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Shooting at the Sky, Mirrors in Space, & Science on the Blockchain
🕑 Added 2024-02-01 01:09:10 +0000 UTCShooting Down Space Debris
Ground-based nuclear fusion laser observatory tracks and fires at distant space debris targets. (Image Credit: Australian EOS).
EX-Fusion, a Japanese startup, is quite literally aiming at the sky. In cooperation with the Australian defence company Electro-Optics Systems (EOS), they are about to use a big laser to shoot small pieces of space debris out of orbit. According to a recent press release, they plan to use a high-power, diode-pumped, solid-state laser turned skywards from an EOS-owned observatory near Canberra, Australia.
EX-Fusion, as the name suggests, actually works on nuclear fusion and develops its lasers primarily to shoot at fuel pellets of hydrogen in the hope that they will fuse to helium and create energy. However, the laser power needed to knock a small piece of junk out of the sky is lower than that needed for nuclear fusion, and for the time being it’s probably a more achievable goal. Check out the official company statements here and here.
Mirrors in Space
Solspace, artist’s impression. Image: University of Glasgow
We have heard of the idea of putting mirrors into space to deflect sunlight and limit global warming. We have also heard of the idea of putting solar collectors into space, converting the energy into microwaves, and sending it to power stations on the ground. But this one was new to me: A group of scientists from the University of Glasgow has worked out a technologically simpler, if similarly ambitious, plan. They want to put mirrors into orbit to direct sunlight at existing solar arrays, thereby optimizing their power production.
The proposal, called Solspace, suggests the use of hexagonal reflectors with sides 250 meters long, each weighing about 3 tons, used to service 13 solar energy farms to deliver a total of 284 MWh energy daily. That might sound big, but compared to the plans for putting solar farms into space – with collectors usually spanning several kilometres – this one counts as small. While the plan currently would cost a prohibitive few thousand U.S. dollars per kilogram, the scientists expect the price to drop and the idea to become economically viable within the next decade. Read more about the project here, paper here.
Life on the Blockchain
An international team of chemists has recently exploited the same blockchain technology your little brother uses to store his crypto to generate the largest-ever network of simulated chemical reactions. They hoped to digitally replicate the rise of prebiotic molecules on early Earth. The blockchain technology made it possible to distribute computing needs flexibly and globally by creating a dedicated network that generated as many as 11 billion possible reactions.
The network indicates that some primitive metabolism may have emerged without enzymes, that metabolic cycles cross-talk with competing side reactions, and that self-replication was unlikely to have driven the emergence of life at the molecular level. While I strongly doubt this work will settle the question of the origin of life, it makes a strong case that blockchains aren’t entirely useless.
Press release here and the full article here.
Comments
That big reflectors look a bit like the AST Bluewalker satellite. Maybe they could have double use: to provide sunlight and 5G coverage direct to handheld.
How remarkably clever, the resorting by those Polish and Korean scientists of a blockchain approach to use the large Golem network of available supercomputers to calculate the huge number of chemical reactions needed for their project, but paying much less that way than if using supercomputer time offered by big commercial outfits such as Amazon. I recommend reading the Cell article, where these things are explained better and in more detail than in the Press Release. The same is applicable to any projects that require the use of supercomputers at an affordable price, for example in poorer nations where research funds and equipment are usually scarce. As to shooting space debris with lasers, using lasers to shoot anything down in space was banned during and since the Cold War and I did not know that was allowed now. If this works, it could be used to divert and, or destroy things that are found to be in a collision course with the International Space Station, instead of having to spend fuel to rise or lower the whole station, along with other larger space installations, necessary Earth observing satellites and important communication ones. The big ones in geostationary orbit, not those of Musk's or Bezos' problematic money-making vanity projects. But this has to be, as a matter of necessity, a national space agencies' international project, not a commercial, private one. And it probably will need a network of such laser stations to correct and fine-tune the falls of the debris so these end impacting the surface in safe places. Putting reflectors in space to send light to a solar farm is a new use of an old Science-Fiction idea (e.g. to warm up Mars as part of its terraforming, to make possible large-scale human habitation there, in King Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars", the first novel of the "Mars" trilogy.) Now, beyond Science-Fiction into reality ... I wish those attempting it now plenty of luck, as I feel they'll be needing it to succeed. Meaning luck in very large quantities. Also using reflected solar light will have the same problem as solar panel farms on Earth already have: cloudy days. Converting sunlight to radio waves, as proposed to do using rectennas would always work, but rectennas are too big to be viable to build them in space, the only way this can be done, any time soon. One important benefit of using solar reflectors and rectennas is that, if high enough, they could collect and send energy from sunlight to the receiving sites at night as well as during the day.
Shooting space waste out of the orbit by lasers seems to be a work for Sisyphos. Orbital mirrors to send more solar energy to existing solar power plants is the first time, I think it could have a realstic perspective among all these space dreams against climate change. Interesting topics again.
