[BlazingArizona]

Hmm. I’m guessing none of these scientists played Sim City. Satellite microwave power plants inevitably lead to parts of your city bursting in flames as the satellite becomes misaligned.

I see the energy generated in space as being used in space. Putting entire Chinese factories in orbit and wafting down palletloads of high value manufactured goods would be more cost-effective than trying to ship energy to a fearful Earth.

[hopespringseternal]

I see the energy generated in space as being used in space.

Exactly. As with resources mined in space.

The tragic thing is that the money we could have spent developing space industry and opening that frontier was instead spent financing entitlements. We probably dumped 100 to 1000 times as much as would have been needed to get space industry going into that rathole and have nothing to show for it but negative social indicators and a "need" to dump more down it.

It is hard to say what might have come from investing in space, but it probably would have bigger impact than information technology, potentially as much as the industrial revolution.

[theFIRMbss]

>Putting entire Chinese factories in orbit and wafting down palletloads of high value manufactured goods

Right. And when Chinese
get pissed over a recall,
a load will 'waft down'

onto say, New York...
Orbital anything will
someday kill millions.