this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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It constantly fascinates me that you can get useful energy from such an insignificant fraction of the sun's output.
A sphere with a radius of 1 AU has a surface area of 2.8 × 10^23^ m^2^. That means a 1 m^2^ solar panel can capture, at most, 0.00000000000000000000036% of the sun's rays.
It's always a bit funny when singularity techbro types start talking big ideas about megastructures and Dyson spheres like dude, we aren't even harvesting a fraction of a percent of the energy that is being hand delivered to us on earth right now. Maybe we should try capturing a little more of that
Same with going to go live on Mars and the moon and Jupiter’s moons, etc.
Like homies. We ain’t even brought civilization to our oceans or mountains right here on Earth, which are much closer and more hospitable.
You would think the next big bazinga thing would be seasteads and terraforming new islands and the like on Earth, but they blew right past that. China, Saudis and the gulf states are the only ones trying to do the terraforming sci-fi stuff.
Even Antarctica is far more habitable than Mars. It’s warmer (usually) and you can breathe the air.
and there's no shortage of fresh water, and you can re-supply quite cheaply (relatively)
They know they are killing it all here and they want to move on to killing the next thing.
even a completely "dead" and polluted Earth is 100 times more hospitable and easily repaired than trying to terraform Mars
But what if we make a Dyson X out of stainless steel?
I'm releasing my white paper for the HyperDyson X. This ingenious technology will be powering the entire planet within two years. Preorder today for 420 thousand dogecoin.
Dyson sphere, except it's from James Dyson and not Freeman Dyson, and it's got what's in those funky bladeless fans or hair dryers
But you'll be stealing all the sun from the plants! Checkmate libruls!
Not only that, but you lose a bit of energy from atmosphere, the spectrum the panels can theoretically absorb and then what you can actually get out of a panel (below)
And that relatively tiny amount of energy is enough to say fuck it, we'll build a global energy grid of ultra high voltage DC transmission lines and go wild on solar installation, and we've got incredibly cheap energy for at least 25 years (the lowest tier of panels degrades at 0.8 percent a year, so you're looking at 60 percent generation capacity after half a century)