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by waegawegawe
3161 days ago
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Think about how large of a lens you're talking about. Even if it were one hundred meters across and was able to collect 100% of the sun's energy passing through it, the amount of energy produced would be utterly insignificant compared to the problem we're discussing. And how would you get a one hundred meter lens to mars orbit? Even after that, you have to consider that we want an oxygen atmosphere, not one made of water vapors. I don't know what you mean by "too far removed from current capabilities", but I doubt we'll even start working on the problem for two or three centuries. No, it seems more likely to me that we'd use our growing knowledge of genetics and psychology to hack out the part of ourselves that needs to be outside, and opt for a purely enclosed existence on Mars. |
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Mars receives 593 W/m^2 flux, so each IKAROS-sized reflector could produce about 100 KW of energy. Given the expected difficulty of large scale terraforming and colonization efforts, it seems the cost of, say, the equivalent of 10,000 IKAROS-sized mirrors (~1 GW, comparable to a large nuclear plant) would be relatively minor.
Whether that would be more cost effective than shipping an equivalently powerful reactor or other generator is questionable - it will presumably depend on our lifting capacities.