Aerovator, Angel fleet, Polywell

[ciphergoth]

Ideas that are currently entertaining me:

• The Aerovator: a spinning wing 2,000km long whose tips rise 100km up and travel at 8 km/s which unlike the Space Elevator can be built (just) with today's materials.
• The Angel fleet: Counteracting global warming with a fleet of 16 trillon solar shades in space between the Earth and the Sun (we can use the Aerovator to put them up)
• Polywell fusion which if it turned out to be possible would save the world - plus we can power the Aerovator with it.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Cool! (Doubly so.)

We could do with a bit of appropriate techno-optimism.

Saints alive but that aerovator is going to move a lot of air. Obviously most of it isn't in 'air' but the bit that is will make a Big Ass Fan look like a nanopropellor. And siting something that big will be a slight challenge politically - for scale, the radius is roughly the distance from London to Berlin, or the length of Califonia.

I love the bit in the Angel fleet paper where they explain away two or three orders of magnitude of cost-per-kg for lifting stuff off the earth by assuming the existence of yet-to-be-prototyped transport technologies, the development costs of which are negligible.

If I've understood it correctly, in terms of development, polywell fusion is a decade or more behind tokamak fusion ... which is about forty years from commercial deployment (and has been for about the last forty years).

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It would pretty much have to be sited in some unused part of the Pacific. Though it's 1000km in radius, most of it is so high up that you wouldn't care - shipping wouldn't have to avoid that region or anything. What worries you about moving that much air?

Guns have been prototyped eg SHARP. The development costs are negligible compared to the $2 trillion cost of building and launching the fleet. I'm sort of hoping it can be made more cheaply than that - for one thing, the Aerovator would allow the disks to be larger.

The encouraging thing about Polywell is that the problems may be substantially easier, because their containment is more straightforward, and the reactors are much faster to build, so it may yield a working commercial reactor long before DEMO first sees plasma.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The air moving is more a wow than a worry - tho it might mess with Hadley cells or jetstreams something. I can imagine airliners wanting to keep well clear.