Getting power from space

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Space Solar Power – Recent Conceptual Progress
[Via The Oil Drum - Discussions about Energy and Our Future]

This is a guest post by Keith Henson. Keith can be reached at hkeithhenson at gmail dot com.

Power satellites are an idea that has been around since the late 1960s [1] but not developed commercially because we don’t know how to build an inexpensive space transport system.  That may have changed recently, at least in theory.

We have known for decades that solar power satellites can send energy to the earth.  Communication satellites do it every day, just not at levels useful for power.  Power satellites scale to humanity’s need; a calculation by G. Harry Stein back in the 1980s noted that there was room for 177 TW in geosynchronous orbit (more than ten times current energy use).

The concept is to make electric power in space (thermal or photovoltaic [2]), turn the power into microwaves, beam the microwaves to Earth and convert them back to electric power at “rectennas.”  The rectennas are simple (though large) structures that stop so little sunlight that the intention is to place them over farmland within a few hundred km of cities.

The biggest obstacle to solar power satellites is the cost of putting the necessary hardware in space.[3] There have been several previous discussions [4] [5] [6] about solar power satellites on The Oil Drum.  What this current post does is describe a way to reduce the cost of putting the materials into space far enough that energy from power satellites can compete with coal (2 cents per kWh), assuming we amortize the total cost over a 10-year period.

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Now this would be a wonderful, forward looking project for us to embark on. The technology is there. It just needs to be scaled up.

But it would get us to a future where fossil-based fuels are no longer a problem. We could then concentrate on ameliorating the effects of too much carbon but we could not be producing more.

Will we have the courage to tackle this problem?

How more education produces two different results

by Phil Roeder

“A Little Knowledge”: Why The Biggest Problem With Climate “Skeptics” May Be Their Confidence
[Via DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science]

AlexanderPope.jpg

Last week, an intriguing study emerged from Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale and elsewhere–finding that knowing more about science, and being better at mathematical reasoning, was related to more climate science skepticism and denial–rather than less.

Kahan’s team simply structured a survey in a way that no one—to my knowledge, at least—has done before. In a sample of over 1,500 people, they gathered at least four different types of information: how much scientific literacy they possessed (e.g., how well they answered questions about things like the time it takes for the Earth to circle the sun and the relative sizes of electrons and atoms), how “numerate” they were (e.g., their ability to engage in mathematical reasoning), what their cultural values were (how much they favored individualism and hierarch in the ordering of society, as opposed to being egalitarian and communitarian), and what their views were on how serious a risk global warming is.

The surprise—for some out there, anyway—lay in how the ingredients of this stew mix together. For citizens as a whole, more literacy and numeracy were correlated with somewhat more, rather than somewhat less, dismissal of the risk of global warming. When you drilled down into the cultural groups, meanwhile, it turned out that among the hierarchical-individualists (aka, conservatives), the relationship between greater math and science knowledge and dismissal of climate risks was even stronger. (The opposite relationship occurred among egalitarian communitarians—aka liberals).

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This is now the fifth study to show essentially the same thing – the more math and science a liberal has, the more likely they are to acknowledge AGW; the more math and science a conservative has, the less likely they are to acknowledge AGW.

The data from all these surveys show that this dichotomy, which is only seen in the US and not in Europe, derives from what political – especially conservative – leaders espouse. As the conservative leadership has become more and more disconnected with the science, so has the educated conservative population.

This is not to pick on conservatives as many liberals can be found espousing views about alternative medicine that hold no scientific validity.

It simply shows the common human trait of relying on leaders to provide simple heuristics and rules of thumb to deal with a complex world.

It also means that solving the problem is not a simple matter of convincing those who refuse to recognize the science that the science is correct. They do not acknowledge the science because of the fear that to do so would likely require them to acknowledge policy changes they find abhorrent.

As Upton Sinclair stated: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

At base, it is not the science but the policy changes that the science might lead to that determines a skeptic’s views.

It is easier to deny AGW than to envision how to correct the problem using conservative principles. If, for the sake of argument, cap and trade was the only solution to AGW – I know it is not but this is a hypothetical – it becomes easier to simply deny AGW for a conservative. Just as a liberal would have a problem if the only solution was to give all our money to our billionaires.

But the real problem here is that there might be a conservative solution, or a moderate solution or one better than has been proposed. But since one side refuses to acknowledge the problem, that solution may never be espoused.

We are starting to see a few conservative leaders begin to acknowledge AGW. I expect more will in the next few years, simply because it is harder and harder to ignore the changes.

Perhaps then this dichotomy will reverse itself and we can actually have a discussion on how to fix the problem.

Maybe space-based solar would be a way to get off of carbon fueled power as well as provide strategic benefits.

Some perspective on austerity as we gut our future

Priorities
[Via Boing Boing]

Fact: The United States military spends more money in Afghanistan and Iraq, on just air conditioning alone, than NASA gets in their entire budget. (Via Matthew Francis)

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We could quibble some about the exact cost but we are spending about $15 billion a month on Iraq and Afghanistan. A huge amount of that goes to energy costs needed to fight in that climate.

NASA gets about $18 billion a year. In the next budget –2012 – it may get as much as it got in 2010. If it is lucky.

But a better understanding of how to create more efficient energy will most likely involve NASA.

NASA is just the highest profile department that demonstrates our continuing efforts to destroy the seed corn of research  in America. We are seeing similar things happen in the research arms of the USDA, FDA, EPA, NIH, HSF, NOAA and just about every other government agency.

We simply are not planning ahead well at all.

More women, smarter groups?

Add Women to Groups to Make Them Smarter
[Via danielmiessler.com]

There’s some fascinating new research showing that adding women to a group of problem solvers makes them more effective. The reason is clear and unsurprising to me: smart men tend to dominate and restrict the flow of ideas, while smart women focus more on sharing and nurturing ideas, which assists the overall progress. ::

(thanks to @laurenroth for the link)

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This sounds all sorts of  interesting until I looked at some of the data.

They created mixed groups from 0% to 100% women and asked them to do some creative things. IQ scores did not correlate with the ability to solve these problems but they claim that the amount of women in the group did.

But the online interview has a figure that makes me think that, if this correlation exists, it is very slight.

You can draw a straight line through almost any set of points but the correlation coefficient – a measure of how close each point comes to that line – would be very small here because there are so many outliers.

In a strongly correlated set of data, one would expect that the 100% men would perform worse than the 100% women, with the 50/50 group being intermediate. Here the 50/50 is one of the worse performing groups. And there are huge error bars. The error bars for the 0% and 100% women groups overlap, indicating that there is no statistical difference between them.

In addition, those groups that intersect the trend line all have error bars that hit the average line. Again, this would indicate that there is no real statistical significance here.

Statistical significance is usually defined as a less than 5% chance that the data is due to random chance. Overlapping error bars usually indicates an inability to demonstrate statistical significance.

And the 30% women group is ‘smarter’ than the 60% woman and as ‘smart’ as the 70% women. In fact, if you look at the five groups that intersect the trend line, their error bars all overlap.

If you wanted to believe this data as presented, the best groups would be those with either 30% or 70% women. But stay away from 50/50.

There may be something there. It is certainly an interesting hypothesis. But they need to get a lot more data to reduce the error bars and provide more statistical rigor before I can believe this data.

Pissing off Apple not a smart move

Apple rumored to move production of custom ‘A6′ chip away from Samsung in 2012
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple is rumored to further distance itself from its rival Samsung starting with the “A6″ chip in 2012, when the iPhone maker will allegedly transition production of its custom ARM chips to a new chipmaker.

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Samsung is going to lose a lot of business from Apple for its copycat ways. I wonder if sales from its tablets will make up for the loss of $8 billion or so?