Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

Energy

Virtus Solis

It is important to first understand that We are all made of energy.

Solar panels have been improving and hold great potential but they are rendered useless by the relentless and uncannily predictable onslaught of night. There’s a simple way to fix this – put the solar panels in space.

Space solar is an idea that has been around for decades, but it is laughably expensive to launch enough solar panels on rockets for anyone to take it seriously. Still, the idea is enticing, because solar panels orbiting Earth get sun 24×7, 365 days a year. They receive 8 times as much energy as terrestrial panels. They can beam power down to Earth anywhere on the planet using radio waves, even in the middle of the night, during a snowstorm – right through clouds. No need for the miraculous breakthrough energy storage that wind & solar farms on Earth require.

What about safety? Beam forming technology makes it possible to send a diffuse beam of radio waves to a large antenna on the ground. The 10GHz band can’t penetrate your skin for more than a millimeter. I’ve stood in front of this beam and at most you can detect a slight warmth, much less than standing in the sunshine. Humans should never end up in the path of the beam, but if they do there is little to no health risk.

What about the ridiculous cost? Even uncontested in the private space launch market, SpaceX has gotten launch cost down 20x from the Space Shuttle. They’re at $2300 per kilogram. This idea gets irresistably cost effective at about $300 per kilogram. The SpaceX target for Starship is $20 per kilogram. In something measured in years, not decades, space solar will become the lowest cost baseload energy anywhere on Earth. It will also be the primary economic driver for private space launch.

Why Virtus Solis? Most of what we’ve seen elsewhere is still in research but we are thrilled with this team’s focus on commercializing this technology as fast as possible. The engineering team is ambitious but humble and practical. They’ve consistently impressed us with better answers than we expected to our hardest technical questions. You can learn more from their blog.

We are all Made of Energy

We made almost 8 billion humans that are alive on Earth, and we need to make enough energy to take care of them. We see this at the most fundamental of all problems to solve. If we solve energy, we can solve a lot of other problems for free. Americans get about 9 times as much energy as the average person in the world. This means unlimited access to clean water, the health benefits of sanitation, the safety of light all night, refrigeration to preserve food & vaccines. We take all this for granted, but over 3 billion people live on less energy than a single toaster consumes.

The real goal is to deliver as much energy
for every human on Earth
as we do for an American.

We never see the target set that high. What will it take to produce 10 times as much energy globally? It sounds impossible, but we’ve done it before. Over the last century we’ve done just that. Over the next century, we’ll grow from ~160,000 terawatt hours to ~1.6 million terawatt hours, but it doesn’t need to take that long, we could do it in a few decades.

The upside is almost unfathomable. What if every human on Earth could have the same living standard as an American? Abundant, clean, low cost energy means we can scale clean water, sanitation, recycling & food production. When people have access to the resources they need to support their lives, they have a lot less to fight over and we can expect a more peaceful, prosperous & ethical world will continue to evolve.