[ExI] Peevish legacy of dour Puritanism

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Sat Jan 12 18:52:02 UTC 2013


On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> But speaking of waste, have you ever considered how much of the Sun's
> energy is wasted?  Virtually all of it sails by the planets becoming
> uselessly dilute.

The Sun "... blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each
instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely.  Incomprehensible
riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from
this eternal river of wealth."

> This question recasts the discussion from "religious like" to
> engineering and economics; how do we do it and how do we pay for it?

I am thinking, more and more these days, that the only feasible way to
get something like this involves not paying for it - at least, not directly
paying for the vast majority of it.

E.g., get an automated solar factory on the Moon.  It need not be all that
efficient, but it does need to be able to expand itself in reasonable time
until it can churn out solar panels at a reasonable rate.  One may pay
for the seed factory, for ground crew time "operating" the factory (which
may be just monitoring, but having a human involved to satisfy outside
parties who care more about the politics than the details), and a few
other things - but this is a far cry from buying each and every solar
panel.



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