3 ms·
Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved. Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds,
by gravescale 2y ago
Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved.
Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.
If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.
You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.