Future Possibilities

This is long term speculative stuff. Mostly it shows that we can bypass most conceivable limits to growth if we move most of our power production, communications, computation, and industrial processes into space and away from the biosphere.

Terascale Arrays and Beam Power

The m288 orbit region can hold perhaps 10 to 100 trillion serversats. This may be far more than is needed to provide foreseeable computation and communication needs, so many of the later generations of server-sats may become "compute-light" and "transmit-heavy", beaming the power as microwaves to rectenna arrays on the ground, producing power for the electrical grid. Because the microwave beams are steerable, they can move from peak load center to peak load center as needed, reducing long-lines requirements. They can even be steered in circles around 6 rectenna grids, generating 3 phase AC power. This is an old idea - solar power satellites - but arrays of server-sats are much lower mass, cheaper, and easier to deploy than large rigid systems of solar cells, structure, and antennas.

However, high density microwave beams are not healthy - while they can be stopped by a thin layer of metal, but birds are not shielded. Unless it can be shown that birds can be kept away from the rectennas, they should only be placed where birds aren't. Perhaps the best place for rectennas is over deep ocean, far from land and far from the paths of feeding and migratory birds. A few centimeters of ocean water will stop the power that leaks through the rectenna.

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When the population of server-sats reaches the high trillions, they will intercept far more of the radiation particles in the van Allen belt, reducing the radiation flux and the radiation damage to individual server-sats. This will increase their lifetime, and so the number of server-sats that wear out per year may level off, even as the total number increases.

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High Orbit Arrays

For the first decade or two, server sky will coexist with traditional geosynchronous satellites, but as the traditional satellites age and become a very small part of the total communication bandwidth around the earth, they will likely be replaced by more server-sats. Very high orbits will be perturbed too much by the moon, but orbits above m720 ( 20295 km radius ) and below 5 day sidereal orbits ( 123300 km radius ) are probably usable. Lets assume the serversats are deployed "thickly" around the 5 day orbit shell, and that they intercept 4% of the total sunlight reaching this region ( reducing the light to the earth by about 1%, much more around the edges of the server-sat "globe". The total power intercepted is 2.4E18 watts. If 1E15w = 1000Terawatts are beamed to earth, that equals the power that is blocked by the server-sats, and provides 100kW of electrical energy for each of 10 billion inhabitants (US usage in 2009 is around 10kW per capita). The rest of the power stays in orbit for orbital computation, industrial processes, etc.

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Lunar and Asteroidal Materials

Most of the mass of a server-sat is silicon, glass, and aluminum, which are also most of the mass of rock, including lunar rock. It may be a long time before we can manufacture solar cells off the planet, and much longer before we could manufacture deep submicron integrated circuits. But the materials on the moon are in a lower gravity well, and there are few ecological risks to using large amounts of lunar material to manufacture solar cells and glass substrates, and launching them with electromagnetic launchers. A cubic meter of lunar regolith could be used to manufacture perhaps half a million 3 gram server-sat "chassis", which could be mated to earth-manufactured integrated circuits in an automated facility in orbit. A cubic kilometer of regolith could manufacture half a trillion server-sats. Lifting those server-sats off the moon and placing them in an m288 orbit would require about 1e19 joules (depending on how they were captured), which is about as much energy as they would produce in half an hour.

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Deep Space Arrays

There is a lot of room in the solar system. Outside the orbit of the earth, most of the light is dumped into interstellar space. Server-sats orbiting between Earth (1.5E11 meters from the sun) and Mars (2.3E11 meters) could capture much of the light of the sun. If there were enough of them, it would increase the apparent infrared temperature of the sky, which would in turn increase the temperature of the Earth. If the earth temperature increase was limited to 1C, then the effective sky temperature could increase from 2.7K to 100K. If the server-sats were at 1.9E11 meters distance from the sun, receiving 800 watts per square meter and at an equilibrium temperature of 270K, then they could cover about 2% of the sky. That intercepts about 7E24 watts of light, and might generate about 1E24 watts of usable electric power for computation and industrial purposes.

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Low cost launch

The launch loop is an electrically powered earth-to-high orbit launch system. The main construction and operating cost of a launch loop is electricity. At 10 cents per kilowatt hour, and a quick payback of capital, a launch loop can put a kilogram into orbit for about $5, and a small launch loop can launch 80 tons into high orbit per hour.

Assuming extra mass for the satellite bus and the apogee insertion motor, the cost of orbiting a 30 gram, 5 watts-to-ground-collector server sat will be on the order of 50 cents. If that 5 watts can be collected for another 50 cents of rectenna infrastructure, and the mechanism that does so lasts 20,000 hours, that is 100 kilowatt hours per dollar invested. This drops the cost of further launches, and thinning the server sats down to 3 grams will save more. In time, the cost can drop still more by building apogee capture systems such as rotating tethers (with some payloads sent around the moon to add momentum back to the tether system).

The result will never be free space launch, or "power too cheap to meter", but it can result in very low cost space launch and electric energy on the earth - 50 cents per kilogram, and a 50 cents per megawatt-hour, may be possible someday.

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Scientific sensors

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