Has the World Finally Caught Up with Isaac Asimov's Vision?

Solar SatelliteI vividly remem­ber meet­ing Isaac Asi­mov when I was a teenager. My father had man­aged to get him as a speaker at the col­lege he was teach­ing, where as part of a Fes­ti­val on The Future, the Sci­ence Fic­tion writer was being asked to give a lec­ture on his advice for the future. Besides his impres­sive mutton-chop side­burns and lively demeanor, I also remem­ber what he spoke about.

One of the main points of his talk was that he found him­self greatly influ­enced by an early piece of Sci­ence Fic­tion him­self. It was a novel called “The Man Who Awoke”, writ­ten in 1933 by Lawrence Man­ning. Despite some silly dia­log and flat char­ac­ters, I actu­ally had read the book and really liked it. It was about a rich her­mit named Nor­man Win­ters, who found a way to put him­self into sus­pended ani­ma­tion in a sub­ter­ranean cham­ber he’d con­structed, for thou­sands of years at a time, mak­ing him a sort of one-way time trav­eler. When he first wakes up in the year 5000AD, all of the world’s fos­sil fuels have been used up, and the peo­ple alive at that point use alco­hol refined from wood pulp as a fuel, and referred to the past cen­turies as the Great Age of Waste. The book is a com­pendium of pop­u­lar Sci­ence Fic­tion plots: in later chap­ters, in the times that Win­ters awakes cen­turies later, the Earth is run by a tyran­ni­cal cen­tral com­puter (see any num­ber of Star Trek and other Sci-Fi series plots), then he tries to inter­vene with a city of sleep­ers who can pro­gram their own dreams (see The Matrix), he then finds a world dom­i­nated by anar­chists in enor­mous walk­ing robots who per­form Genetic Exper­i­ments, and finally, he reaches the age where Man dis­cov­ers Immor­tal­ity (and just in time for him, too).

It was that first episode, how­ever, that struck Asi­mov as down­right plau­si­ble; as we know very well today, there are only finite reserves of fos­sil fuels, and we now know that burn­ing them at the rate we’ve been doing for power and trans­porta­tion has led to cat­a­strophic cli­mate changes. After years of study and thought, Asi­mov (back in the 1970’s, when he gave this lec­ture) sug­gested a scheme where we launched satel­lites into geo­sta­tion­ary orbit, much the way weather satel­lites are today. These satel­lites, how­ever, would use arrays of solar cells to col­lect the sun’s energy and con­vert it into elec­tric­ity. To get that power back to the earth, Asi­mov sug­gested a microwave beam, that like a tower between the earth and the satel­lite, would never move, and allow us to con­tin­u­ously har­vest power, with­out any inter­rup­tions of clouds or storms.

Much of Asimov’s pro­posal was dis­missed in the 1970’s, mostly because it was too expen­sive, par­tic­u­larly when you fac­tored in all of the rock­ets that you would need to launch and man­power you’d need to sup­port in space to build such a struc­ture. A lot of peo­ple were still in denial that mankind would ever really run out of oil, despite the Energy Cri­sis of 1973 being a clear warn­ing shot off the US’s bow.

Today, with Manning’s 1933 prophecy com­ing true, and the even more seri­ous prob­lem of global warm­ing from the Green­house Effect, Asimov’s pro­posal is start­ing to look far more attrac­tive. In fact, if you fac­tor in the sav­ings we get by using robots to build the solar arrays (another Asi­mov cre­ation, but oddly enough, he never dis­cussed using them to help build his orbital con­struc­tions), improve­ments in pho­to­voltaic effi­ciency, newer, lighter mate­ri­als, and the idea starts to gain credibility.

I found that last bit out in an arti­cle on the web site for New Sci­en­tist, where the US Pen­ta­gon has sug­gested Space-Based Solar Power Facil­i­ties as a poten­tial solu­tion to our energy problems:

A report released yes­ter­day by the National Secu­rity Space Office (NSSO) rec­om­mends that the US gov­ern­ment spon­sor projects to demon­strate solar-power-generating satel­lites and pro­vide finan­cial incen­tives for fur­ther pri­vate devel­op­ment of the technology.

Space-based solar power would use kilometer-sized solar panel arrays to gather sun­light in orbit. It would then beam power down to Earth in the form of microwaves or a laser, which would be col­lected in anten­nas on the ground and then con­verted to elec­tric­ity. Unlike solar pan­els based on the ground, solar power satel­lites placed in geo­sta­tion­ary orbit above the Earth could oper­ate at night and dur­ing cloudy conditions.

“We think we can be a cat­a­lyst to make this tech­nol­ogy advance,” said US Marine Corps lieu­tenant colonel Paul Damp­housse of the NSSO at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day in Wash­ing­ton, DC, US.

The NSSO report rec­om­mends that the US gov­ern­ment spend $10 bil­lion over the next 10 years to build a test satel­lite capa­ble of beam­ing 10 megawatts of elec­tric power down to Earth.

My favourite part of the arti­cle comes right at the end:

…the NSSO and its sup­port­ers say that no fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tific break­throughs are nec­es­sary to pro­ceed with the idea and that space-based solar power will be prac­ti­cal in the next few decades.

“There are no tech­nol­ogy hur­dles that are show stop­pers right now,” said Damphousse.

So, noth­ing new to invent, and we could have much of the prob­lems of the end of cheap oil and Green­house gas buildup fixed within, say, 15 years. That might just save the human race from extinc­tion (even if we do lose the Polar Bear).

I am aware of the dan­gers of a fixed and con­tin­u­ous microwave beam, and we have no idea what it would do the atmos­phere. I cer­tainly wouldn’t want to be a bird (or plane) that wan­dered too close to the beam itself. Nev­er­the­less, I can’t help think­ing that if we’d only lis­tened to Asi­mov, when I met him back in the 1970s, we’d be in much bet­ter shape now, but maybe it’s not too late to heed his advice 30 years later.

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By David Drucker | Filed in Tech | October 13, 2007 10:57 pm

18 Comments to “Has the World Finally Caught Up with Isaac Asimov's Vision?”

  1. AvatarJan Karlsbjerg
    Posted: Oct 13th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
    1

    Sorry David, but the num­bers just don’t add up at all:

    The fact that no “fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tific break­throughs are nec­es­sary” just means that the project is pos­si­ble using today’s tech­nol­ogy (just like wind power, wave power, etc. etc.), but you also saw the num­bers, right? “10 bil­lion dol­lars over a ten year period to build a test satel­lite capa­ble of beam­ing 10 megawatts of elec­tric power down to earth”.

    In the year 2000, the com­bined capac­ity of U.S. elec­tric power plants was 604,514 megawatts [Offi­cial energy sta­tis­tics from the U.S. gov­ern­ment]

    When I was a kid in the 70’s I kept hear­ing on the news that there was 20 years of oil left. Now, 30 years later, the num­ber is 40 or 50 years, I think. They keep find­ing more of the stuff. Oil is still way too cheap, and the result­ing pol­lu­tion is still mostly free (i.e. it’s not the ones who pol­lute who pay). That needs to change before any­thing else will change.

    I don’t buy into the 15 year hori­zon on fix­ing the problems.
  2. Avatarddrucker
    Posted: Oct 14th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
    2
    Author Comment

    Jan — You’re right that 10 megawatts cer­tainly doesn’t even begin to take a bite out of 604+ megawatts. I guess I’m prob­a­bly too opti­mistic (and the thought that a nerdy Sci Fi Author of the ‘70s had ‘the answer’ all along is prob­a­bly not a real­is­tic thought, either, but it surely would be the best Revenge of the Nerds of all time!)

    I’m also now won­der­ing what would hap­pen to the elec­tric­ity after it reached the earth in that tow­er­ing microwave beam; how would it get sent around? How would it get stored? How would we con­tinue to build the machines that we’d need in order to turn that elec­tric­ity into motion, heat, and other work? There are so many holes in the sce­nario, that I now begin to won­der how New Sci­en­tist could make so many leaps of faith in the story.

    I guess there are no easy answers, and worst of all, you’re absolutely right about the iner­tia that has infected the devel­oped world with respect to chang­ing our habits, lifestyles and appetites when it comes to the gulp­ing of nat­ural resources and gen­er­at­ing of pol­lu­tion. Even if some cat­a­clysmic Nat­ural Dis­as­ter (and one worse than Kat­rina, and cen­tered upon an afflu­ent White sub­urb) hits the US, they won’t be able to put 2 and 2 together and change. I’ve no con­fi­dence in the Amer­i­can pub­lic or politi­cians, but I guess I haven’t quite given up on hi-tech com­pa­nies. Maybe I should.
  3. AvatarJan Karlsbjerg
    Posted: Oct 21st, 2007 at 9:28 pm
    3

    I almost hate to do it, but the cur­rent US con­sump­tion is not 604 megawatts, it’s 604 thou­sand megawatt = 604 gigawatt.
  4. AvatarMilander
    Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 10:46 am
    4

    ddrucker — ” I’m also now won­der­ing what would hap­pen to the elec­tric­ity after it reached the earth in that tow­er­ing microwave beam; how would it get sent around? How would it get stored? How would we con­tinue to build the machines that we’d need in order to turn that elec­tric­ity into motion, heat, and other work? There are so many holes in the sce­nario, that I now begin to won­der how New Sci­en­tist could make so many leaps of faith in the story. ”

    How do you think it gets sent around now? How do you think it gets stored now? your com­ment on how would we build the machines to use the elec­tric­ity is sim­ply dumb.

    The project is pos­si­ble and 99% of the solu­tions are here now it is just a ques­tion of willpower and neces­sity to build it. It is NOT a pipe dream and does not require any ‘leap of faith’.
  5. Avatarddrucker
    Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
    5
    Author Comment

    Geez, I’m get­ting it com­ing and going.

    Milan­der, I’m not sure what you think is dumb about the fact that there are cur­rently no electric-powered dump-trucks, heli­copters or even fac­to­ries to make these machines. I also think that say­ing that 99% of the solu­tions are here strikes me as an even greater stretch than the arti­cle suggested.

    As for the project being a ques­tion of willpower and neces­sity to build it, I agree, but it, like any other mas­sive energy project in which some of the ele­ments are not fully defined (like the con­ver­sion of the energy to and from microwaves, the envi­ron­men­tal impact of a mas­sive microwave beam, how to best keep the beam steady and avoid­ing any chance of things going hor­ri­bly wrong and the beam blast­ing across the coun­try­side, and other ‘minor’ details) is indeed a ‘leap of faith’ in the design­ers and engi­neers, at the very least. Has any­body ever con­verted Microwave energy to elec­tric­ity at the scale they’re talk­ing about? I don’t think so. What hap­pens to the effi­ciency of con­ver­sion at that level of trans­fer? What do you shield work­ers at the receiv­ing sta­tion from microwave leak­age with? And just how do you design the receiv­ing sta­tion, not to men­tion the satel­lite itself? The largest solar array cur­rently in orbit is prob­a­bly the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion, and just yes­ter­day astro­nauts had to per­form what sounded like a haz­ardous space­walk in order to repair a ‘tear’ in the array. To sim­ply say that this is only a lack of will is over­stat­ing the case. I’m with you on that, but call­ing any ques­tion­ing of miss­ing details (and there were plenty of them) ‘dumb’ is doing a dis­ser­vice to your argument.
  6. AvatarNoble Bear
    Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
    6

    Don’t see why this should be such an impos­si­ble task, con­sid­er­ing the alter­na­tives. A bil­lion dol­lars a year to try out what could mean an unlim­ited energy resource is peanuts, please do com­pare this sum of money to the cost of — par­don the cliche — the Gulf War. Or, for that mat­ter the cost of drilling, refin­ing, trans­port­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing petro­leum world wide.

    Nat­u­rally, it’s to be expected that an ini­tial test run would pro­duce a minute amount of energy. How much petro­leum was refined and used as fuel a hun­dred years ago? How exten­sive a a tool was the inter­net fif­teen years ago? Obvi­ously, every new tech­nol­ogy ini­tially only gen­er­ates a loss of invest­ment, that’s just how inven­tion fund­ing works.

    With a few test facil­i­ties improv­ing and pop­u­lar­iz­ing solar power, we could hope for vir­tu­ally free energy within our life time. Imag­ine the con­se­quences of that sit­u­a­tion — with the Mid­dle East no longer being of imper­a­tive strate­gic impor­tance, maybe there’d be a chance for peace in that war-torn region. All the resources we put into energy pro­duc­tion today could be redi­rected into what­ever we choose. Such as free health care, edu­ca­tion and fresh drink­ing water for every­one on the planet, per­haps. Wanna be nerdy about it? We could also spend all those tril­lions of dol­lars annu­ally wasted on petro­leum prod­ucts that poi­son the planet on col­o­niz­ing space. Or any­thing else you fancy.

    Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, or at the very least a pos­si­bil­ity worth explor­ing, as our cur­rent way of life has warped our sur­round­ings to the point where we con­sider cli­mate change a banality.
  7. Avatarpete
    Posted: Nov 7th, 2007 at 8:26 am
    7

    All visions attract naysay­ers. Accept­ing the chal­lenge of some­thing which might not work is vastly prefer­able to inaction.
  8. AvatarMartin
    Posted: Nov 7th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
    8

    Struc­tures in orbit will always be nice tar­gets for space junk. Large solar pan­ells would be destroyed rather quickly.
  9. Avatartoolbar
    Posted: Nov 8th, 2007 at 12:07 am
    9

    NO! This is exactly what destroyed the planet Krypton!!!
  10. AvatarNevs
    Posted: Nov 8th, 2007 at 6:55 am
    10

    While huge arrays of solar pan­els beam­ing “free” energy back to us on Earth are cer­tainly atten­tion grab­bing, I can’t help but feel there are far more prac­ti­cal solu­tions to the renew­able energy prob­lem avail­able with­out need­ing to take the risk of launch into orbit, or foot the enor­mous bill.

    Geot­her­mal “hot-rock” gen­er­a­tion — where holes are drilled down to a large body of hot, porous rock and water pumped down, heated as it goes through the rock and then pumped back up to drive tur­bines are being inves­ti­gated. Sounds out­landish, but is appar­ently feasible.

    In Aus­tralia a new wave gen­er­a­tion design is being devel­oped (see http://ceto.com.au/home.php ) that is com­pletely sub­merged (ship and storm safe), and has costs per unit of energy com­pa­ra­ble to wind gen­er­a­tion but is suit­able for base load (ie 24/7) — the wave energy is always there to be extracted, unlike wind or solar.

    Also, earth based solar farms where mir­rors focus sun­light onto heat­ing pipes to heat a work­ing fluid (which can be stored for use dur­ing the night) seem to be devel­op­ing quite well.

    Get­ting to my point — I think there will be other, eas­ier energy sources exploited well before orbit­ing solar farms appear.

    Finally, what would the car­bon foot­print of build­ing and launch­ing a solar satel­lite sys­tem be? How long would it need to pro­duce for to off­set that, and how would that com­pare to its ser­vice life­time? Don’t wanna be a grinch, but I just don’t see orbit being christ­mas. Yet.
  11. AvatarMarty
    Posted: Nov 8th, 2007 at 7:16 am
    11

    one point twenty-one gigawatts!
  12. AvatarChris
    Posted: Nov 8th, 2007 at 8:20 am
    12

    To address Jan’s com­ments about the increas­ing size of oil reserves, there’s an easy expla­na­tion as to why reserves are increasing.

    Reserve num­bers are directly related to the price of oil. The exact mean­ing of the term is how much oil is recov­er­able at the given price of oil…Essentially, oil that is unprof­itable to get is not counted as reserves. The price is going up today and so are reserves.

    Canada’s oil sands (a LOT of oil) got added around $50 Bbl, I believe. There’s also the mat­ter of turn­ing Coal into Oil, which becomes prof­itable at around $65 Bbl, and coal reserves are at around 200–250 years.

    Also worth not­ing is that OPEC changed some of its rules in the 80’s so that reserves affected how much a nation could sell…and the “offi­cial” reserves of the OPEC coun­tries sud­denly dou­bled with­out any change in price or any new explo­ration. So some of the reserves don’t even exist.

    In any case, it’s the end of cheap oil, just not the end of oil. Not yet, anyway.
  13. AvatarJoe
    Posted: Nov 8th, 2007 at 10:42 am
    13

    Weird, I noticed that “Milan­der” left a neg­a­tive com­ment here. I thought the name looked famil­iar, then I remem­bered that he’d left a neg­a­tive com­ment here: http://www.ecojoes.com/using-a-cloth-bag-instead-of-paper-or-plastic/

    It’s the sec­ond com­ment. I guess he/she is just a “Neg­a­tive Nancy”.
  14. AvatarTholaris
    Posted: Nov 9th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
    14

    I’m not sure neg­a­tive com­ments are at all called for or of use in this case as they are not con­struc­tive in nature, and they only give an opin­ion instead of stat­ing fact. “That is dumb” is an opin­ion, not a fact. If it were a fact, it would be sup­ported with evi­dence or at least a valid argu­ment (which, now that I think of it, would con­tain evidence).

    Seri­ously, how much change can this arti­cle affect? In turn, take into con­sid­er­a­tion how much change the com­ment will make on an arti­cle that makes prac­ti­cally no change what­so­ever. All the arti­cle is doing is relay­ing infor­ma­tion already reported some­where else, and adding the bit about it being Issac Asimov’s idea originally.

    The idea in the arti­cle is an inter­est­ing one. The best fea­ture I could sug­gest about orbit­ing solar pan­els is the abil­ity to point the energy wher­ever you need it. Set­ting up a mil­i­tary base in the mid­dle of the jun­gle or a sandy expanse nowhere near a power sta­tion? Just cre­ate a portable receiver and have the beam (maybe even just a por­tion of the beam) redi­rected to your cur­rent posi­tion. The same could be said for orbit­ing space sta­tions that might slip into shadow, or for boost­ing the power on some futur­is­tic moon settlement.

    Sure, a huge solar “sail” would prob­a­bly get torn by the occa­sional space debris, but would it really be that expen­sive of an obsta­cle that it would out-weigh the advan­tages gained from its implementation?

    My biggest fear would be that the beam would be used as a weapon. Imag­ine a 10 megawatt microwave beam able to hit any point on an entire hemi­sphere. Once the AI advances beyond human con­trol, we’ll have spy satel­lites cou­pled to solar-powered microwave can­nons and each time we dis­obey the tyran­ni­cal, mechan­i­cal gods we’ll get an unfriendly taze from the skies.

    Then again, I’m not all that con­cerned about global warm­ing and the rate of energy con­sump­tion as I’m sure we’ll nuke our­selves into obliv­ion long before we run out of fos­sil fuels. If we don’t, I’m of the mind that we’ll nuke each other fight­ing for the last few drops of oil, and any sur­vivors will live in a hell unimag­in­able to you or I and will prob­a­bly kill them­selves to end their suffering.

    Can this com­ment get any longer? Why, of course!

    I’d finally like to say to the nay-sayers: just because obsta­cles exist does not mean we should give up think­ing of solutions.
  15. Avatarsrv
    Posted: Nov 9th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
    15

    It’ll make a great weapon.
  16. AvatarCharles F. Myers
    Posted: Nov 11th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
    16

    50 years ago peo­ple said that peo­ple walk­ing in space was IMPOSSIBLE. No one with half a brain can deny that the ice caps are melt­ing, we have a hole in our atmos­phere and tem­per­a­tures are ris­ing faster then gas prices. Why do peo­ple reject any idea there pea sized brain can not under­stand. We must do some­thing. This sounds as good as not doing nothing.
  17. AvatarBart
    Posted: Nov 12th, 2007 at 2:37 am
    17

    Would you like to live next to a gigawatt beam that could cook you in a sec­ond if the aim of the sender was off by the mer­est frac­tion of a degree? Even if there were guar­an­tees against use as as weapon (which I would not trust) I wouldn’t trust my life to such technology.
  18. pingback pingback:
    Posted: Dec 27th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
    18
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