I was recently told by a person commenting on another blog that beamed energy is a myth. The commenter claimed that Fusion energy would be a more likely future development. I cited Criswell and Zehner and gave back.I am a very progressive eco friendly person and I have wondered many years if there is some energy industry conspiracy that keeps clean power from becoming a reality. The only conspiracy is human greed influencing exactly how we live on this planet.
Zehner’s book spells out the situation in a unique way; he calls it as he see’s it and the numbers cannot be spun too much because he presents the basic foundations of what it takes to make the electricity flow. Criswell is more biased toward his proposal even though it is peer reviewed and has all the math equations.
What Criswell is proposing is a river of energy traveling from vast collectors on the surface of the Moon to Earth Geostationary orbit and from there down to surface recievers of several square kilometers.
What fusion proposes is to keep a sustained nuclear reaction going without the use of a sun. The other way to generate useful energy from a fusion reaction is to actually explode H-bombs underground and harvest the resulting heat and nuclear products. The only useful work that can be had from a H-bomb besides this kind of excavation is to use it as a propulsion device for spaceships.
The two questions here seem to be:
1. Can microwave energy be beamed across long distances in space (a quarter million miles or so) from a transmission site on the surface of the moon to a geostationary relay station? Yes or No? Probably yes but what really matters is the size of the geostationary relay station.
If it has to be over a couple square miles in area
then getting it to Earth geo from the metal shop on the Moon may not be practical.
2. Can energy be made available for the projected world population of 10 billion people in the coming decades of this century?
No. To supply the same amount of energy to all 10 billion inhabitants of Earth that is presently consumed by Westerners with a high standard of living would require……..a river of energy being beamed down from space. All the fossil, nuclear, solar, and renewable energy on the planet is NOT going to be able to meet that need without an astronomical amount of coal and gas power plants, along with a huge expansion of nuclear.
It will be cheaper and less suicidal to build the power stations on the Moon.
If it will work.
Why microwave and not laser? The shorter wavelength of laser would allow for smaller optics, so the geostationary relays could be much easier to build.
Whatever works Thomas. I believe the Japanese are looking at using lasers in the adaption of Criswell’s concept.