My, that's Power

[Asperion]

I got thinking recently about the different ways that people attempt to create energy.  In ancient times,  people had muscle power in some form, either human or animal.  Eventually we figured out power of moving water,  then came other forms of power that are either more powerful or portable (or both). Today we possess a wide array of ways to create power  - muscle,  hydro, steam,  wind,  petroleum,  solar, among MANY more.  Including discussion about their strengths and weaknesses,  I would like for us to brainstorm possible ways people can create energy that either are only theory today or not even at that stage,  might even talk about completely fictional sources - those might become real someday. 

[DShomshak]

 

For a complete guide to human energy use, from the Paleolithic to the present, there's Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization. One thing he finds: Use of past energy sources hasn't declined in real numbers -- only in proportion, as new energy sources have eclipsed them. Thus, humanity gets just as much energy from biomass (burning wood, animal dung, etc.) as a thousand years ago -- it's just that we get so much more from hydro, fossil fuels, etc. We still burn as much coal (or nearly so) as ever, it's just that we also burn increasing amounts of petroleum, with natural gas use still rising.

 

Nuclear is anomalous in its real decline, but it's also very new and so subject to political hiccups. It hasn't been around long enough for the normal pattern to have happened yet.

 

Of course, this pattern will inevitably suffer an enormous exception as stocks of easily recoverable petroleum are exhausted. Coal and natural gas simply take longer, but they too are finite, even without taking climate change into consideration. Smil is not optimistic that civilization can decarbonize quickly enough to do so in a smooth and orderly fasion. The historical record also shows how long technological transitions take, and they aren't quick. The history of Bronze Age deforestation to support copper smelting is also not encouraging. Still, at least we've been told, and some people are trying to manage a speedy transition.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

G. Harry Stine's Space Power lays out a fairly detailed plan for shifting civilization to solar power using satellites equipped with huge panels of solar cells. The great problems with Earth-based solar power, after all, are that solar energy is diffuse and unavailable half the time. In space, though, it's always sunny and there's plenty of room. Of course, lifting all those satellites into orbit would carry a prohibitive cost... but you can make it all much cheaper by getting raw materials from the Moon. The greatest practical difficulties remain those Stine found when he wrote the book in 1981: Start up costs are too high for private industry or even any single government, and the legal issues for the necessary partnerships are not yet worked out. But there is no technological impediment, and Stine even works out how a solar power satellite system could benefit less developed countries that lack an electrical grid.

 

It would be an excellent system for a nearish-future, hard-SF setting.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Moving into pure SF, when I was building the wider background for my Planetary Romance campaign, I had nuclear batteries as the convenient energy source for any tech that never needed refueling. However, I didn't want to leave them as pure magic. For the rubber science, I invoked hypernuclear matter, or hy-matter for short: muonic matter (replacing electrons with muons), strange matter (particles incorporating the "strange" quark as well as the "up" and "down" quarks of protons and neutrons), magnetic monopoles, and the like. Some science speculation articles by, IIRC, John Cramer had suggested such materials might have novel properties that would be useful for SF-tech.

 

And how does one make hy-matter? In very, very big particle accelerators -- so big they can only be built in space. Power them in turn with thermoneclear fusion reactors. And to fuel the banks fo fusion reactors, park the whole assemblage in syncronous orbit around a jovian planet, and drop an orbital tower pipeline into its atmosphere to such up hydrogen. I had the two big hy-matter factories at Jupiter and Barnard's Star. The Chinese extrasolar colony of Tianchi was building its own hy-matter factory to compete, but it was much smaller. The hy-matter factories had been major battle sites in the Cladist Wars... battles conducted very carefully, because nobody wanted to damage them.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

32 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

G. Harry Stine's Space Power lays out a fairly detailed plan for shifting civilization to solar power using satellites equipped with huge panels of solar cells. The great problems with Earth-based solar power, after all, are that solar energy is diffuse and unavailable half the time. In space, though, it's always sunny and there's plenty of room. Of course, lifting all those satellites into orbit would carry a prohibitive cost... but you can make it all much cheaper by getting raw materials from the Moon. The greatest practical difficulties remain those Stine found when he wrote the book in 1981: Start up costs are too high for private industry or even any single government, and the legal issues for the necessary partnerships are not yet worked out. But there is no technological impediment, and Stine even works out how a solar power satellite system could benefit less developed countries that lack an electrical grid.

 

It would be an excellent system for a nearish-future, hard-SF setting.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Does Stine discuss the efficiency factor? Broadcasting power through atmosphere will cause a lot of signal diffusion, wasting energy. And what happens if a glitch causes the satellite to shift alignment and broadcast over a populated area?

[Asperion]

Two forms that have been used strongly in the past and lessened up recently are matter/antimatter and zero point energy (ZPEr). In current reality,  both are either HIGHLY expensive or some other reason not available.  However,  people being what they are cannot leave any problem alone.  Due to this,  I believe that both of these energies will eventually become available to humanity. 

[Lord Liaden]

To date, no one has come up with a scientifically feasible theory on how to draw enough zero point energy to accomplish anything useful. At least matter-antimatter reactions can be mechanically visualized.

 

We should probably get controlled nuclear fusion working first.

[DShomshak]

23 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Does Stine discuss the efficiency factor? Broadcasting power through atmosphere will cause a lot of signal diffusion, wasting energy. And what happens if a glitch causes the satellite to shift alignment and broadcast over a populated area?

IIRC (it's been a few decades since I read this), he does. The microwave beam is already so diffuse that atmospheric distortion shouldn't matter much. (The rectifying antenna to turn the microwave beam back into electric current covers a cres -- a lot of land, but you can do other things with the land as well, such as farm.) The beam is also so diffuse that Stine claims it won't hurt anyone. Prolonged exposure...? Eh, I'm not sure I'd want to live directly in the beam, but it's no Death Ray. The system *is*inefficient -- solar cells still aren't that efficient last I heard, they were worse in 1981, and there's another loss in conversion back to electricity. The whole scheme is predicated on the input of solar energy being free, and low operating costs once the satellites and rectennas are in place.

 

It would all, of course, be terrible for Earth-based astronomers. But once you have sufficient space-based industry to impledment the system, you put all the observatories in space, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Scott Ruggels]

Wouldn't Microwaves beamed from space, heat up water molecules in the atmosphere, and make the temperature situation worse?

[L. Marcus]

That depends on the frequencies of the microwaves, I imagine.

[IndianaJoe3]

17 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Wouldn't Microwaves beamed from space, heat up water molecules in the atmosphere, and make the temperature situation worse?

 

17 hours ago, L. Marcus said:

That depends on the frequencies of the microwaves, I imagine.

 

It does. Above a certain wavelength, the atmosphere is effectively transparent.

[DentArthurDent]

ESA in 2022

“Space-based solar power is getting serious—can it solve Earth’s energy woes?“

https://www.science.org/content/article/space-based-solar-power-getting-serious-can-it-solve-earth-s-energy-woes

 

Japan in 2015

“Japan space scientists make wireless energy breakthrough“

https://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html

[Chris Goodwin]

Most of our energy generation is based on turning a wheel.  We've done it with muscle power, wind (windmills), cold water (waterwheels), boiling water (coal and nuclear), and expansion of burning gases (internal combustion). 

[Lord Liaden]

That's one of the things I find really interesting about the Incas, the largest pre-Columbian imperial civilization in the Americas. Their whole cultural area never used the wheel for any of the things we assume. They did know the concept -- wheeled children's toys were made during their era -- but no vehicles or machines for transportation or construction. It is worth noting that the Andean cultural tradition developed among the vast Andes Mountains of South America, where roads are necessarily narrow, so things like wagons and chariots would have been impractical. There were also no native horses or large beasts of burden to pull them. Which makes the Incas' massive stone constructions even more impressive.

[DShomshak]

The Incas also had no form of money, or even proto-money, according to Goldstein's Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. The state collected all goods produced, then redistributed them to the populace as it saw fit. Of course, all labor was also centrally planned and compulsory. An "existence proof" that such a society can function. I make no judgement as to whether such a political economy is desirable.

 

They also got by without writing, though the knotted-cord "quipu" were a form of record-keeping to manage all the collection and redistribution. All in all, a good source of inspiration for Fantasy or SF societies that go beyond the standard tropes.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

The Meso-American civilizations, e.g. Aztecs and Mayas, are another outstanding example. Monumental stone architecture, elaborate writing system, sophisticated mathematical and astronomical knowledge, stratified urban society. No worked metal harder than copper -- pure neolithic tool use. Further demonstrates that what we tend to think of as the inevitable evolution of technology, is driven by a variety of non-ubiquitous factors.

 

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

All in all, a good source of inspiration for Fantasy or SF societies that go beyond the standard tropes.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

[shameless self-promotion] I ran with a brief CU reference and Inca heritage to develop The Valley of Night. [/shameless self-promotion]

[novi]

On 9/24/2022 at 12:38 PM, DShomshak said:

IIRC (it's been a few decades since I read this), he does. The microwave beam is already so diffuse that atmospheric distortion shouldn't matter much. (The rectifying antenna to turn the microwave beam back into electric current covers a cres -- a lot of land, but you can do other things with the land as well, such as farm.) The beam is also so diffuse that Stine claims it won't hurt anyone. Prolonged exposure...? Eh, I'm not sure I'd want to live directly in the beam, but it's no Death Ray. The system *is*inefficient -- solar cells still aren't that efficient last I heard, they were worse in 1981, and there's another loss in conversion back to electricity. The whole scheme is predicated on the input of solar energy being free, and low operating costs once the satellites and rectennas are in place.

 

It would all, of course, be terrible for Earth-based astronomers. But once you have sufficient space-based industry to impledment the system, you put all the observatories in space, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

You run into fundamental limitations of the laws of physics on this one, namely optics and the nature of waves.  We don't know of any way to perfectly focus a beam of energy, so real light beams spread out over distance.  Current technology can only narrow a beam of microwaves down to about several kilometers wide from geosynchronus orbit.  This puts it at similar to lower intensity than natural sunlight.

 

Inefficiencies abound, but one of the reasons for using microwave beams is that an antenna opaque to microwaves can be ~99% transparent to visible light, so you can just put it over farmland to double up the land use.

 

On 9/24/2022 at 5:29 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

Wouldn't Microwaves beamed from space, heat up water molecules in the atmosphere, and make the temperature situation worse?

 

And while you are dumping energy into the system, it's presumably replacing a bunch of thermal power plants, so things approximately even out.  The temperature situation is not about how much heat we make, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, which changes the equilibrium temperature of the planet.  Humans make a bunch of heat, which can be local problems, but on the whole is mostly noise on the scale of the entire planet.  At least for a few more centuries.

 

On 9/24/2022 at 10:31 AM, Asperion said:

Two forms that have been used strongly in the past and lessened up recently are matter/antimatter and zero point energy (ZPEr). In current reality,  both are either HIGHLY expensive or some other reason not available.  However,  people being what they are cannot leave any problem alone.  Due to this,  I believe that both of these energies will eventually become available to humanity. 

 

I can see antimatter power as something happening someday.  There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but I don't know of any more efficient and compact source of energy allowed by the current laws of physics.  In practice, it's likely to be more of an energy storage medium than anything else, as it requires a prohibitive amount of energy and infrastructure to create.  And while I can foresee science developing more efficient ways to produce antimatter, I'm pretty sure that we're not getting around the conservation of energy/mass on this, so you will never have net energy from making antimatter.  It's just ridiculously compact - an ounce of antimatter stores about a megaton of TNT worth of energy.

 

As for zero-point energy, it is completely BS and pseudoscience.  It is very literally the lowest possible energy state in the universe, a complete vacuum at absolute zero.  Now, because of quantum physics, specifically the uncertainty principle, you can't actually reach that perfect zero.  There's always going to be a little left over energy fluctuating around.  It's actually possible to measure this, partly due to something called the Casimir effect, and partly because even if we can't do anything with it, it still counts as energy for the purposes of General Relativity.  And those measurements give us a really, really tiny, but positive value.

 

As for why people thought it might be a limitless source of energy, IIRC, is something Richard Feynman doodled on the back of an envelope in the 50s.  Basically, it was a calculation of how much energy could be in the Zero Point state.  Depending on the assumptions you make, you can get a stupidly, hugely big number, the "boil all the earth's oceans with the energy in a coffee cup" result.  This is because Quantum mechanics doesn't care about the total amount of energy, just the differences between available energy states.  There are reasons to expect the Zero Point energy is as big as it can be.  The fact that it has been observed to be very small, a difference by a factor of over a googol, is regarded as something of a problem by physicists.

 

In any case, if you still want to try to use Zero Point energy, you would somehow have to produce a vacuum with a lower energy state than the universe, so that energy could flow into it.  Aside from all the other issues, that would destroy the universe, something called "False Vacuum Decay".  Basically, your lower energy state would be more stable than the current vacuum, and would proceed to Ice-Nine the universe. 

 

On 11/7/2022 at 10:24 AM, Chris Goodwin said:

Most of our energy generation is based on turning a wheel.  We've done it with muscle power, wind (windmills), cold water (waterwheels), boiling water (coal and nuclear), and expansion of burning gases (internal combustion). 

 

Yup, and that's actually one of the big limitations on nuclear power, is that it's still technically steam power.  Even more mindbogglingly, that was the grand plan for fusion power for a long time, that it would still be steam that makes the electricity.  I'm not sure what the current state-of-speculation is, so somebody may have a better plan, but I don't know it.