OT: The price of Gas..

[Fyron]

Dont buy SUVs or humbies lol - the ultimate fuel guzzlers - go for more fuel efficent and hybrid petrol electric cars.

If you have the large amount of money to buy one, sure. You will save a lot more money by getting a normal car than one of those hybrids, as the (useful) hybrids are quite expensive.

[Kamog]

Yeah, I hope the price on those hybrid cars come down. It would be nice to fill up half as often as a regular car and drive around the same amount...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

we need a solar power satalite or a few hundred. i don't know how many, but they could supply us with all the power we need, and if we lengthen out the wave enough, other people on here have told me there's no risk of cancer.

scientific facts aside, i'd still want to test that out for a few years on lab animals. large amounts of anything tend to be bad.

[Fyron]

You can still get cancer from long wavelengths, it just requires having them have a relatively tremendous amount of energy (much more than is possible from something like a cell phone). Beaming energy down from solar collector satellites might just be enough energy.

[Kamog]

Hopefully, the satellites would transmit the power in the form of a tight beam, precisely aimed at the receiving stations on the ground.

[Loser]

Originally posted by Kamog:
Hopefully, the satellites would transmit the power in the form of a tight beam, precisely aimed at the receiving stations on the ground.

It would have to, otherwise you'd lose so much that the technique would be useless.

The question is, where do you put it?

Perhaps it would be best to have three or four in equatorial geo-synch. That way, even on those rare occasions when one is eclipsed by the earth, you still have a significant percentage in operation. Additionally, this may make it easier to keep the beam focused.

Or you could put one huge solar energy collection structure in an orbit Trojan to Earth's (that is, Lagrange points 4 or 5 on Earth's orbit around Sol). This would have the advantage of being forever in direct sunlight, but would have to generate a truly Herculean amount of energy, as it would be the only thing supporting Earth and because it would lose so much over the distance.

In order to mitigate loss of power in the transmission, it would be best to use coherent microwave, or 'maser' (may-zer), technology. This is basically a laser, but in the microwave range of the spectrum.

The beam would need to stay precisely on target, as it would have a rather destructive effect on anything that got in its way, so the speed of light may limit this possibility. I'd ask someone else to do the math, because it's early here, but I believe there will be quite a few seconds of delay between Earth and a point sixty degrees away in Earth's orbit.

So yeah. Back to fusion.

[solops]

Originally posted by Loser:
The beam would need to stay precisely on target, as it would have a rather destructive effect on anything that got in its way, so the speed of light may limit this possibility.

What a great weapon.