Solved our energy problems

[Undertoad]

It's easy if you stop to think about it. So J and I were arguing about what the gov't can do to fix the problem. But to really solve a problem, you have to get to the root of the problem.

Right now, to get energy, we take oil and coal from under the top layer of the Earth, and we burn that and get the energy from it.

The problem is, that energy comes from long, long ago. It was first shucked off by the Sun; then it was absorbed by plants and plankton and beasts and whatever, who used it for a while, then died -- and became pockets of energy under the crust of the planet.

Cut to today: the mining of that past energy has become the economics problem that is the entire story of our modern era. A half-billion people move in the middle class in India and China, and suddenly it fucks up the demand, and prices increase.

The real problem is that, in one way, we are not really entitled to that energy. Oh sure, we can use it as best we can, but eventually the energy of the PAST will no longer be available to us. This seems inevitable, when one does the math.

Originally Posted by me

This is "sustainability", a word that is golden in some schools of thought (born-again ecologists), and filthy in others (some - not all - business people and short-run capitalists). But when you stop to think about it, stop to do the math, you realize that the "sustainable" means "economically viable for a long time". Markets like sustainable conditions; Capitalism actually demands sustainability, even though many self-labeled Capitalists may not notice or understand it.

What energy we Earthlings are actually entitled to is the amount of actual energy coming to our per-capita area of land. Divvy it up as you wish, but the amount of sunlight that hits the earth, right now, is roughly the sustainable energy we earthlings can say we are "permitted".

And we do use it; we employ it to work as we like, growing things, drying things out. We convert it to some battery power once in a while.

It's not much and it sure would be nice to get more of it somehow, for all of us. So here's what we should do.


First, we should adapt a nice sector of the Moon for human living, and get a nice shuttle between here and there going. I know Mars is a lot sexier and stuff, but the Moon is *better*. In fact, the Moon is *awesome*. Mars is a freakin' loss. I mean we should do some science there, figure some shit out. But look, it's even further away from the Sun than we are. That means it gets less energy than we do, which means it sucks in a very basic and obvious way. We can kinda guess that there is not interesting life on Mars -- only because there is not enough energy on Mars.

But -- check out the Moon. It's right close to us, so we can probably figure out how to get a lot of stuff up there on the cheap, and start working on using it to our benefit.

Even better: it's obviously our ideal launch platform to get to the rest of the area. It has no atmosphere, so that horrible problem of how to get back to the surface of the Earth is not a problem on the Moon. You just land there, no foam tiles needed. And launch is totally easy when there's so little gravity holding you back.


So. First thing we do is we build the Moon up to suit our human interests. And then, we start building robots that can use the resources of the Moon, plus whatever additional resources we bring to the Moon.

These robots are initially programmed to build copies of themselves or modular parts of themselves. Then, they build robot factories on the moon until large sectors of the moon are populated with them.

At that point they are re-programmed to build whatever we think of next. And the first thing is, they are used to build factories for the best solar collectors and batteries we understand at the time.

They build massive solar collectors, and then they launch them at the Sun. As they get closer to the Sun, they get more and more sunlight and more and more energy.

At this point, they orbit the Sun, collecting energy the whole while. They might use some of that energy to do various things but mostly they collect it and store it. Then they ship it back to us.

Maybe these solar collecting thingies stay orbiting the Sun, and we send them containers to collect the energy, and they send them back. When I say "containers", they could be batteries, or organic material, or whatever way energy can best be stored. Maybe they just heat up massive elements and fling them back where they can be used the way we currently use geothermal. They can use some of that energy to get back to the Moon, or maybe we'll know how to do some sort of orbital fling, who knows.


Here's the thing. The energy that we have here, plus any tidal or geothermal we manage to work out, that is our bootstrap energy. It has allowed us to bootstrap partway, it seems -- where we can get around and have a good infrastructure to build societies and get smarter. But we're not bootstrapped the whole way until we can work out how to suck even more out of the Sun.

Maybe we can suck Venus's bootstrap energy, or Titan's. At least until we get to the next level.

[Cicero]

Oh, I thought we were planning to do that already. Well not all of that specifically, but I thought the point of things was to make the moon habitable. Huh..... Not that anyone has let me in on some plan, but I gathered that, as a natural course that we are building on currently.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Bah, we don't need to go through all that rigmarole. The Sun sends us a new batch of energy every 9 minutes... all we need and more. All we have to do is gather and store it. Storing it is the big riddle, if we figure that out, we could run the world on lightening alone.

[Undertoad]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science...lar/index.html

Mehta has another solution for India's chronic electricity shortage, one that does not involve power plants on the ground but instead massive sun-gathering satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles in the sky. The satellites would electromagnetically beam gigawatts of solar energy back to ground-based receivers, where it would then be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids. And because in high Earth orbit, satellites are unaffected by the earth's shadow virtually 365 days a year, the floating power plants could provide round-the-clock clean, renewable electricity.

yeah, there ya go!

[spudcon]

I agree with Bruce. The sun puts out more energy in one second than all the puny resources of man can muster in years. We don't have to go to Mars, or Titan(what for?) or even the moon. I've always had a problem with spaceborn solar power stations, because beaming gigawatts of RF energy thru the Earth's atmosphere has always seemed a little scary to me. The whole flaw in all of the arguments is thinking government can fix the problem. I don't want any more of their fixes, they've messed up our lives enough. The only way government can fix anything is to get out of the way of researchers and private industry, and make the solutions worth the capital investments in research.
This is all a pipe dream, of course. I just received a mailer from my congressman, outlining how he's going to reduce our energy costs. Can you guess? Higher taxes. That's sure worked before, hasn't it?

[headsplice]

Wait, private industry are the people who've gotten us into this mess. How the heck are they going to fix it?
BTW, I'm not advocating a government-only solution. The best stuff generally comes out: basic science by the feds, applications by private companies (LOTS of them - no market dominance).
I'm a big fan of the vertical wind turbine.

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by headsplice

...
I'm a big fan of the vertical wind turbine.

But why? I agree that it sounds like a good idea, putting the major components near the ground for easy maintenance; no correction necessary for wind direction, etc. But they aren't very efficient and most of the Darrieus machines ended up self-destructing.

[glatt]

We need to drill holes down to the lava below our feet, pour water down, and capture the steam in a turbine.

[HungLikeJesus]

That's being done with various forms of geothermal energy generation, but the existing equipment mostly requires fairly high temperatures, which aren't widely available. Also, drilling costs can be pretty high, as the wells often must be drilled very deep.

There are some low temperature systems under development, by UTC/Carrier and others.

[headsplice]

I like the prospect. There are definitely some problems, but who knows what continuing development will find? I also like the concept of airborne wind turbines. Again, more work needs to be put into them, but it's a reasonable concept.