Okay, Chelsea? Yeah? I have relatively good news, or at least an interesting, slightly uplifting news for the future for my episode. Sorry, for my fringy mini. This is like what episode? Yeah, my fringy mini episode. Okay, hit us with it. Okay, so. This comes from Live Science, Live Science. Yep. We're not going to look it up. We're just going to say I'm familiar with it.
To do that. This was published on January 14th, 2025 by Ben Turner, article title, China plans to build enormous solar array in space and it could collect more energy in a year than all the oil on Earth. Haini scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous 0 .6 mile or one kilometer wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via
microwaves. The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super -heavy rockets, has been dubbed, quote, another Three Gorgeous Dam project above the Earth, end quote. Do you know what the Three Gorgeous Dam is? Yeah, it was there. Oh, yeah, that's right. So that's the next paragraph anyway.
So we have to go through it. The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze River, is in central China, is the world's largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year. According to one of NASA scientists, the dam is so large that if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth's day by 0 .06 microseconds.
The new project, according to lead scientist Longlei Hao, the chief designer of China's Long March Rockets, would be, quote, as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36 ,000 miles above the Earth, end quote,
quote. This is an incredible project to look forward to, end quote, long added during a lecture in October hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as reported by the South China Morning Post, quote, the energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from earth." And I just want to make sure that we understand this. They're not saying oil extracted from Earth in a year. They're talking about all oil that could be extracted
from the Earth. Like, that's how much energy we're talking about. That is insane. That is insane. Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar power, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations, such as the intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground. Hmm. Scientists propose a number
of space -based solar power technologies. which would continuously collect and transmit energy from sunlight and space, board is 10 times more intense than at Earth's surface. But building an appropriately giant array would take many launches, meaning that most proposals failed to get off the ground. To overcome this challenge, Long and his team are working on the development of the Long March 9 reusable heavy lift rocket, which will have a lift capacity of at least 150
tons. Besides being used for satellites, the rockets will also be key to China's plan to reach the moon, where it wants to rebuild in an international lunar research base by 2035. China isn't the only nation eyeing plans for a solar satellite array. The US companies Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grunman, the European Space Agency, and Japan's JAXA space agency have also been investigating the technology with the latter scheduling the launch of a small proof of concept satellite
this year to assess its feasibility. That's the end of the article. You know what? Out of all the countries you just listed, China's probably the most likely to do it, to be honest. Yeah.
with you and I just when you're looking at like the future and like who's going to be dominant you hear a story like this from China and yes you will hear so many people critiquing China which yes China deserves some critiques let's actually talk about some of the good stuff they're doing and compare it to the US is deregulating oil and coal at this exact same time Who's going to rule the next century? The people who are trying to build the solar array or the people
deregulating coal? Yeah, like if they're taking a step back. But you look at something like that and it kind of is reminiscent to me at least of the space race, but it seems like they're the only ones kind of to go up. The United States is kind of taking steps back as far as stuff like that goes. Yeah, it's not two countries trying to vie for space and one of them refusing to acknowledge that space exists. I mean, who's gonna win if China gets something like that up
in space? Like it's not even a race, like they're gonna be the clear leader of everything. In a year, this thing can produce as much energy as That's insane. That's absolutely insane. And it's not going to wreak as much havoc on the environment. I mean, without knowing any of the details, which is, you know, just speculating on this. It doesn't seem as if it would, which is crazy. The implications of that. Like, yeah,
some actual good news. China is actually working with a lot of countries on not on developing this, but making sure that everybody has access to this technology. They're not trying to hide it behind trademarks or corporate secrets. They are trying to share it with people so that we can all live in a safer world, a more environmentally friendly world. They're also trying to pull ahead as the leader of the universe. Yeah, that'll
do it. Almost as if there's some vacuous void that has just shown up that they can inherit very easily. Interesting. And let's face it, this is one of the things China is very good at is being able to plan for something so fundamentally different and future thinking with their society as opposed to what we have with our current society. That's pretty crazy. That's pretty... Yeah. I mean, we're just... You know, make as much money as you can off of all the poor people. Yeah,
exactly. And most importantly - Who can't think.
ahead we gotta mark up everything and just you know rape and pillage what you can out of the pockets of well and importantly too if energy is that abundant you can't make that much profit off of it which is why one of the reasons we don't look into something like this is because that was a definite thought i had too because what's running the economy of a lot of the united states that makes the world leader yeah and this is always something that you really need to take
into account under a capitalist system whatever you're pushing forward needs to be profitable. it has to be profitable or it will not get built or move forward because somebody is able to money off it and if they can't why would they do anything because capitalists need to make money off it and probably one of the big reasons why they're trying to build this in space and move it forward
and the U .S. is deregulating oil and gas so anyhow probably enough of a rant about our terrible terrible system and how we're falling and that was a great mini yeah and you guys 48 hours I don't know maybe look into space see if you can see this thing maybe you come up with your own idea I don't know maybe you've got your beautiful brain and you can have a good idea like this I know I can but I don't have it right now so maybe you do anyhow bye