From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Lunch with Buzz
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 21:34:51 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 9:10 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Lunch with Buzz

> Rich Lynch <rw_lynch at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > http://www.livejournal.com/users/rwl/9943.html
> > (The only other WSFAn there was Keith.)
>
> Sitting next to Rich was Bob Hershey, who is involved with two other
> groups I'm in (WMOD (http://www.infiltec.com/wmod.htm) and LES
> (http://keithlynch.net/les/)), and with the Philosophical Society
> (http://www.philsoc.org/), whose talks I sometimes attend, and who
> also known by Ron Kean, who I was surprised wasn't there.  I had
> discussed the Aldrin event with Ron when I ran into him on Monday at a
> used book sale.  (I also saw WSFAns Adrienne and Jim at that book sale.)
>
> I hadn't known that Rich and Bob knew each other.  Small world.
>
> Is it just me, or does it seem ironic that you can get a Free Lunch at
> a libertarian organization?
>
> "Edwin" hasn't been Buzz Aldrin's first name for years.  He had it
> legally changed not long after Apollo XI.
>
> As for solar power satellites, the original idea was to make them
> mostly out of lunar materials, rather than lifting everything needed
> out of Earth's gravity well.  Installing a solar powered mass driver
> on the moon will be expensive, but once it's there, it should be able
> to launch unlimited amounts of material for negligible additional
> cost.  Yes, even less than it would cost to FedEx the same amount of
> mass from DC to Baltimore.
>
> Any number of solar power satellites can be built of any size, to
> provide a source of energy that does not depend on Middle East
> politics, that does not enrich people who want to kill us, that will
> not run out for billions of years, that does not result in significant
> amounts of global warming, that does not produce ionizing radiation,
> that does not produce waste matter of any kind on earth, and that,
> unlike ground-based solar, does not depend on weather, and doesn't
> stop working at night.
>
> Downsides:
>
> * While such plants scale up quite well, they don't scale down.
>   It's not practical to build a small demonstration satellite.  A ten
>   megawatt SPS would cost almost as much as a one ten gigawatt SPS.
>
> * Getting the power to earth involves (harmless) microwaves, which,
>   being a form of radiation, will get some environmentalists upset.
>   And environmentalists currently have the power to halt projects
>   indefinitely with billions of dollars of red tape.

There's nothing "harmless" about microwave radiation of sufficient power.
Whether you stand in front of a radar unit, or figure how to run your
microwave oven with the door open, the result will be harmful.

To transmit actual *power* from a satellite to an earth receiving station
is something Charles Sheffield dealt with in a novelette I published in
FANTASTIC in the late '70s.  Needless to say, the microwave radiation
needed to transmit useful amounts of power would be not at all "harmless."
If an airplane flew into the beam (which has to be relatively tightly
focused) all aboard would be fried, as would be the plane's
electrical/electronic circuits.   If the satellite wobbled, and the beam
swung away from its receiving station, it would leave a path, a swath of
devastation of all living matter.  (This occured in Charles' story.)
Think of the dead birds that flew into the beam.   They'd start piling up.
Dead insects, too.

This strikes me as potentially more dangerous than any power-generating
nuclear reactor.

--Ted White