Replies

This is—beyond all human imagination—the best pro China AI article I’ve seen written throughout the span of the history of human writing—from the cave paintings in the Lascaux cave in France to the latest blog entry by Earl Shoemocker on why Texas BBQ is better than any food on Earth—and definitely within the last couple of hours.

This is ludicrous. The “article” claims that this fantasy orbiting power station would be “…capable of generating more energy in one year than all the oil on Earth.” That’s just stupid, since their equally fictional chart of potential output, at max, claims an output of 1.5 megawatts, about the same as a single Earth-bound nuclear reactor, or a single large gas or coal power plant. And that claimed output is over the top fantasy, since such a satellite would still have to use the same solar panel tech we have today, and no ground-based solar power plant of similar size can produce anywhere near those numbers, even if it had 24-hour sunlight. This concept has been around since the “energy crisis” days of the 1970s, and there are multiple reasons one has never been built.

This appears to be childishly-written, poorly conceived CCP propaganda, as well as fodder for some kind of site pimping silver investment (though weirdly, I don’t see a mechanism in the article for follow-up).

As an aside, when I was in elementary school in the early 70s, I read a novel called “Flameout” that was about the investigation of a commercial airliner crash. The investigators eventually figure out that the jet had accidentally flown through the microwave beam of an orbiting solar power station, frying all of its electronics. It was pretty good (at least from what I remember now).