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On June 23 2016 16:40 Manit0u wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2016 06:50 KwarK wrote:On June 23 2016 06:17 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
would it be possible to generate power on another planet and somehow send it to the Earth? Not efficiently. How about microwaves? I believe there was some wild ancient aliens theory that the pyramids were used as huge reactors to send microwaves (through those shafts pointing up) to "refuel" orbiting ships 
That sounds like a reliable source on information.  Let's do that! We can build pyramids on Mars and send microwaves here! We can prolly reuse the earth pyramids as receptors.
Otherwise....
Instead of building power plants at other planets. There is one already in the solar system! A fusion reactor! That goes through many billion metric tons of hydrogen every second! It's not focused, but I'd say that is our best bet when it comes to interplanetary energy transfers. Thoughts?
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On June 23 2016 16:40 Manit0u wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2016 06:50 KwarK wrote:On June 23 2016 06:17 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
would it be possible to generate power on another planet and somehow send it to the Earth? Not efficiently. How about microwaves? I believe there was some wild ancient aliens theory that the pyramids were used as huge reactors to send microwaves (through those shafts pointing up) to "refuel" orbiting ships
Power of the electromagnetic waves(microwaves fall into that category) inversely proportional with the distance. Distance is immense between celestial beings which means a vast majority, almost all of them, of the power will be wasted.
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On June 23 2016 17:21 Laserist wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2016 16:40 Manit0u wrote:On June 23 2016 06:50 KwarK wrote:On June 23 2016 06:17 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
would it be possible to generate power on another planet and somehow send it to the Earth? Not efficiently. How about microwaves? I believe there was some wild ancient aliens theory that the pyramids were used as huge reactors to send microwaves (through those shafts pointing up) to "refuel" orbiting ships Power of the electromagnetic waves(microwaves fall into that category) inversely proportional with the distance. Distance is immense between celestial beings which means a vast majority, almost all of them, of the power will be wasted.
The inverse square law doesn't really apply if you manage to focus it enough to catch most of the beam. I guess the idea was that the pyramids focused the microwaves to the ship? But yeah, once the beam is wider than you can catch, you lose power as inverse square distance.
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On June 23 2016 16:37 Laserist wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2016 07:02 Simberto wrote:On June 23 2016 06:22 Laserist wrote:On June 23 2016 06:17 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
would it be possible to generate power on another planet and somehow send it to the Earth? You can transfer power by electromagnetic radiation but it would be very very very ineffective for now There needs to be a reason to do something. If you want to generate power somewhere else and then transfer it, ask yourself why you want to do that. No method of transfer is perfect. Why are you generating power on, say, mars, and transferring it to earth? What does Mars have that earth does not? Especially currently, where you would have to ship all your power generating stuff over there, and then ship the energy back, i see no point to doing that. Even further, what advantage does Mars (or any other solar body) have over just putting stuff in orbit around earth? That being said, i don't think "very very very ineffective" gets even close to describing just how bad the effectiveness would be. You are talking about EM radiation. What that basically means is taking the energy that you produce, somehow turning it into a big laser, pointing that Gigawatt-Laser at earth, and having some sort of solar array here to turn that light back into usable energy. There are multiple major problems with that. -We are not very good at turning light into electricity. -Lasers do not work as people think they do. They don't produce a tight beam that never gets broader, no matter how far it goes. A laser will always get broader after some point, and it is not theoretically possible to get rid of this effect. So your laser will hit a large area on earth (probably at least a continent or so), and you would have to fill that continent with stuff that turns that energy into electricity. The size of the area hit greatly changes depending on how far away the planet is from earth (which varies over time due to different orbits around the sun) -It is pretty hard to aim that precisely at long distances. -Everything turns around all the time. Most importantly, both earth and the planet you are shooting from rotate. So you can't just build a building that streams energy on both, and be done with it, because those two buildings will very often not be able to see each other because one of the two planets in is the way. You will need a continuous seem of lasering buildings on the launching planets equator, and a large area around earth's equator needs to be dedicated to receiving the energy. You might be able to circumvent some of that stuff by putting the receiving station on an orbit, but i am not certain whether an orbit that always faces the other planet actually exists. (Probably not, since both planets also orbit the sun at different speeds). So you would probably need a ring around earths equator in orbit, and i think a lot of people would be angry about that, for example the people living below it that really like to have sunlight at midday. In the end, you are probably better of just building solar panels and not bothering to build a laser on another planet. I agree with some some points but not all of them. Firstly, laser beam is not the only type of electromagnetic radiation you can transfer power. Albeit probably the most efficient one if done properly. You can transfer power with EM waves into all directions(which probably you can hardly detect, let alone producing something useful) or you can use directional antennas(a tad bit "better" but still far from useful). Those types theoretically much easier to target and shoot per se. I am not sold into the idea of we are not very good at turning light into electricity argument. We are having problems using solar energy and producing enough electricity to satisfy our demand. Focused light beam should be much more efficient. Maybe the same I am not sure I'd rather use nuclear energy and throw waste into space(where radiation is a part of everyday life) instead of creating energy somewhere else. Even creating nuclear energy at the orbit might be more useful
Yes, laser beams are not the only way to use EM waves to transfer power. All the others are worse, though. Laser beams are the way that splits up the least over distance. Omnidirectional is obviously silly, unless you wish to build a second sun barely anything will arrive at earth.
Directed antenna are slightly better, but the resulting circle you hit will still be absurdly larger than earth. ( I am having a hard time finding data with regards to how large the angle is on such an antenna, so i am just going to take a random guess and put it at 1/10th of a degree.)
For my following calculations, we will put our power generation on venus (because it is the closest to earth) and use it's average distance of 41,400,000 km to earth. The real results will be worse as that distance changes a lot.
With an angle of 0.1°, we can calculate the earth-side radius as 41.400.000 km * the tangens of 0.1° = 72257 km. So the radius you hit will be around 10 times larger than earth, which means that the area is 100 times larger than earth, which means that you lose a lot of your energy simply due to beaming it into space, and the rest just barely hits earth.
The currently largest existing nuclear reactor, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, produces about 8 GW of energy. Lets place a million of those on Venus. We now generate 8PW or 8*10^15W of energy on Venus. We manage to shoot all of that lossless into space. A hundredth of that hits earth, so 8*10^13W. Earth has surface area of 510.1 million km², or 5.10*10^14 m². We hit half of that, though we do hit some areas better than others, so for the sake of argument lets say the earth is flat and directly focused on venus, meaning we hit every place at a right angle. This circle has an area of 127.5 mio km², or 1.27*10^14 m². This means that we deliver a total of ~0.63 W/m² to Earth. The sun delivers about 1,368 W/m² onto earth. So our gigantic Power plant with an absurdly good antenna produces a net effect of 0.05% of what the sun does, not even noticable.
For a laser, the lowest possible angular divergence can be calculated (in rads) as wavelength / (Pi * beam diameter). Lets use a laser with a wavelength of ~200nm, apparently that is about as low as it currently gets. Lets also make our beam have a 1 m radius at the start (This is gonna be hard to do). This leads to an opening angle of about 3,6*10^-6°, a circular radius on earth of ~2,6 km, and an area hit of 22km², or 2.2*10^7m², and our giant power plant will actually deliver all of it's energy to that spot. So in this ideal situation, we would have a power of 3.7*10^8 W/m², which is actually not that bad. However, all of my calculations are very unrealistic. We probably don't have an ideal UV-laser with a smallest beam radius of 1m, or a million of the largest power plants available placed on Venus. Still, lasers are basically the only viable way to do this, everything else is silly. And they are less bad than i expected to be honest.
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Neat calculations bro. Since we are doing some armchair science, let me continue like that.
If we have a technology to generate huge level of energy in another planet, I can only guess we have sufficient technology to bend time-space hence we can create wormholes.
What if we use some portion of that energy to create a relatively small wormhole in which we can project some beams and the other end of the hole is just at the edge of earth/space boundry (very close to earth in space standards)?. Then transfer a very good portion of that to the earth without using millions of reactors.
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On June 23 2016 19:43 Laserist wrote:
Neat calculations bro. Since we are doing some armchair science, let me continue like that.
If we have a technology to generate huge level of energy in another planet, I can only guess we have sufficient technology to bend time-space hence we can create wormholes.
What if we use some portion of that energy to create a relatively small wormhole in which we can project some beams and the other end of the hole is just at the edge of earth/space boundry (very close to earth in space standards)?. Then transfer a very good portion of that to the earth without using millions of reactors.
The leap from 'we can make a lot of power' to 'we can make wormholes' seems like a rather huge one. At that point we can think pretty much anything into being and we will not have to offshore our power production at all.
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On June 23 2016 19:43 Laserist wrote:
Neat calculations bro. Since we are doing some armchair science, let me continue like that.
If we have a technology to generate huge level of energy in another planet, I can only guess we have sufficient technology to bend time-space hence we can create wormholes.
What if we use some portion of that energy to create a relatively small wormhole in which we can project some beams and the other end of the hole is just at the edge of earth/space boundry (very close to earth in space standards)?. Then transfer a very good portion of that to the earth without using millions of reactors.
Do you notice the difference between what you were doing and what i was doing?
I was making assumptions, all of them in favor of the planet energy beamy thing, (Low spread angle, very high energy, average distance at all times), and showed that the thing still does not work in a situation that is far better than anything achievable. That is a reasonable way to make an argument. If the best possible situation is still very impractical, any real situation will be even less practical.
You are making up random sci-fi magic. At this point "we make a wormhole" is basically like saying "magic" We don't currently have any reasonable theories as to how to open a wormhole, or in fact any proof that such a thing even exists in the first place.
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I don't really understand why you start bashing me O_O
It is called "Ask and answer stupid questions here" for a reason lol.
How making a million of biggest nuclear reactor on venus and transferring energy to Earth is much reasonable argument wrt. wormholes lol
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@Zambra, how are you? lol
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On June 23 2016 20:32 Laserist wrote:
I don't really understand why you start bashing me O_O
It is called "Ask and answer stupid questions here" for a reason lol.
How making a million of biggest nuclear reactor on venus and transferring energy to Earth is much reasonable argument wrt. wormholes lol
Because when you start talking about 'why not create a wormhole and use that' your so far off established science that 'because we could build an infinity energy generator the size of a pin head that eliminates the need for off-world power generation' becomes an acceptable counter argument.
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On June 23 2016 20:58 JimmiC wrote:
Why are we wasting all this time and effort on getting energy off far away planets when the real questions is when are we gonna find life and get to go all Captain Kirk on their lady folk?
While transferring power to earth looks like a fruitless effort by itself, some people think the amount of power that can be obtained by a civilization is a good metric of how developed they are. Link
Probably we need a lot of power to increase our area of influence in our galaxy and beyond as humankind.
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On June 23 2016 20:58 JimmiC wrote:
Why are we wasting all this time and effort on getting energy off far away planets when the real questions is when are we gonna find life and get to go all Captain Kirk on their lady folk?
You know that Kirk had to have some viscous comments being made behind his back. Like did you see that? THAT, he slept with that.
Considering how Xenophobic Bones was too, I'm sure he got tired of curing so many alien stds.
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In the movie Serenity, they left earth to terraform other planets because earth was dead--why wouldn't they be able to just terraform earth?
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Inconsistent results from what I'm getting, people that care seem to think it odd that earth would be well and truly abandoned. Some seem to think that the environment was so harsh that it wasn't feasible at the time.
Long story short, no canon explanation of why no one seems to live there.
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On June 24 2016 00:47 JimmiC wrote:
Maybe it's like renovating your own home is more work and more expensive then buying a new one?
Split Level Earth That Was, good bones, needs some work 20 Billion Beds 14 Billion Baths. 510 million sq. km. In need of some TLC.
Great neighborhood. No Dogs or Cats left.
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On June 24 2016 00:56 ThomasjServo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2016 00:47 JimmiC wrote:
Maybe it's like renovating your own home is more work and more expensive then buying a new one? Split Level Earth That Was, good bones, needs some work 20 Billion Beds 14 Billion Baths. 510 million sq. km. In need of some TLC. Great neighborhood. No Dogs or Cats left.
Perfect for the handy alien race.
Vibrant neighbourhood with 7 local planets (all with ample parking space) orbiting the famous sun that never sleeps.
Well connected with new wormholes being installed to Sirius and Betelgeuse: you can now spend a weekend at Zaphod's Bar without the annoyance of hyperspace travel.
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Here's how it is: The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much.
From the opening monolog of 4 of the episodes of Firefly. So supposedly they used up all materials and rather than transporting stuff to Earth they relocated.
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EPT
