Look Ma, No Wires!

but I think you misspoke. It sounded like you said wirelessly. Yes, I guess you meant like, uh, some other word. You mean, like wired power. Yeah. Sure, I can see why you would say that, seeing is how our infrastructure is heavily based around wired power. Joe, But nay, say I to you. I am talking wireless, as in, get that wire that transmits said power to your house and throw it out the door, for you shall need it no longer. So you're talking lightning. I don't know what is this. Look.

I'll tell you lightning harnessing the energy of the heavens themselves is going to make my cell phone never run out of battery. Okay, you know, broadly speaking, yes, uh no, no, no, we're gonna we're gonna talk about wireless power because it is. Yes, okay, so not thor but Tesla. Okay, all right, let's let's ease into this first before we before we get into the Tesla discussion. And don't worry, folks, there will be one I want to this actually still has to do

with Tesla. Tesla was one of the minds working on making alternating current a workable, uh feasible means of transmitting electricity as opposed to direct current. Right, So, like the grid electricity that you get out of your wall socket is going to be alterning eating current, but to use it in a lot of things, you need to translate it to direct current. So here's the here's the reason why there's alternating current in the first place, because I know there are a lot of people who get confused

about this. Back in the day, back when electricity was first starting to be understood and uh and and harnessed in a usable way, there was a lot of discussion about what's the best way to deliver electricity from the place where you generate it to the place where you need it. Direct current is one way. This is the way that batteries work. Right. The current flows in one direction. It goes from the negative terminal to the positive terminal.

That's how electricity works with direct current. So you're anything that's ronning on a fuel cell or a battery, that's that's how it goes. Alternating current the essentially you get it switching so that the current flows in two different directions. First one direction than the other. Its cycles. Okay, it alternates. Uh. Now.

The reason why alternating current is the is used in transmission is because if you wanted to transmit direct current and across vast distances, you had to use really high voltage, which back in the day was not really easy to do. Okay, it would require a lot of energy, it wasn't very efficient, and it wasn't very economical. It meant that you were limited to about a miles worth of distance across the lines at the time. So that meant that you would have had to build a whole bunch of generators or

power stations to serve even a relatively small city. Now, alternating current, what you can do with that is build something called a transformer. Transformers allow you to change the voltage by stepping it up or stepping it down. And if you are using a really high voltage alternating current, you can then transmit this electricity over long distances, use transformers to step it down to the voltage that you

need wherever you're going to use it. Because your house does not need to have a hundred thousand volts going in through the outlet, and if it did, it wouldn't last extraordinarily long. Honest, I don't know intuitively how much a volt is. Okay, so you know you've heard of like one twenty volts or two forty volts there you go, So you don't need a hundred thousand coming through that out So the idea here is that you would have

these transformers to change the voltage. You can do that with alternating current, you cannot do it with direct current. It all has to do with electromagnetism. So just one last thing that I need to cover for this, because direct current will become important in the rest of this conversation. When you have a coil of wire and you run electricity through it, that generates a magnetic field. Okay, if you have an alternating magnetic field and that the magnetic

field itself is fluctuating. Or you move a magnetic field within and away from a conductor, you induce electricity to flow. So if you took take two coils of wire, a primary coil and a secondary coil, and you run an alternating current through the primary coil, meaning that the current flows one direction and then the other, this creates a fluctuating magnetic field. The secondary coil is within that fluctuating

magnet field, so that induces electricity to flow. And the relationship of the number of coils in the primary coil versus the secondary coil determines how much voltage is going to flow through that secondary coil. If it's the same number of coils, it's a one to one conversion. If there are more coils in the secondary coil than there is in the primary. Let's say that you've wound wound the primary ten times, but you've wound the secondary twenty times,

you get twice the voltage. Okay, So that's how you can step up or step down the voltage based upon the number of coils in that secondary coil compared to the first one the primary coil. An interesting way to tie this into our discussion is that what you've just described is what's called a transformer, and this actually does transmit current wirelessly, albeit over a very short distance, through electro magnetic induction. Right, So these these wires are not

actually connected to one another. The man magnetism created by one creates the electricity in the other wire coil. But we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk about more of that in a little bit. I just know that it works with alternating current, but not with direct current, because direct current only creates a magnetic field that's stable, not fluctuating.

All right, So now we can have our discussion about the big bad boy of the Internet of technology, the guy who just got ground down by the establishment, the guy who had all the ideas to save the world or destroy it, Nikola Tesla. Yeah, so, just like all these other great technology stories, Nicola Tesla figures into the history of wireless power transmission. But there's a problem whenever you want to find out something about Nikola Tesla, I've discovered,

which is the the Internet Tesla fog. Yeah, there is sort of this fog of dubious information about Gala Tesla, and it's really hard to tell what actually happened with this guy. There's just a lot of websites. Yeah, that's just gonna say stuff. And all right, So part of the problem here is that a lot of the info about Tesla is from a biography called The Strange Life of Nicola Tesla that was published in nineteen seventy three

by one Arthur H. Matthews. UM. That became the first bio of Tesla on the internet because it was transcribed from a photo copied booklet by one John Roland Penner. UM. If this already sounds shady, that's because it absolutely is. Uh. Now, Now, both of these contain certain omissions and weird additions from Tesla's actual autobio biography called My Inventions, which was published in six parts in a magazine in nineteen nineteen. UM. Now, all of this should be should be understood through the

filter of alright, so Tesla was a crazy showman. I mean, like, this dude was very fond of saying these big impressive things and making these statements and being kind of wacky to begin with, um as part of his personal stick. And on top of that, by by nine nineteen UM he was perhaps not perceiving um reality the way that I would say that most human people on average perceive reality to be had some stuff going on. To be fair, being a showman and being in technology in this era

was by no means limited to only Tesla. This was an arrow where Edison would take the stage to try and while the newspapers and and other form of audiences into buying into direct current. I mean Edison of course famously would use alternating current to show how dangerous it was zapping animals to death. Yeah, that one time he had one of his assistants kill an elephant. Was she had she did nothing? Well? Okay, no, she actually did kill a couple of trainers, but to be fair, the

trainers were probably not so nice either. To complicated issue at any rate, Um, anything that you read online about Tesla and his inventions should be um considered critically. Yeah. Yeah, because some of the things that are famously attributed to him have no actual documentation apart from people relating a story, So you might get something second or third hand or worse,

and not actual documented evidence. So the reason why we're even laying all this out in the first place is because a large part of Tesla's mythos centers around this idea of broadcasting power wirelessly more than one method, I believe, right, Yeah, there's one that sort of used the earth. So how how did that's That's that's really the big one. There's the other one, which is just zapping the hell out of anything that happens to be nearby, also know as

the Tesla coil um. But no, if you're talking about like warden Cliff Wardencliffe Tower, which was meant for a couple of things. Primarily it was meant to find a way to transmit speci tifically, not really radio waves, but transmit waves transatlantically. Uh. There were a lot of financial backers, including JP Morgan, who were interested in this possibility. This is the earliest days of radio. Yeah, yeah, this was mostly being thought of as a method of communication, but

as of course it would turn out to be. But the kind of secondary proof of concept sort of things surrounding it was like and maybe energy, right right, Tesla was saying that, you know, he had this kind of interesting Yeah, he was thinking of the Earth is having its own electric charge, all right. He essentially thought of the Earth in a way that future scientists would kind

of prove he was on the right track. He didn't have a he didn't really have the right view of it, the accurate view, but he was on a track to enough things that it gives enough credibility to this makes people question right or not it's real. So his idea was like using the Earth essentially as the means of

transmitting electricity. And before we get too technical, essentially just imagine that you have a transmitter and a receiver that are precisely tuned to one another so that you you can't be even a smidge off or else that nothing works, and you transmit this using the transmitter, you send electricity through the Earth, and then really no matter where the receiver is, as long as it's tuned into the right frequency, it would pick up that transmission and you would get

power transmitted from one point to the other. This is not the same as free energy, which is what some people say. You would in fact have to generate the electricity on the transmitting end and then transmit it through and you would lose power this way too, just as you would through any other transmission means where converting energy from one form to another you tend to lose some, usually in the form of heat, kind of resistance. Yeah,

there's usually some sort of resistance there. There would have to be if you were generating electricity and then putting it through a transmitter, and then you probably lose more on the receiver end as well. So it's not a efficient it's not free energy, but it would be a wireless means of transmitting power. All that being said, I know of no one who has ever been able to make it work the way Tesla was saying. I know there are a lot of people who are looking at

similar approaches, but nothing. For one thing, Tesla. Tesla did put out a patent on this, but you know, patents describe a general way of achieving something, right, they don't necessarily outline the entire process. Yeah, and so especially back in that those days, Tesla's patent is refreshingly very short compared to today's patents. You might see a patent today on something as simple as, uh, an electric toothbrush that doesn't even have you know, a wireless charging and it

could be you know, thirty pages long. Tesla's is relatively tiny. But anyway, uh, yeah, as far as I know, no one has replicated anything that Tesla was playing. And you know, there there were stories that Tesla was able to use an enormous Tesla coil in Colorado that lit something like um light bulbs that were twenty six miles away or something two light bulbs. But again that's second, third hand information.

There was no actual documentation of it. Um. Also, I mean there are stories that Tesla like created a winged horse, and just I love the story about how Tesla went on this long journey trying to get home and was distracted several times throughout that journey by a cyclops and there were some and uh there was like a big whirlpool thing. Okay, okay, but but for first, an actual quote from Tesla about this Warden Cliff tower. Um Uh, this is according to PBS, who I trust to have

done their fact checking. In this system that I've invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip so that the whole of this globe can quiver. Yeah, I not dramatic at all. And also I'm not sure why he was kind of

British there, but but I think Russian, British whatever. Actually, what I was going to say was that fueling the the mythology around Tesla is the fact that his financial backers pulled out so warden Cliff was being constructed, it was taking longer than anticipated, it was costing more money

than anticipated. And meanwhile, a little fellow named Mark Coni had figured out how to transmit a single letter transatlantically just like some dudes holding a pole right well, essentially that he found it using a system that was that

worked and was cheap comparatively speaking. So if you are our financial backer and you're looking at this unproven technology that is taking huge amounts of your money and still you haven't seen any progress unless just talking about the earth quivering, and then you look at this other dude with with this stick, and you're like, oh, I get a stick. I understand that right, right exactly? Why do I waste all this money on this thing that may or may not work when I can get this thing

that totally works. So that was you know, it wasn't It wasn't like it was a malicious attempt. There are some people who framed this as the uh like like Edison and his cronies were able to infiltrate all of this and pull strings and that's why um Tesla was abandoned. But here's the deal, guys think there were certainly many times during which kind of underhanded business stuff like down in Tesla's life. But but you know, here's the thing is that that's not why people remove their money. That's

not why people remove their financial backing. Because I don't care if you're Edison or not. If you're JP Morgan and Edison comes up to you and says, hey, I want you to pull your support out of from Tesla. But you're JP Morgan and you think, no, Tesla is gonna make me little ten times more money than I'm putting in. You tell Edison like, go pound sand buddy. So so I'm pretty sure there wasn't a conspiracy. It

was more of a in a decision. Okay, So I want to climb our way out of the Tesla fog, if that's all right, that's fair because a minute ago you mentioned electric toothbrushes. Yes I did, And that brings me to the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Coming away from the winged horse Tesla mythology, I want to come right down to the most mundane wireless power transmission we've got the same junk that charges your electric toothbrush

and really is wireless electricity? How does it work? Okay, so this is essentially what I was talking about before inductive coupling. You have imagine that you have a a a device that is able to put an alternating current

through a coil of wire. You've got a secondary device that has a coil of wire in it that's connected to some sort of energy storage device like a battery actually really should just say a rechargeable battery, and then you run that that alternating current through the first coil. As long as the second coil is close enough to be within that magnetic field, then it will induce electricity to throw flow through the coil and thus charge the battery.

So with your electric toothbrush, the actual the primary coil would be the one that's in the base that you set the toothbrush down upon once you're finished brushing your teeth, and then as long as it's plugged in, it's going to be drawing current and then running this little alternating current through the primary coil. Secondary coil picks up that it's induces electricity to flow charges the battery. Okay, but

so this is actually charging the toothbrush without making conductive contact. Yes, it's it's just using that magnetic You could you could do this with anything. You could have a lightbulb plug screwed into a base that has a coil in it. You could have a secondary coil where there is no physical contact between the two coils, and you could run electricity through that primary coil and that light bulb will light up. Just the magnetic energy from the first creates

electricity in the second. Just that that basic uh, that basic relationship between electricity and magnetism. Yeah, okay, so that's really cool, But it seems like that only works at short distances, right, well you yeah, you in general, if you're using basic, this basic approach, yes, because the secondary coil has to be within the magnetic field generated by the first coil. Is there a way we could make it work at longer distances? Okay? Well, I guess um,

I don't know what you're saying. Resonates with me, but oh no, oh dear alright, So, so resonance actually adds

potential to this entire inductive coupling concept. Yeah, um, and and resonance is just um an object size and shape will determine the frequency at which it naturally vibrates, right, right, So this is the same concept behind if you if you ring a glass and you hear the tone it makes, if you're able to generate that same tone at a strong enough amplitude, you can make the glass deform and break.

H Yeah. Or for example, if you have a second glass that has the exact same resonance, then pinging the first glass should make the second one also begin to vibrate, Yes, exactly, Okay, and now for power. The idea here is to get yourself some two curved coils of wire. Yeah, except you put a capacitance plate at the end of each one, um and and place the coils within an appropriate range

of each other. Once you're working with resonance, this can be up to a couple of meters or about seven feet, which is that's huge because again you're you are outside the usual magnetic field. I mean, unless you're putting bookoos a power through a coil, that magnetic fields not going to normally extend that far. So certainly not that far

right right, this is pretty good. Um And if these if these coils resonate at the same frequency, and you run electricity through that first one, then it should jump or more precisely transmit or stream to the second one. UM M I T has been working on prototypes of this since um the early two thousand's. But um, even with this method, the distance at which you can transfer power is dependent on the on the diam or of that coil. So that's not going to like electrocute you

if you walk in front of it. No, because it's not electric fields. It's a magnetic field, and you're not resonating hopefully at the same same odd if you had something on you or in you that resonated at that frequency, uh, that would not be good. But I can't imagine you having anything that would make being the setup for a really interesting techno murder mystery. I think I think there should be an episode of Sharlock about this, absolutely where

this necklace. Let's not get off on the subject of Sharelock, because I just watched the first episode season three, and I'm I could talk about that. We're wearing to go okay, But so it's a it's a pretty much one to one ratio of the diameter of the coil that you're using and the distance at which you can make a second coil resonate, gotcha. So in other words, you that that is a limitation obviously, because if you're talking about larger distances, you would need larger coils, which means a

larger form factor for whatever it is you're using. It gets pretty ridiculous and expensive pretty fast. But there might be ways around that. Even just this month January, researchers at Duke published a paper which is a tongue twister that I'm just going to try to say anyway because it entertains me so much. Magnetic meta material superlens for increased range wireless power transfer. First, take y'all um and and this described the design of a sort of focusing

lens for electromagnetic fields. It's it's sort of like a cubic honey comb. And and each cell of this of this sort of weird giant flat Rubik's cube um is etched with spiraling copper wire um. This this this is called a meta material, and it kind of funnels the field into this narrow cone that can transmit power a distance of some twelve times the diameter of the coils. All right, that's kind of cool. So we're talking like coils and what like the eight or ten inch range

something like that. Oh, they're about two centimeters in diameter right now, which is about point eight inches. Um, little smaller than I was thanking, But all right, but that's a total transfer distance of of centimeters are about a foot, which is still really impressive considering that they're only two centimeters to begin with. Sure, okay, so so we're still

pretty much live. It's not like you're going to be able to have a power station that's on one side of your house and be able to use that to transmit power to a light bulb on the other side of your house right now, not this year. But this is a step in that sort of direction. Okay, Yeah, that's really cool. But we're still basically on the hield, not outside my yard certainly, right right, Well, why don't we think about maybe going a little further, like, I

don't know, from outer space to the Earth. What. Yeah, I have thought about this before, because if you'll recall our our podcast about the Kardashiv scale. Yes, we talked about what it takes to advance a civilization to sort of the next stage of energy production and use. Um, So what happens when we need to power all kinds of vehicles and colonies all over the solar system. Clearly, we would have to be able to tap into power

beyond just what's available here on Earth. And we're already even though even though you you can easily argue that we're not nearly tapping all of the Earth's resources as far as energy production could theoretically go, we might not even be tapping the best ones. Right. But even even so, even if we were to do that, that would still limit us on how far we could expand outwards. If that's all we depended upon, we would need to find

other ways of harvesting and transmitting energy. Right. You can't run a chord out from Earth to the colony on the Moon, not after that one visit I had from federal authorities who said it was a noble attempt, but I should knock that off. Versus versa. You also can't run a chord from the solar harvest on the Moon

to Earth if that's what you want to do. Right, So, you might even be able to design this amazing device that can float out in space unimpeded by the Earth's atmosphere, that has a diameter that is so large that's it's capturing more solar energy just from this one device than all of the solar farms on Earth. But how do you get that power down to the planet where we can use it. Well, let's talk about some beaming beam we get Scottie, he's chief Archief O'Brien. Yeah, that they

are very important as far as beaming goes. Now, so we're talking about using uh different forms of energy to transmit uh something that where we store. We we gather energy from one source, we convert it into another kind of transmission, whether it's electromagnetic or something else, send that down to a receiver which then can convert it back into electricity that then can be used. That's the basic idea,

right Is this for real? This is for real? Yeah, this is this is something we can do right now. In fact, one of the one of the methods is through microwave transmissions. Yeah, okay, So microwaves are basically their electromagnetic radiation, so they're along the electromagnetic spectrum the same as light and radio waves. Um, so we know that we can transmit them around. I mean that they're like

your cell phone sends a signal based on microwaves. Sure, lots of other cable signals like television come in can be beamed by microwave. Y yep, you can do it that way, and you can actually have a way of generating or all not generating, but transmitting electricity this way. Okay, So how does it work? How does a device receive microwaves and turn that into usable electricity? First, you have again a DC generator, all right, something that's going to

create DC electricity, that converts that. You then have a converter that converts the electricity into microwaves, sends the microwaves towards wherever it is that you're you want it to go, all right. On the other end, you have a rectifying antenna or a rectenna that can receive this and then convert those microwaves back into direct current, which then can go and to whatever application you were planning. Granted, if you were planning on transmitting that through, say like a

power grid. Let's say that we've got some sort of um orbiting space station that's beaming power down to generate electricity specifically for the power grid here on Earth, then you would probably need to at least the where infrastructure is based right now, you would need to then put the power through an inverter to make to change it from DC power to a C power so it could be transmitted across the grid. As it stands now, still pretty cool. If you're getting there from space, I'd say, oh, no,

it's it's pretty awesome. I mean you have to keep in mind that any anything that's a multi stage process like this, where you're transmitting power, you're losing energy along the way, so your efficiency is never going to be I want to make that clear. Uh, you should think about changing energy between different media, like trying to hand

somebody a pile of sugar. Like you can hand it to them, but they're never going to get all of it, right, Right, You're gonna lose a little bit, usually in the form of heat. That's the that's the big one, right, But there are other ways you can lose energy as well. Yeah, And microwaves actually do better than a lot of other forms. Sure. Yeah. In fact, in space they're great because you don't have to worry about like when it moves through the atmosphere.

You can actually lose some microwaves and transmission that way. Not enough for it to be a huge loss, but it would mean that you would take a hit and efficiency. Each stage you would lose a little bit of energy and efficiency. But I think i've read that the ideal like it's say that everything's working at all, the equipment is top notch. Yeah, it's working as good as it

possibly could, which means we'll never get there. But you know it's it's the This is the ceiling would be an efficiency of around seventy Because you're talking about converting electricity to microwaves, the microwaves back into electricity. It means there are a couple of different stages there, and of course that also will depend upon whether the transmission is through space where you don't have to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way, or if it's atmosphere to

space or space to atmosphere. Because we could use this microwave transmission for a lot of different purposes, not just beaming out to space. Wouldn't have to just be that. But but that's one way. How about unmanned aerial vehicles? How about them? You can beam microwaves to a ua V and keep it a lot I can surely this is crazy science fiction. No, this idea has been around

for a long time. Actually in nineteen sixty four, the electrical engineer William C. Brown, who was working for the Raytheon Corporation at the time, gave a demonstration showing that he could power a small electric helicopter by beaming microwaves to the vehicle from an antenna. So it had a rectenna, it received the microwaves, convert to them to d C current and power the rotors of the helicopter. And this was how it stayed aloft. Uh. And so that's not

the only one there's been. The Sharp vehicle. It was the stationary high altitude relay platform that was created by the Canadian Communication Research Center in the nineteen eighties, and it was given a huge boost by new printed circuit technology that allowed um, those those rectennas to become lightweight enough to really benefit the vehicle, right, because I mean, obviously, if you have a device that adds weight to the vehicle, then you have to take all of that into account.

It changes everything, right every time you are thinking, oh, well, here's a solution, but it adds weight weight. Now we need more power than the solution would allow us to have, and then we have to go back to the drawing board. Right, this one could circle for like months at a time.

Uh yeah, So I think that's really the bottom line with this is you've got to figure out how to reduce the size and mass of the rectenna and um how to increase the efficient right, And so if you can maximize both of those, these could have some really interesting capabilities. Like save for micro aerial vehicles. Sure, so you can have teeny tiny ones because you wouldn't need a battery on board at all. Yeah, I want to

give just one example. I was looking at some of what are some of the really cool micro aerial vehicles out there. One is called the Dell fly Explorer, and that's an autonomous flying vehicle. Weighs about twenty grams, so your average empty soda can is fourteen or fifteen grams, not much heavier than an empty aluminum can, right, And this is a an autonomous, tiny flying vehicle. It's got stereovision so it can see obstacles and avoid them. But the main problem is the battery life is only nine

minutes at that scale. Yeah, that's not very long. But imagine if you could scale down and efficient enough rectanna at that size that you could beam microwave power and keep this thing going. I don't know if that's achievable. I'm not an engineer. I don't know if you can get Erectina to that size and the right efficiency, But if you could, it seems like that would be a good alternative to the battery power. And another is, uh, this is true of all of our broadcast abilities, the

ability to to transmit power over fast distances. But another potential application is in construction in space. Oh yeah, actually, because a lot of the things you want to have in space, it is not very feasible to build on Earth and send up whole right. Yeah, even even building in part and sending it up and being constructed in parts can be problematic depending on the size of the parts, because you know, you're you're limited by whatever payload capacity

your vehicle happens to have. Right. So, if we're able to get to a point where we can either ship raw materials up into space, or if we get into that asteroid mining world where we're able to even get raw materials out there and process us them some way, we need to have energy to fuel those processes and not having to send fuel up along with whatever we're sending, because then again you need more fuel to send up the fuel. As we're right back to that energy problem.

But if you're if you're able to beam the energy either from Earth or you're able to generate it through some other space orbiting uh platform. For example, you know, a space orbiting platform that's collecting solar energy. You could beam it from there to the site and you would be able to provide energy for everything from uh uh you know, refining the materials that you're mining out of asteroids to actually giving the energy you need to for

the construction of various stuff out in space. If we could get to a point where we could actually construct spacecraft in space where you don't have to launch them in the first place, then you you're really on your way toward a viable exploration and even colonization sort of civilization of that. You know. Otherwise you have to sit there and figure out how to get the thing off the planet before it can even start on its journey to wherever it's going to go. Yeah, the the construction

thing seems like a big potential application to me. But the other one is the one we touched on earlier, which is energy harvesting space. Sure, um, so we're not getting all of the potential solar energy we could be getting on the surface of the Earth, are we not nearly? You know? For one thing, obviously one, we can't cope the entire Earth with solar panels, so we can't get all of the solar energy that's saying earth. Plus there are these things called clouds, the clouds. There's also, yeah,

the atmosphere. There's also the fact that solar panels reflect some lights, so you're not gonna get you're not getting of the sunlight that's even hitting a panel, much less of the sunlight that's hitting the Earth. There's this other thing called nighttime. Yeah. Yeah, it happens first when the Sun goes down, right, it's not when the Earth turns um. But yeah, if if we were able to create, uh, like I said, these these kind of solar harvesting platforms

out in space, then that could definitely help. Or if we were able to harness uh, some of the other real estate that's out there, like the moon. Yeah. H the idea of a space based solar power plant is also we're not just spitballing like this is something that NASA actually talks about. I want to give one example of a cool paper I was looking at it's called the SPS alpha. So it was in an early evaluation of this thing called the Solar Power Satellite via arbitrarily

large phased array. I don't know why it has to be arbitrarily large. I think it should be specifically large. I think the basic idea about that was that you could keep adding modules to make it larger. Okay, that

makes sense. Okay, So it was investigated by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Division in two thousand and eleven two twelve, and so essentially, imagine a flower shaped array of modular mirrors that direct solar energy inward towards solar cells and then convert that energy into microwaves and then beam it down to Earth and that would be up in geostationary orbit UM, so it would have direct access to this

clean sunlight. UH. And in the official report, the authors stayed in their conclusion quote, if the SPS alpha can be developed, solar power in the range of hundreds of megawatts, two hundreds of gigawatts could be harvested in space and delivered efficiently to markets on Earth, and to enable energy rich operations throughout the inner solar system, transforming all aspects of government and commercial space. All I need is one one gigawatts, that's megawatts, Yeah, I need one one of them.

But they think that microwaves are the way to do this. Huh Yeah, so they went with microwaves. Now, are there any other ways that you could transmit something that far other than microwaves space hamsters? I think that that's the most accurate and scientific method of energy transfer. I have a ridiculous story to tell you, guys, but we'll save

that till after the podcast is over. Actually, the other one another, well, the other one, there are multiple suggestions, but another big one, which another big one would be lasers, right right, because lasers are, after after all, working on just another range of the electromagnetic spectrum that's within the

light spectrum, super focused. In this case, it would be directed infrared or near infrared laser beams, so would not be visible to the naked eye, right, But that could activate photovoltaic cells, you know, basically solar cells, and that would convert the light into electricity. So in other words, we're just kind of being able to create fakes on light beam it down to a specific place. Now, I got a question for you, guys. So it's a laser based system. Um, what am I looking here? What are

my limitations? Well, you know with with this or actually with microwaves, to you need a direct line of sight between your power source and your receiver. So anything that's based on light is obviously limited by line of sight. You know, if if if the receiving station is on the side of the Earth that's facing away from the transmitting station, you have to wait until the two are

in alignment. Now, normally you would get around this by having whatever it is in uh direct line of sight all the time, sure, or if you had some kind of um array of dishes, you could use those to beam the lasers. Yeah, if you had an array and you were able to direct the transmitting antenna toward a specific point, then you could do that. So um, yeah, it's certainly one something that you'd have to take that into consideration. Obviously it's an issue. M Also efficiency is

an issue. Um, your photovol takes optimized for the wavelength of an R are near and for a beam can capture about half the power. So again we're looking at that that loss of energy through various stages of transmission. I mean even converting energy into a laser, you're going to lose some of that energy already, right, depending upon however you're doing it. But you know, some of the electricity that you would go into creating a laser, you

lose some of that. And then on the other end, you've got the common problems with photovoltaics being you know that the materials that we have right now aren't quite as optimal as they could be. Yeah, and even that at top level, like even if you were to optimize it to the ideal, again, you're never going to reach. So the question is whether or not the efficiency adds up to it making being a practical solution. Um. And honestly, you know, all of these things are things we're thinking about.

We don't have a whole lot of experience actually putting major versions of this into place. I mean, obviously in the lab we've used quite a bit. Yeah, what's actually been done in terms of laser transfer, Well, for lasers, they did a test run of a tiny little radio controlled aircraft at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in two

thousand three that that proved that the concept was solid. Um. They they totally flew that little thing around inside a building for a good while, right, and and I mean, you know, I'm talking about it like it was silly, and it was a tiny bit silly, but it was really cool. I mean, like that was a laser powered airplane. That's awesome. It's a proof of concept, right, that's how

these things start. Also also very cool. Um. Back in two thousand nine, there was a robot that climbed nine that's that's about half a mile or so UM cable that won some funding from NASA for going towards space elevator research because we need to be able to provide

energy to climber, and that robot was laser powered. Yeah. Yeah, see that that makes a lot of sense too, because if you have a space elevator and you've got a robotic climber that needs to climb that cable, one way that you can reduce some of the weight is to remove the need for it to carry its own power, so able to provide power some other way than that would lighten the load of the space elevator uh that needs to climb up this this cable and thus in

the long run, it will only take sixty four weeks. In well more importantly, it means that you are, it won't be let's it won't be as much of an energy drain, right, Yeah, ultimate expense will be less so uh so. Yeah, really cool ideas here, and the you know, the important thing to remember is that all of this stuff, it's all in the prototype stage, the experimental stage. Obviously, we've been harnessing solar power for ages now, so it's not like all of these are untested ideas. The ideas

themselves have been tested. It's just being able to implement them on a large scale is still that's a big deal. I think I know the main thing that's holding them back, which is when you build a microwave power plant in some city two thousand, it inevitably gets blast by this thing from from above where you can see, and it sets half your city on fire. That does you know,

we have to we have to crack that nut. We have to crack that nut, and once we do, then we're ready to install sim City and it will not require an online connection for you to play, even if you're playing a single player campaign, that's just connect part. Part of this brings up an important issue, which is the public perception of things like microwaves and laser beams, because when you say words like that to a lot of people, they think microwave. That's what I used to

boil food. I go back to Tesla's death ray. Yeah, that kind of thing, which is not how that would work. Yeah. Uh, Now, I can't conclusively rule out any risks because I don't really know, but I have not read anything that suggested there would be major risks of death rays from space if we were to use microwave transmission. Yeah, I death rays from space would make an awesome album title though.

All right, Well, you know, the important thing I think to remember here is that these these methods are not science fiction. I mean, this is the stuff that is going to make a lot of the future, specifically stuff like space exploration really viable, at least in the near term, unless we come up with a way of creating you know, fusion reactors aboard distant um spacecraft and space stations. So I'm really excited about it. I think that it's got

some interesting applications. I don't think necessarily that we're going to see it replace all the power cables that are here on Earth anytime soon, unless someone comes up with a brilliant means of transmitting power safely that I think that infrastructure is going to stick around for the foreseeable future. I mean, it's kind of so tied into everything we

do right now. There are are infrastructure yeah right, I mean even now that we can transmit direct current more efficiently than alternating, well, our infrastructure is based off alternating currents. So while we have the technology to do it, it would mean having to replace a huge amount of stuff

that's been established for you know, decades now. So uh so, you know, I don't know that we're gonna see a change on our day to day lives in the near future, but it has incredible implications for the far future, particularly when we're talking about space, which we like to do on this podcast from time to time. So guys, if you have enjoyed this episode, go to FW thinking dot com.

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We look forward to hearing from you, and we'll talk to you again, Nellie Sen. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problem brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places