this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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We've had the template for this for decades. Put the solar panels in space where the thick soupy gunky spunky atmosphere doesn't stop the little energy things from the sun. Collect the power in orbit. You just do that up there up in orbit okay? And then you fucking beam the power down to the surface you numpty fucks. Use a maser to send the power down to the surface and you can pick a frequency that isn't affected by the gunky spunky and then the receivers on the ground can pick it up and they send the power through these things called wires to a building that uses the power and the building can use this neat little thing called CONVECTION to more efficiently remove the heat from the things using the electricity wow.
Or just, y'know, use less power and make use of ground based solar. We don't need fucking AI data centers in space. Don't get me wrong, I think it might be useful to, say, have some compute up in geostationary orbit that other satellites could punt some data to for computation. You could have an evenly spaced ring of the fuckers so the users up there can get some data crunching done with a RTT of like 50ms instead of 700ms. That seems like a hard sell, but it at least seems a bit tenable if you needed to reduce the data you're sending back to the earth down to a more manageable amount with some preprocessing. That is still not fuckass gigawatt AI data centers. Fuck
That's a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.
It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.
Also, transmission is a huge problem. It's easy to say 'make a maser,' but making giant one and aiming it reliably (lest one fries nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order. Geosync is super far away.
There's plenty of space on the ground, for now.
And efficiency, too. Even at a really good 50%, both for the solar panels and the maser, that's still a fuckton of heat being generated.
YES. That's a HUGE one, for the maser in particular. I can't even think of a precedent for operating (and cooling) something so high power in space, so its likely to fail, too.
It's honestly all a bad idea, lol. It's way less safe than nuclear, way more expensive than ground solar, so...
Yeah, I think it'd be a pretty silly thing for us to ever try to do. My goal was to take their stupid idea, provide a slightly less stupid idea, and then say "or just don't do space power at all and keep everything terrestrial." Orbital solar power stations were lots of fun in science fiction, but panels are cheap, there's plenty of land, and giant death masers that cook any birds flying into the beam are, uh, suboptimal.
Proportionally though, there is far more space in space.