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

[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.