Comment by raegis
8 hours ago
I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.
Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.
That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.
I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.
Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.
if the thermal radiation panels have ~3 x the area of the solar panels, the temperature of the satellite can be contained to about 300 K (27 deg C). Ctrl+F:pyramid to find my calculations.