this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
119 points (85.6% liked)
Technology
74296 readers
4014 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is the energy transmitted to Earth?
Yeah this article is severely lacking in any concrete details.
I'd also like to know how exactly it is that they plan to deploy massive arrays of solar panels to space. Most earth-based solar farms are huge and take up entire fields, some are a few kilometres across in size. That's many orders of magnitude more massive than anything we've previously ever launched.
Plus whatever power transmission system they come up with would have to be powerful to be of any use but if it's that powerful would present an active danger and would effectively constitute a space-based weapon system.
It's a cool sci-fi idea but it is all pie in the sky.
Back of the napkin math:
Largest solar sail (much lighter than panels, but doesn't produce electricity) 2000 sq meters
200w/sq meter
400kwp
Also iirc the space solar farms plans I've seen call for re radiating the energy back via microwaves to dedicated receiving towers on the ground
Yeah I've seen that. Microwave power beaming would work in theory it's just electromagnetic radiation after all. But the vast majority of it is going to get absorbed by water molecules, because that's what microwave radiation does, that's why it cooks your food.
They're probably going to bake a lot of seagulls as well.