{"id":7154,"date":"2016-09-14T20:46:34","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T19:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7154"},"modified":"2016-09-14T20:52:39","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T19:52:39","slug":"mission-stars-anyone-got-spare-100gwp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7154","title":{"rendered":"Mission to the stars -anyone got a spare 100GWp?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sol_view_from_alpcena1\"<\/a>This blog likes to keep its feet firmly on the the ground and not up in the stars.\u00a0 However on Sunday I happened to chance on the “Sky at Night” which was talking about a mission to the stars.\u00a0 This is something I had heard about in the news, Professor Stephen Hawking is involved as are a load of tech billionaires.\u00a0 The idea is to shoot micro probes to the nearest star or nearby stars at up to 20% of the speed of light.\u00a0 At this speed getting to Proxima Centauri and even a peak at the newly discovered planet orbiting it.<\/p>\n

The idea is to launch some very small probes (lots of them) in orbit.\u00a0 They would unfurl a microspically thin solar sail.\u00a0 LASERs on earth would blast the sail with light accelerating them rapidly towards the speed of light.\u00a0 There are a number of technical problems with this.\u00a0 How to communicate with the probes at such speeds, what to make the sail out of so it survives space and high powered LASER blasts and where the power is going to come from?<\/p>\n

Leaving aside moral and cost concerns (the project is really only the same cost as the large Hadron Collider), a 100GW is a lot of juice.\u00a0 There seems to be some question as to whether all this is needed at once, the projects website is very vague.\u00a0 However, this amount of energy is not trivial.\u00a0 This got me thinking would we need world wide power grid.\u00a0 Maybe useful for a number of reasons, but technically probably be impossible with current transmission technology.\u00a0 Also linking continents wouldn’t be worth it with the levels of transmission power that current interconnectors have.\u00a0 Next it got me thinking about total spare capacity at night.\u00a0 The obvious place to start is the US.\u00a0 It has a 1000GWp capacity.\u00a0 Obviously not all this is available all the time but in principle the US might be able to provide the power at night time.\u00a0 This is today though and not in 20 years time when the starshot is being talked about. Then patterns of energy use such as electric cars and changes in capacity might make this far more difficult.<\/p>\n

The wikipedia page<\/a> is better than the official project website.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog likes to keep its feet firmly on the the ground and not up in the stars.\u00a0 However on Sunday I happened to chance on the “Sky at Night” which was talking about a mission to the stars.\u00a0 This … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMission to the stars -anyone got a spare 100GWp? - The oil lamp - shining God's light on peak oil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7154\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7154\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7154\",\"name\":\"Mission to the stars -anyone got a spare 100GWp? 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