10 ms·

This seems like a cool hi-tech venture. But the opportunity cost is way too high. For Japan, I think $21 billion investment in windmills in the ocean would le

by ankeshk 17y ago

This seems like a cool hi-tech venture. But the opportunity cost is way too high. For Japan, I think $21 billion investment in windmills in the ocean would lead to more energy than creating a solar power station in space that sends back electricity in the form of microwaves.

drats 17y ago
Yes, but the windmills don't get you a 1GW energy weapon in space.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I'm assuming it is geosynchronous, you could only blast down to your own country with it, any place else the angle to the atmosphere would be too oblique to have any chance of reaching the ground. It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though. Sort of a satellite born seppuku.
  - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
    Well, you could also target your immediate neighbors. I bet most of the richest and most industrialized eastern china would be right inside the viable target area. Also, think anti-ballistic missile defences -- no need for adaptive optics and all that jazz when you can swat the missiles with lasers from their most vulnerable position, right at the top of their trajectory.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      One gigawatt is a tremendous amount of energy, but what microwave radiation would do against an incoming ICBM is an open question. It's all about how concentrated the beam will be and how fast you can direct it (ICBMs move pretty fast and even at the top of their trajectory they are hard to pinpoint because they do not exactly carry homing beacons). Also, in all of the following keep in mind that we're talking about a re-entry vehicle here which has extensive heat shielding anyway just to survive its inevitable contact with the atmosphere. It is more about energy density if this could be used as a weapon against an ICBM or not, the receiver of the energy would presumably be a fairly large patch of ground with a 'safe zone' around it in case of minor misalignment. If you'd want your gigawatt to be concentrated in an area of 100x100 m under 'normal 'conditions you will not be able to quickly reconfigure to something on the order of a hotspot as produced by a battle laser (this is not a laser!). In normal operating conditions and assuming they can beam as tight as 1,000,000,000 Watts per 100x100m patch (which remains to be seen) you'd have about 100KW / square meter, or about 10 W / square centimeter assuming absolutely perfect (so lossless) transmission and 0 reflection. Microwave absorption of the ICBM would then be the deciding factor if anything happened to it or not, 10W / square centimeter seems a lot but it really isn't, the question is how long the beam could be focused on the incoming ICBM and how steady it could be held. With lasers this appears to be possible, see this http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817 http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817 but it was an aircraft at subsonic speeds vs a stationary ground target. Shooting stuff down that moves very fast is not that easy, especially not if your normal mode of operation is for energy transmission instead of destruction.
      - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
        Who was talking about shooting icbm's with microwaves? If you have a gigawatt power generation platform in space, putting a couple of free-electron lasers up there is hardly more than an afterthought. With a big enough laser, you can stop having to worry about the heat shielding/reflectivity of the target, and just trust that the second you hit something, it's surface is going to ionize (= blow up). And as for hitting the targets up there, at the apex of their trajectory ICBM's are 1) ballistic 2) slow compared to the other parts of their flight. While hitting is still not exactly easy, other than hitting them on the launch pads it's the easiest way to do the (hard) task.
        jacquesm 17y ago
        You make this sound a little easier than it is, really, but you are right that if you do want to hit them the top of the trajectory is one of the best times to try to do it. Unfortunately the people that launch these things are well aware of that, which is why if they are launched they are not launched 'one-by-one' to allow you to recharge your lasers between shots. Another slight problem with the strategy is that any attacker capable of launching an ICBM at a country would probably also have the capability to hit that platform, and wich a 1GW radiated output it provides you with a really nice fat target.
        ars 17y ago
        Why would it blow up? Nuclear bombs don't blow up when they get hot. All that would happen is you would make a hole in it, but since it's on a ballistic it would keep on going. (Ballistic means gravity is controlling it, it's not powered.) Even if you blew it up, at best you would spread nuclear material all over the target area. You need to hit these things during the boost phase, where a: you can stop it from going ballistic and make it fall back into the launching country, and b: you have something volatile to blow up (the fuel). Also, it's easier. When it's at the apex it's moving horizontally very quickly, and it's at it's closest to you. Which is the most difficulty when it comes to aiming (since the angle of the shot is moving the fastest at that point). When it's moving vertically toward you is much easier to aim, since you barely have to move the laser.
  - ars 17y ago
    > It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though. You couldn't do anything to a country. You could damage a small area if you concentrated it. If the capture area is 4km, then anything on the ground larger than 2km x 2km would not even notice you doing anything (since it gets basically that much sun anyway). And with the losses (I estimate only 25% of energy is captured). You can radiate an area 1km x 1km without anyone noticing (which is about a city block). To do damage you'd have to a go a lot smaller. It would take a very long time to do anything to something even city sized.
- skorgu 17y ago
  Other advantages: Windmills are vulnerable to disruption by anyone with a zodiac and some semtex, not to mention they have transmission issues of their own. A space-based solution has a far higher cost to threaten; you basically need to have ASAT weaponry and that's (at least for now) somewhat out of the reach of non-state actors. Not to mention a space-solar satellite would have enough onboard power for some fairly aggressive countermeasures. Edit: grammar
  - antipaganda 17y ago
    But why the fuck would you want to blow down a windmill? Apart from the visuals and the twanging as the blades hit the ground.
    - skorgu 17y ago
      Who knows. For a country with Japan's neighbors and no navy I'm sure it's not a potential vulnerability they're eager to create.
- gtt 17y ago
  which can be easily destroyed with cheap missle
  - drats 17y ago
    Ah but the thing would be so big that the space debris problem would have to be dealt with first or it would not be practical. And what better way to deal with space debris than to make the system capable of directing microwave and laser energy weapons (powered initially by RTGs hooked up to supercapacitors) at fast moving objects coming toward it from any angle?
chaosprophet 17y ago
The region around Japan is extremely earthquake and tsunami prone, so I doubt windmills could be stable in the seas around Japan.
patio11 17y ago
The Japanese space program is not employed because it is cost competitive with terrestrial options. It is a mechanism to transfer wealth from the public at large to defense contractors. In both of these respects, it is exactly identical to NASA.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  I wonder what their Velcro and Tang will be?
  - antipaganda 17y ago
    Giant Hello Kitty robots which shoot heart-shaped laser beams from their eyes. And yes, in Japan that is considered a practical spinoff.
ckinnan 17y ago
The cost is less than the U.S. government's bailout of Bear Stearns...for the cost of our bailout of AIG, America could have built 8 of these stations.
- Retric 17y ago
  The cost of bailing out several of the big "banks" was approximately nothing because they paid back their loans with interest. PS: AIG has already payed back 9 billion of it's 80 billion loan, and expects to make another 25 billion payment fairly soon. Granted it's selling off assets to do this, but it's profit of $1.8 billion in the second quarter gives you some idea how many assets the company has. http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/aig/index.htm?postversion=2009082016 http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/aig/index.htm...
  - anamax 17y ago
    > The cost of bailing out several of the big "banks" was approximately nothing because they paid back their loans with interest. The "cost" was the risk assumed by the taxpayers.
    - Retric 17y ago
      No, the "cost" is the risk currently assumed by the taxpayers plus opertunity cost and any defaulted loans. As they pay back the loans the risk keeps dropping. The upper bound on risk might be the total amount loaned, but you can't talk about the bailout as the total loan amount once they start to pay back most of the money. PS: The actual cost estimate of the bailut was probably upto 10% of the amount of money loaned. It's quite possible we will make money from this at which point talking about the cost based on the total loan amount would be silly.
      - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
        > opertunity cost The opportunity cost was enormous. The bailouts were a disaster for American capitalism. We now have a huge tattoo that reads "WARNING: Crony Capitalist Country. Proceed with caution". Don't ignore the very difficult to quantify effects of the bailouts on the credit markets. The whole lesson will surely make the US a less credit worthy market and raise more questions about the dollar.
anamax 17y ago
Windmills don't necessarily produce power when you want it. (In parts of the US, the "good wind" is at night.) I don't know the timing of space-based solar power, but if it matches demand, that's a big deal, especially if it isn't as weather sensitive as ground-based solar. (I don't know if clouds and the like are more transparent to sunlight or microwaves.)
kingkongrevenge 17y ago
There's a lot of rather convincing literature out there on the potential of tidal power. The energies are enormous and the technology is straightforward. It's not like photovoltaics where we're waiting on improvements in cost. It's simple turbines. Tidal power ends up attracting a lot of conspiracy theories. Why are we bombarded with news and policies about wind and solar when on paper huge tidal generation capacity is probably viable right now? There could be something there, I don't know.

by ankeshk 17y ago

drats 17y ago

Yes, but the windmills don't get you a 1GW energy weapon in space.

jacquesm 17y ago
I'm assuming it is geosynchronous, you could only blast down to your own country with it, any place else the angle to the atmosphere would be too oblique to have any chance of reaching the ground. It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though. Sort of a satellite born seppuku.
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
  Well, you could also target your immediate neighbors. I bet most of the richest and most industrialized eastern china would be right inside the viable target area. Also, think anti-ballistic missile defences -- no need for adaptive optics and all that jazz when you can swat the missiles with lasers from their most vulnerable position, right at the top of their trajectory.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    One gigawatt is a tremendous amount of energy, but what microwave radiation would do against an incoming ICBM is an open question. It's all about how concentrated the beam will be and how fast you can direct it (ICBMs move pretty fast and even at the top of their trajectory they are hard to pinpoint because they do not exactly carry homing beacons). Also, in all of the following keep in mind that we're talking about a re-entry vehicle here which has extensive heat shielding anyway just to survive its inevitable contact with the atmosphere. It is more about energy density if this could be used as a weapon against an ICBM or not, the receiver of the energy would presumably be a fairly large patch of ground with a 'safe zone' around it in case of minor misalignment. If you'd want your gigawatt to be concentrated in an area of 100x100 m under 'normal 'conditions you will not be able to quickly reconfigure to something on the order of a hotspot as produced by a battle laser (this is not a laser!). In normal operating conditions and assuming they can beam as tight as 1,000,000,000 Watts per 100x100m patch (which remains to be seen) you'd have about 100KW / square meter, or about 10 W / square centimeter assuming absolutely perfect (so lossless) transmission and 0 reflection. Microwave absorption of the ICBM would then be the deciding factor if anything happened to it or not, 10W / square centimeter seems a lot but it really isn't, the question is how long the beam could be focused on the incoming ICBM and how steady it could be held. With lasers this appears to be possible, see this http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817 http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817 but it was an aircraft at subsonic speeds vs a stationary ground target. Shooting stuff down that moves very fast is not that easy, especially not if your normal mode of operation is for energy transmission instead of destruction.
    - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
      Who was talking about shooting icbm's with microwaves? If you have a gigawatt power generation platform in space, putting a couple of free-electron lasers up there is hardly more than an afterthought. With a big enough laser, you can stop having to worry about the heat shielding/reflectivity of the target, and just trust that the second you hit something, it's surface is going to ionize (= blow up). And as for hitting the targets up there, at the apex of their trajectory ICBM's are 1) ballistic 2) slow compared to the other parts of their flight. While hitting is still not exactly easy, other than hitting them on the launch pads it's the easiest way to do the (hard) task.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        You make this sound a little easier than it is, really, but you are right that if you do want to hit them the top of the trajectory is one of the best times to try to do it. Unfortunately the people that launch these things are well aware of that, which is why if they are launched they are not launched 'one-by-one' to allow you to recharge your lasers between shots. Another slight problem with the strategy is that any attacker capable of launching an ICBM at a country would probably also have the capability to hit that platform, and wich a 1GW radiated output it provides you with a really nice fat target.
      - ars 17y ago
        Why would it blow up? Nuclear bombs don't blow up when they get hot. All that would happen is you would make a hole in it, but since it's on a ballistic it would keep on going. (Ballistic means gravity is controlling it, it's not powered.) Even if you blew it up, at best you would spread nuclear material all over the target area. You need to hit these things during the boost phase, where a: you can stop it from going ballistic and make it fall back into the launching country, and b: you have something volatile to blow up (the fuel). Also, it's easier. When it's at the apex it's moving horizontally very quickly, and it's at it's closest to you. Which is the most difficulty when it comes to aiming (since the angle of the shot is moving the fastest at that point). When it's moving vertically toward you is much easier to aim, since you barely have to move the laser.
- ars 17y ago
  > It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though. You couldn't do anything to a country. You could damage a small area if you concentrated it. If the capture area is 4km, then anything on the ground larger than 2km x 2km would not even notice you doing anything (since it gets basically that much sun anyway). And with the losses (I estimate only 25% of energy is captured). You can radiate an area 1km x 1km without anyone noticing (which is about a city block). To do damage you'd have to a go a lot smaller. It would take a very long time to do anything to something even city sized.
skorgu 17y ago
Other advantages: Windmills are vulnerable to disruption by anyone with a zodiac and some semtex, not to mention they have transmission issues of their own. A space-based solution has a far higher cost to threaten; you basically need to have ASAT weaponry and that's (at least for now) somewhat out of the reach of non-state actors. Not to mention a space-solar satellite would have enough onboard power for some fairly aggressive countermeasures. Edit: grammar
- antipaganda 17y ago
  But why the fuck would you want to blow down a windmill? Apart from the visuals and the twanging as the blades hit the ground.
  - skorgu 17y ago
    Who knows. For a country with Japan's neighbors and no navy I'm sure it's not a potential vulnerability they're eager to create.
gtt 17y ago
which can be easily destroyed with cheap missle
- drats 17y ago
  Ah but the thing would be so big that the space debris problem would have to be dealt with first or it would not be practical. And what better way to deal with space debris than to make the system capable of directing microwave and laser energy weapons (powered initially by RTGs hooked up to supercapacitors) at fast moving objects coming toward it from any angle?

chaosprophet 17y ago

The region around Japan is extremely earthquake and tsunami prone, so I doubt windmills could be stable in the seas around Japan.

patio11 17y ago

The Japanese space program is not employed because it is cost competitive with terrestrial options. It is a mechanism to transfer wealth from the public at large to defense contractors. In both of these respects, it is exactly identical to NASA.

euroclydon 17y ago
I wonder what their Velcro and Tang will be?
- antipaganda 17y ago
  Giant Hello Kitty robots which shoot heart-shaped laser beams from their eyes. And yes, in Japan that is considered a practical spinoff.

ckinnan 17y ago

The cost is less than the U.S. government's bailout of Bear Stearns...for the cost of our bailout of AIG, America could have built 8 of these stations.

Retric 17y ago
The cost of bailing out several of the big "banks" was approximately nothing because they paid back their loans with interest. PS: AIG has already payed back 9 billion of it's 80 billion loan, and expects to make another 25 billion payment fairly soon. Granted it's selling off assets to do this, but it's profit of $1.8 billion in the second quarter gives you some idea how many assets the company has. http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/aig/index.htm?postversion=2009082016 http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/aig/index.htm...
- anamax 17y ago
  > The cost of bailing out several of the big "banks" was approximately nothing because they paid back their loans with interest. The "cost" was the risk assumed by the taxpayers.
  - Retric 17y ago
    No, the "cost" is the risk currently assumed by the taxpayers plus opertunity cost and any defaulted loans. As they pay back the loans the risk keeps dropping. The upper bound on risk might be the total amount loaned, but you can't talk about the bailout as the total loan amount once they start to pay back most of the money. PS: The actual cost estimate of the bailut was probably upto 10% of the amount of money loaned. It's quite possible we will make money from this at which point talking about the cost based on the total loan amount would be silly.
    - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
      > opertunity cost The opportunity cost was enormous. The bailouts were a disaster for American capitalism. We now have a huge tattoo that reads "WARNING: Crony Capitalist Country. Proceed with caution". Don't ignore the very difficult to quantify effects of the bailouts on the credit markets. The whole lesson will surely make the US a less credit worthy market and raise more questions about the dollar.

anamax 17y ago

Windmills don't necessarily produce power when you want it. (In parts of the US, the "good wind" is at night.) I don't know the timing of space-based solar power, but if it matches demand, that's a big deal, especially if it isn't as weather sensitive as ground-based solar. (I don't know if clouds and the like are more transparent to sunlight or microwaves.)

kingkongrevenge 17y ago

There's a lot of rather convincing literature out there on the potential of tidal power. The energies are enormous and the technology is straightforward. It's not like photovoltaics where we're waiting on improvements in cost. It's simple turbines. Tidal power ends up attracting a lot of conspiracy theories. Why are we bombarded with news and policies about wind and solar when on paper huge tidal generation capacity is probably viable right now? There could be something there, I don't know.