About the "solar panels around the sun" video...

[KaareKanin]

First off, the usual disclaimer, I tried finding a thread about this, but no luck, so if this has been said before, I'm sorry...

 

Anyways, in that TechQuickie video, I feel they should have touched on where all that energy would end up... What I'm getting at is this:

Energy has a tendency to become heat sooner or later, and my understanding of popular scientific topics nowadays is that we kinda already have enough heat on earth as it is. I know, I know, this isn't something we'll se happen (in the foreseeable future), but it is an important point and something I feel lacked from the video.

 

A solution could be a massive heat pipe running up to space along with the space elevator to keep us cool, we PC folk like that kind of stuff

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

Lol a massive heat pipe...

[Gravesnear]

In space the only way to dissipate heat is radiantly. Radiant heat in space is locomotive iirc. Meaning that if something was radiating heat in space in a certain direction it would cause that object to move (VERY slightly) in the opposite direction. I don't know if this has to do with anything, I lost my train of thought.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Gravesnear said:

In space the only way to dissipate heat is radiantly. Radiant heat in space is locomotive iirc. Meaning that if something was radiating heat in space in a certain direction it would cause that object to move (VERY slightly) in the opposite direction. I don't know if this has to do with anything, I lost my train of thought.

Have a  giant track around the earth so the heat pipe can move?

[Gravesnear]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

Have a  giant track around the earth so the heat pipe can move?

well you could have another one on the other side of the earth to equalize the the locomotive force. However, I don't think a heat pipe will be very effective for a task  of this magnitude, also dumping heat into space isn't going to be very fast or effective in the  first place. But I like where this thread is going so ignore what I just said. Let's go with a moving track, it's more whimsical.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Gravesnear said:

well you could have another one on the other side of the earth to equalize the the locomotive force. However, I don't think a heat pipe will be very effective for a task  of this magnitude, also dumping heat into space isn't going to be very fast or effective in the  first place. But I like where this thread is going so ignore what I just said. Let's go with a moving track, it's more whimsical.

Well we know it wont be effective.... Its just fun to imagine what if... It would be like 2 miles in diameter lol

[Gravesnear]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

Well we know it wont be effective.... Its just fun to imagine what if... It would be like 2 miles in diameter lol

Exactly! I love the way you think. We could put giant heatsinks at the base and blow the hot atmospheric air. It  could be an LTT video sponsored by none other than Noctua. The 2 mile diameter disc at the top could have this as its logo:

[Guest]

Just now, Gravesnear said:

Exactly! I love the way you think. We could put giant heatsinks at the base and blow the hot atmospheric air. It  could be an LTT video sponsored by none other than Noctua. The 2 mile diameter disc at the top could have this as its logo:

Then we can pollute the earth as much as we want!

[Sakkura]

3 hours ago, KaareKanin said:

First off, the usual disclaimer, I tried finding a thread about this, but no luck, so if this has been said before, I'm sorry...

 

Anyways, in that TechQuickie video, I feel they should have touched on where all that energy would end up... What I'm getting at is this:

Energy has a tendency to become heat sooner or later, and my understanding of popular scientific topics nowadays is that we kinda already have enough heat on earth as it is. I know, I know, this isn't something we'll se happen (in the foreseeable future), but it is an important point and something I feel lacked from the video.

That's not how it works. Diffuse "heat" is unusable to perform any work. If you have a system where everything is at the same temperature, you cannot use that temperature to do anything. But if you have a system where some parts are colder and other parts are hotter, then you can exploit that temperature difference.

 

Other than temperature differences, you can also directly use eg. energy from photons, which is what photovoltaic solar panels rely on.

[Gravesnear]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

Then we can pollute the earth as much as we want!

"I think we just solved global warming" *Hi fives*

[Coaxialgamer]

2 hours ago, Abyss Gaming said:

Then we can pollute the earth as much as we want!

You know increased temperature isn't the only effect caused by pollution right? 

[Thunderpup]

PBS space time did a really informative video on this very topic about a year ago.  

 

 

 

[jeffery7466]

One problem with the heat sink and heat pipes:
The sun will definitely heat it up, so overall heat transfer may be back to Earth.

 

Unless the construct can somehow be constantly on the dark side.

[KaareKanin]

On 1.9.2017 at 4:42 PM, Gravesnear said:

In space the only way to dissipate heat is radiantly. Radiant heat in space is locomotive iirc. Meaning that if something was radiating heat in space in a certain direction it would cause that object to move (VERY slightly) in the opposite direction. I don't know if this has to do with anything, I lost my train of thought.

 

Heat pipe was a joke, kinda figured there wasn't much mass to do heat convection to up there... should have thrown in a bit of hard line tubing, thick radiators and Noctua fans to make it more obvious ;-)

 

That said, I love where the thread ran with it... HL3 pattern has after all shown to be the most effective at radiating energy, so much so that Valve hasn't been able to do enough work to actually complete it 

 

On 1.9.2017 at 5:01 PM, Sakkura said:

That's not how it works. Diffuse "heat" is unusable to perform any work. If you have a system where everything is at the same temperature, you cannot use that temperature to do anything. But if you have a system where some parts are colder and other parts are hotter, then you can exploit that temperature difference.

 

Other than temperature differences, you can also directly use eg. energy from photons, which is what photovoltaic solar panels rely on.

 

That's not how what works? Heat pipe? Or energy eventually becoming heat?

[Sakkura]

11 hours ago, KaareKanin said:

That's not how what works? Heat pipe? Or energy eventually becoming heat?

How extracting useful work from thermal energy works. You can't really use the temperature of something to provide useful work; you need a temperature difference. Earth has a limited ability to dissipate heat, so there's only so much useful work you can extract before the temperature of the entire surface of the planet is homogenized.

[KaareKanin]

6 hours ago, Sakkura said:

How extracting useful work from thermal energy works. You can't really use the temperature of something to provide useful work; you need a temperature difference. Earth has a limited ability to dissipate heat, so there's only so much useful work you can extract before the temperature of the entire surface of the planet is homogenized.

 

Yup, still don't see how that relates to what I said. I don't recall ever mentioning work, what I said was that whatever energy we would collect in space and bring back to earth would only lead to rising temperatures, unless we at the same time would find a way to offset this by removing heat from the planet

[Sauron]

On 9/1/2017 at 1:33 PM, KaareKanin said:

A solution could be a massive heat pipe running up to space along with the space elevator to keep us cool, we PC folk like that kind of stuff

A space elevator just needs to get you to space, that's 100 KM from the surface. The sun is 149,597,870.7 KM from Earth (on average). Even in a perfect situation where the distance from the sun was fixed, the Earth didn't rotate, the moon didn't periodically collide with the hypothetical pipe and heatpipe technology was efficient enough to not lose most of the energy on the way through radiation, the sheer materials requirement and building time would make it completely unfeasible. Even just sending cargo ships to the sun with lithium ion batteries would be more practical than that.

[SandalsWarrior]

On 9/1/2017 at 11:35 PM, Thunderpup said:

PBS space time did a really informative video on this very topic about a year ago.  

 

 

 

The title is so dumb, "Should we", lol. It's not if we "should" or "shouldn't", it's whether we can or can not do it because is freaking impossible do make a dyson sphere.If all the matter on earth(that is dirt,water,air, and everything) would somehow be converted and used for making a dyson sphere, there still wouldn't be enough.Also, you wouldn't need that amount of energy to run the whole planet(Elon Musks said it would need 100 gigafactories to convert to renewable energy(even if that number is 5 times higher it would still be orders of magnitude lower than what you'd need for a dyson sphere)). On top of that, the money involved would be simply impossible to imagine and the practicality would be 0.

P.S. I get way into some things sometimes.

[MrMarriarty]

so yeah it is impossible for us as a civilisation to realise this for the foreseeable future. The Kardashev scale kinda cover this, for a dyson sphere you need to be at Kardashev Lv2 we are not even close to achieving Kardashev Lv1!

 

For all the reasons given by @SandalsWarrior this will remain science fiction for an extremely long time

[Thunderpup]

5 hours ago, SandalsWarrior said:

The title is so dumb, "Should we", lol. It's not if we "should" or "shouldn't", it's whether we can or can not do it because is freaking impossible do make a dyson sphere.If all the matter on earth(that is dirt,water,air, and everything) would somehow be converted and used for making a dyson sphere, there still wouldn't be enough.Also, you wouldn't need that amount of energy to run the whole planet(Elon Musks said it would need 100 gigafactories to convert to renewable energy(even if that number is 5 times higher it would still be orders of magnitude lower than what you'd need for a dyson sphere)). On top of that, the money involved would be simply impossible to imagine and the practicality would be 0.

P.S. I get way into some things sometimes.

did you even watch the video?  Keep in mind that these sort of videos aren't specifically targeted for people who already know it isn't possible, but for those who don't already know.

 

The video states that doing so wouldn't be possible, and even if it were it wouldn't be really necessary.  However it does outline a number of scenarios where a partial dyson could be possible and how it "could" be achieved. 

[Sakkura]

6 hours ago, KaareKanin said:

 

Yup, still don't see how that relates to what I said. I don't recall ever mentioning work, what I said was that whatever energy we would collect in space and bring back to earth would only lead to rising temperatures, unless we at the same time would find a way to offset this by removing heat from the planet

We wouldn't be bringing the energy to Earth. When a civilization is advanced enough to start building anything like a Dyson sphere, it's long past being bound to just a single planet.

[SandalsWarrior]

16 hours ago, Thunderpup said:

did you even watch the video?  Keep in mind that these sort of videos aren't specifically targeted for people who already know it isn't possible, but for those who don't already know.

 

The video states that doing so wouldn't be possible, and even if it were it wouldn't be really necessary.  However it does outline a number of scenarios where a partial dyson could be possible and how it "could" be achieved. 

I did not watch the video, I was just adressing the word phrasing of the title which seemed a bit click-baity. I do not question the fact that it was an informative video about the topic, just wanted to point out a few things. Also, I like PBS Space time and watched a lot of their videos so I'm not hating here.

P.S. As I said above, the whole dyson sphere topic, in my opinion, should be put to an end because a lot of people are not very informed on the topic and most of the videos only explain what a dyson sphere is and fail to highlight the impracticality,cost, and the imposibility of making one thus giving birth to ideeas such as "We found a distant star with a strange structure/object/planet/anything orbiting it/obstructing the light transmited to us so it must be a dyson sphere or aliens.".

P.P.S(really should stop with these). You mentioned a partial dyson sphere. Instead of going in space, spending giant sums of money and workforce and putting people at risk, it would be smarter to just build more solar panels which is the equivalent of a partial dyson sphere but the people who lead us can't even do that and prefer coal/oil and nuclear as a source of energy so why bother with more complex ideas when we struggle with something so basic.

[KaareKanin]

On 3.9.2017 at 5:34 PM, Sauron said:

A space elevator just needs to get you to space, that's 100 KM from the surface. The sun is 149,597,870.7 KM from Earth (on average). Even in a perfect situation where the distance from the sun was fixed, the Earth didn't rotate, the moon didn't periodically collide with the hypothetical pipe and heatpipe technology was efficient enough to not lose most of the energy on the way through radiation, the sheer materials requirement and building time would make it completely unfeasible. Even just sending cargo ships to the sun with lithium ion batteries would be more practical than that.

 

Again, did people have problems understanding "to keep us cool". My whole point was that whatever (solar) energy we collect in space and brought back to earth must be offset by us removing heat away from earth again. Also, I felt that a heat pipe was an obvious joke to cater to the computer part of this forum. Maybe I should have said RGB hardline tubing and industrial Noctua fans...

 

Why do I even bother... :-/

[Thunderpup]

On 9/4/2017 at 9:49 AM, SandalsWarrior said:

P.P.S(really should stop with these). You mentioned a partial dyson sphere. Instead of going in space, spending giant sums of money and workforce and putting people at risk, it would be smarter to just build more solar panels which is the equivalent of a partial dyson sphere but the people who lead us can't even do that and prefer coal/oil and nuclear as a source of energy so why bother with more complex ideas when we struggle with something so basic.

The video actually addresses both of those.

 

By partial dyson they are referring to orbital solar panels around the sun that collect and transmit back to the earth.

 

One possible solution to doing this would be to use automated fabricators that harvest minerals and construct the panels as well constructing other automated fabricators.  Depending on how many panels we put around the sun the planet Mercury may need to be completely cannibalized, and maybe even Venus too. 

 

The automated fabricators idea has been floated for a number of different solutions as it would resolve the problem of getting stuff into space.