To save the earth, the modern man seems to be ready to do anything. When activities on earth seem inadequate to reduce the burden on Mother Nature, he is even willing to borrow help from Space!
The Climate Conference in Bali triggered off some amazing ideas to save the earth. The littlest of UN nations, the Western pacific island Palau, brought forth its ambition of providing affordable, clean, safe, reliable, sustainable and expandable energy for mankind from space-based solar power, solar energy is eight times more powerful in outer space than it is after passing through Earth’s atmosphere.
So how does the little island plan to go about the project? The proposal is to create a small demonstration project, in which a 260-foot-diameter ‘rectifying antenna’, or rectenna, is to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth. That would be enough electricity to power 1,000 homes, but on that empty island the project would be intended to show its safety. The energy captured by space-based photovoltaic arrays would be converted into microwaves for transmission to Earth, where it would be transformed into direct-current electricity. Low-orbiting satellites, as proposed for Palau, would pass over once every 90 minutes or so, transmitting power to a rectenna for perhaps five minutes, requiring long-term battery storage or immediate use – for example, in recharging electric automobiles via built-in rectennas.
This mini demonstration has been estimated to cost $800 million and is hoped to be complete by 2012. It sounds like fiction but seems to be on its way to taking the shape of reality.
Other climate change solutions which came up at the conference included, filling the skies with soot to block the sun, to cultivating oceans of seaweed to absorb the atmosphere’s heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
