zlacker

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

>>raegis+(OP)
Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.

That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.

I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.

>>keepam+u6
Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.

>>wooooo+7g
if the thermal radiation panels have ~3 x the area of the solar panels, the temperature of the satellite can be contained to about 300 K (27 deg C). Ctrl+F:pyramid to find my calculations.

>>Doctor+nK
I looked, and you outlined a solution that would be hard to achieve in a vacuum chamber on earth. Now we're going to launch it into orbit and it will work great?

Building data centers in Antarctica with nuclear power would be easier. And still way harder than necessary.

>>wooooo+oM1
Yes, how would you simulate a 4K background in a vacuum chamber on earth... or you could just trust a law that has withstood 150 years the test of time by physicists...