the rectenna on the ground is owned and defended by the local utility and nation receiving the power. The satellite in space would be defended even better by various national military, even better than the growing fleet of communications and other satellites. The increased defense of national and global interests in near space is necessary as our global economic infrastructure increases its presence in cis-lunar space. We must reduce our environmental footprint on earth. I don't think you understand how difficult it would be to "kill" an SSP. It would be sort of like attempting to destroy the interstate highway system with a bomb placed anywhere you like. We may have difficulty preventing that bomb, but violators will be swiftly located and introduced to corrective measures. Everyone that has reliable electric power wants to see their electric power continue.
What about ideology - the cause of most wars?
Are you sure that Ideology is not being used to 'sell' the war VS being the cause?
Back in 1908 - 1912, the dominant meme in the west was that the Great Powers were too interdependent (financially and in trade) for a major war to be possible. There was no "reason for war."
Every technology since steam has been promoted as "reducing the reason for war." Notably, nuclear fission proponents pushed this long and hard. Strangely, despite all these wonderful technologies (that we already have), we still seem to need to "reduce the reason for war."
War does not need reasons.
Two questions:
The problem I have with your argument is the same one I have with Kurzweil's, namely that having the physical capabilities to do something (simulate brains, scan brains) doesn't imply the knowledge or skills needed to exploit that (create strong AI). A scanned brain is just a big pile of data; using that data to create a super-human intelligence is by no means a trivial feat.
This appears to be why Kurzweil's predictions for AI were so off the mark - he's fixating on hardware and ignoring knowledge, which based on my experience is the harder part of solving most problems. (FWIW, his first book is online at his website, and it's interesting to look at his predictions for AI and compare them to what actually happened. With one exception - chess - he was uniformly and wildly over-optimistic.)
Do you have a link to a detailed analysis showing 56% efficiency for electricity-to-oil? I've been trying to find empirical evidence for the efficiency of synthetic oil, but there doesn't seem to be data for an actual implementation of the hydrogen-to-oil leg. There is such data for electrolysis, but all industrial-scale installations I've seen data for were under 50% efficiency.
"Why would nanotech necessarily allow brute-force scanning of brains? "
Molecular disassemblers, an obvious product.
"Why would being able to scan brains necessarily lead to AI? "
Simulation.
Finely infiltrating a brain with enough sensors to tell what the cells were doing would probably work as well.
"Do you have a link to a detailed analysis showing 56% efficiency for electricity-to-oil?"
I worked out the mass and power budget for a 1000 bbl/day forward fuel synthesis plant for the military. It ran on ~100 MW input. I worked the efficiency just before a talk and seem to have got it wrong. I can't get as that low an efficiency now. A bbl of oil is about 1.7MWh. 1000 bbls would be 1700 MWh. 24 hrs x 100 MW is 2400 MWh. 17/24 is 71%. 98% of the energy is for making hydrogen. That could range up to 120 MW which would lower the efficiency to 59%. Some of this could be recovered making steam while cooling the Fischer-Tropsch reactors.
How would that help?
We have no lack of human-level intelligences already - they're called "humans". Why would simulating a few more let us do something new? If the already-existing human intelligences couldn't come up with a supra-human intelligence, why do you so blithely assume the addition of simulated human intelligences would change that?
This isn't a board full of people already convinced of the inevitability of a technological singularity; you can't just wave your hands and say "magic happens" and expect people to believe you.
You're making an enormous assumption about what nanotech can and cannot do. Your argument seems to boil down to:
That's not a persuasive argument. It's more like a statement of faith.
Where is your evidence that a 1000 bbl/day plant runs on 100MW? You can't just arbitrarily choose both input and output volumes, otherwise you've chosen the conversion efficiency, which is exactly what you're trying to calculate!
If this is an example of your calculations, no wonder they don't make sense - you're just making shit up.
Garbage in, garbage out - if there's no evidence behind the numbers you put into your calculations, there's no point in doing the calculations. Industrial electrolysis is 50-70% efficient, meaning that if you seriously believe creation of synthetic diesel from electricity is going to be 70% efficient, you very clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
This is simply embarrassing; are you trying to make renewable energy people look unrealistic and out of touch? That is what you're doing, and right now that's more harm than help.
"Where is your evidence that a 1000 bbl/day plant runs on 100MW?"
Basic chemistry
Liquid fuels can be made out of carbon dioxide by n(CO2) + n(3H2) --> (CH2)n + 2n H2O. (It's exothermic.)
120t C, 60t H2 makes 140t synthetic oil, which is about 1000 bbls
Recipe for 140t of synthetic oil per day
Carbon 120t (5t /hr)
Hydrogen 60t (2.5t/hr)
(40t of Hydrogen combines with the oxygen and is recycled.)
It takes about 100kWh/t to remove carbon dioxide from the air. See http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/uoc-cd092908.php (This is equal to 360 kWh/t of carbon.)
Experimentally these researchers have removed CO2 from air at a rate of 20 tons per year with a square meter of scrubber
20 t/year/square meter
20t/year/365/year/m2 x 12/44 = 0.0149 t/d/m2 (C)
120t/d/0.0149 t/d/m2
= 8000m2
100kWh/ton of CO2
366kWh/t of carbon.
5t/hr / .36 MWh/t = 1.8MW
Sanity check , 120t of carbon per day is 5 t/hr Air is 350 ppm CO2 or 95 ppm carbon
1,000,000t of air has 95t of carbon in it
Tonne of air has a volume of about 800 m3
About 1.2 billion m3 of air per day.
Or 1.2Bm3/8000m2, 150 km/day or about 6 km/h. (Half the average wind speed and not as big as the rectenna.)
Electrolytic hydrogen requires 48 MWh/t currently. Recent results from MIT make it possible the energy might get down to 33MWh/t. The chemical equation above requires sixty t of H2 to 120t of carbon.
2.5t/h x 48MWh/ton = 120MW (Theory is 33MWh/t, 83 MW)
For rough numbers, ignore the small energy cost of carbon and use the average of the above line.
"Molecular disassemblers, an obvious product."
Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.
Sorry, Keith. I like graph paper a lot, too. But your overconfidence in the predictive abilities of calculation are like expecting a man who is the same weight and height of Shakespeare to arrive at the same products as long as you give him enough paper..
.. I'm going to my shop, where I can spill some more coffee on that graph paper that earnestly tries to tell me how to connect Post A to Gimbal B ..
Bob
Thanks Pitt. Once again you've said it for me.
The fact that somebody has been thinking about it for decades does not mean didley squat. Brilliant mathematicians spent centuries thinking about how to eliminate Euclid's postulate about parallel lines because their intuition told them that it was not necessary. Guess what? They were all wrong.