[ExI] The End of the Future

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Wed Oct 5 16:23:41 UTC 2011


On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:35 PM,   Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have beating this drum for a while now, and I am happy to see some
> converging voices:
> http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future-peter-thiel?page=1.
>
> The issue remains only too often "can be done, cannot be done" as if
> everything that can be done is going to happen by itself, or out of
> extrapolations of past trends. See the debate on AI.
>
> Well, this is *not* the case. This is why I am speaking at the upcoming
> London "Beyond Human" event on "How to make a Singularity happen".

I replied on the National Review site

The energy problem is at least solvable, though it will take more like
tens of thousands of nuclear reactors worldwide to replace fossil fuel
as it becomes harder to get.

We probably have the fuel to keep them going over their 40-50 year life.

However, it also seems like it would be worth taking a hard look at a
43-year-old proposal to collect solar energy in GEO and beam it back
to the earth with microwaves.

For this to make economic sense (i.e., less expensive than coal) the
cost to lift the parts to GEO needs to come down to $100/kg.

Because of the rotten mass ratio, that doesn't look possible for
chemical fuels, in spite of Elon's impressive work with SpaceX.

But it does seem to be fairly easy with the exhaust velocity possible
from beamed energy propulsion.  The high power laser diodes and
gyrotron microwave generators that make beamed energy possible have
only been available for a few years.

The big names in beamed energy are Jordin Kare and Kevin Parkin.  NASA
Ames just bought Kevin a $2 M gyrotron that will let him test hydrogen
heaters up to 10 MW/m^2.

There is more here:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (end of article comment)

There are things that might not be doable by free markets,
particularly those involving companies run by Harvard MBAs that can't
think beyond the next quarter.

I am not optimistic about power satellites (and the required transport
system) being built in the west at all.  But if they are, it seems
likely to be some kind of government mandate on the Manhattan Project
or Apollo model.  The problem, of course, is that goals those projects
and how to do them were fairly clear.  It's not so well understood how
cheap transport into space gives low cost energy, and it is certainly
not widely understood how beamed energy could get us there.

Keith

PS.  There are some interesting articles around that discuss how
following the short term improvements in cost by outsourcing to China
was a long term disaster for US companies.



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