5: Japan

Space Based Solar Power

I myself am still pretty big on Sahara though. Space might be 10 times more efficient, but it might be 20 times more expensive, at least now. But I will go to space for clean, why not? Space based solar power also has potential for colonizations of the moon and Mars and beyond. It would make large scale 3D printing possible. Ocean covered moons of planets like Jupiter could give water if energy is plentiful. Water and solar and you are that close to growing food.

Space-based solar power

a higher collection rate and a longer collection period due to the lack of a diffusing atmosphere and night time in space

Space-based solar power: the energy of the future?

In space there's no atmosphere, it's never cloudy, and in geosynchronous orbits it's never night: a perfect place for a solar power station to harvest uninterrupted power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. ..... the concept is scientifically sound. ..... there was nothing wrong with the physics but the real question is the economics ...... With costs as high as $40,000 per kilogram for some space launches, the final price-tag for the first space-based solar power station could be as high as $20 billion. ........ the wars in the Middle East gave new impetus to the space-based solar power as scientific researchers with the military wrestled with the problems of delivering energy to troops in hostile areas. ........ Multiple, and potentially hidden, receivers could tap space-based solar power and relieve the military of the expensive and often dangerous task of supplying troops with generator diesel by either road or air ...... Two proven ways of getting the power to Earth exist in the form of either laser beams or microwaves. ...... laser transmitting satellites would have difficulty beaming power through clouds and rain. ...... The microwave option would have the advantage of uninterrupted transmission through rain, hail or any other atmospheric conditions and could provide gigawatts of power........ as early as 1964, scientists were able to power a helicopter using microwaves. Dr Jaffe said with a large receiving area the energy from the microwaves was so dissipated that it would present no danger to life. ......... as many as 100 launches into space would be required to construct the space stations with costs running into tens of billions. ...... space-based solar energy is like most novel ideas. "It's hard to tell if it's nuts until you've actually tried."

Space-Based Solar Power

Microwave transmitting satellites orbit Earth in geostationary orbit (GEO), about 35,000 km above Earth’s surface. Designs for microwave transmitting satellites are massive, with solar reflectors spanning up to 3 km and weighing over 80,000 metric tons. They would be capable of generating multiple gigawatts of power, enough to power a major U.S. city. ...... The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the Earth’s atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths. ........ The estimated cost of launching, assembling and operating a microwave-equipped GEO satellite is in the tens of billions of dollars. It would likely require as many as 40 launches for all necessary materials to reach space. On Earth, the rectenna used for collecting the microwave beam would be anywhere between 3 and 10 km in diameter, a huge area of land, and a challenge to purchase and develop.

What If Giant Space-Based Solar Panels Could Beam Unlimited Power To The Earth?

This idea may sound like science fiction, and at one time it was. ...... Asimov's 1941 story envisions a world where the Earth is powered by a beam of light that draws its energy directly from the sun..... Take New York City, for example, which requires 20 gigawatts of power. ...... The sandwich modules would be about 10 feet long on a side and about 80,000 would be needed. The array of sandwich modules would be about the length of nine football fields, or more than 1/2 a mile long. This is about nine times bigger than the International Space Station...... Back on Earth, the energy-containing radio frequencies from the space-based solar panels would be received by a special antenna known as a "rectenna," which could be as big as six miles in diameter............ the same beam would be able to provide power to Seattle and redirected to provide power to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil...... they could build receivers at remote operating bases and locations where it is logistically difficult and incredible costly to deliver diesel fuel....... the incredible heat of the sun in space

China considering space-based solar power station

Some believe a space-based solar collector could be launched as early as 2020 ..... a satellite that weighs more than 10,000 lbs., dwarfing anything previously placed into orbit, including the International Space Station ...... others place the launch date further out, as far away 2050. ...... "China will build a space station in around 2020, which will open an opportunity to develop space solar power technology" ...... China should begin with an experimental space-based solar power station by 2030, and build a commercially viable space power station by 2050. ....... "An economically viable space power station would be really huge, with the total area of the solar panels reaching five to six square kilometers" ....... Six square kilometers is nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. ....... The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has proposed its own solar collector to be launched within the next 25 years. ...... "When space solar energy becomes our main energy, people will no longer worry about smog or the greenhouse effect" 

Space solar is a very real option, but it will not happen in time to tackle Climate Change. For that we need to rely on Earth Solar. Let's just use satellites for internet communication.

Related articles

• SpaceX rocket launch ends in failure, explodes in air
• UFOs fleeing Earth caught by International Space Station NASA camera
• Here's What The Future Of Energy Might Look Like. And It's Pretty Amazing (VIDEO)
• Tesla's Dream is Getting Closer: Japanese Scientists Transmit Electricity Wirelessly Through the Air
• Travel to Mars and beyond on table at Toronto space conference

From 3 Gigawatts To 100

as the Indian government targets a massive expansion in the country’s solar output from some 3 gigawatts today to 100 gigawatts by 2022...... “India can become probably the largest country for solar energy” ..... “India has two times the sunshine of Japan. The cost of construction of the solar park is half of Japan. Twice the sunshine, half the cost, that means four times the efficiency” ..... India is one of the world’s largest carbon polluters; coal dominates the country’s energy mix 

SoftBank in tie-up for $20 billion in Indian solar projects

SBG Cleantech will be a harbinger of solar and wind energy. Following the Indian Prime Minister's 100GW solar and 60GW wind target by 2022, the venture will invest in and develop renewable energy plants across India.

Related articles

• SoftBank, partners eye $20 billion investment in Indian solar projects
• SoftBank, partners eye $20 billion investment in Indian solar projects
• SoftBank, partners eye $20 bln investment in Indian solar projects
• SoftBank to launch USD20 billion SBG Cleantech
• Softbank, Bharti & Foxconn Bet $20 Billion on Indian Solar Energy Projects
• Adani Group enters JV for 10GW Rajsthan solar park, signs PPA for 200MW Tamil Nadu plant
• Adani to set up country's largest solar park of 10,000 MW in Rajasthan
• Pakistan Solar Park Plugs In 100MW To Grid
• Nikesh Arora appointed SoftBank president
• Foxconn and Softbank to open robot joint venture

New York To DC In An Hour

Makes total sense. Boston to NYC to Philly to Baltimore to DC totally deserves this. So it would not matter where you worked and where you live. It would take the Northeast economy to a whole new level. The whole of Northeast would become one mega city.

Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at 311 MPH

a $10 billion Japanese magnetic-levitation train line to the 40-mile (64 kilometer) Washington-Baltimore corridor for 15-minute trips ..... Japan is looking for an overseas customer for maglev technology as the country works toward opening its first line in 2027. ...... Maglev trains rely on magnetic power to float the cars above the ground, eliminating the friction of steel tracks. The trains start off running on wheels, the same as used on F-15 fighter jets, until they’re going fast enough for the magnets to kick in and create lift. ..... A Washington-Baltimore starter line eventually may be extended to New York, putting the biggest U.S. city within reach of the capital in 60 minutes by train ..... proposed line could carry about 9.2 million passengers a year

Related articles

• Japan approves plans for world's fastest train line
• Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at 311 MPH
• The U.S.'s First Maglev Train Could Connect Washington, D.C. and Baltimore
• 311mph (500km) Bullet Train [Video]
• Japan Conducts First Public Test of New 311 MPH 'L-Zero' Maglev Train
• Japan Transport Ministry OKs Tokyo-Osaka maglev train project
• Fifty Years After The Bullet Train, Japan Approves Plan To Build Super-Speed Maglev Train Line
• Backers of a Maglev Train Hope to Outpace Acela in the Northeast Corridor
• Backers of a Maglev Train Hope to Outpace Acela in the Northeast Corridor

Japanese Style Precision

Path Is In China, Why Not Facebook?

I wonder if the closed nature of Path makes it more palatable to the communist party honchos, but it makes no sense to let Path in and keep Facebook out. Both are so very similar in what you can do with them. On Facebook you can have 5,000 friends, on Path only 150. Used to be 50.

Or is Path too small to not have been noticed yet?

Dave Morin Says China Is Path’s Second Biggest Country

A lot of the early growth with Path 2.0 was in Japan and Korea, and Path’s second largest user base is in China, he said. Things have been picking up in the United States, too, especially in “these nice metro pockets.” .... photosharing remains the most popular activity. Music-sharing recently surged ahead to number two spot, overtaking the ability to announce when you fall asleep and wake up

Related articles

• Dave Morin: Path is growing fastest in Asia
• Path app targeting Facebook grabs attention
• Will the new social media site Path replace Facebook?
• Facebook's China problem
• There's One Glaring Way Path Is A Better Mobile App Than Facebook, Twitter Or Instagram
• Attention on mobile app Path
• Path's Dave Morin and Benchmark Capital's Matt Cohler Will Join Us At Disrupt SF!
• Path CEO Dave Morin speaks on design and bringing the future to the world
• China's unbalanced path is still the right one
• Elephants on the Path to Extinction in Africa Unless There is Global Intervention

60 Milli Seconds

Bathymetric/topographic map of the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding islands (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The ocean route might make sense for inter-continental destinations, but I think air is still the best option for dense cities.

ExtremeTech: $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

the first ever trans-Arctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables ...... a smattering of branches that will provide high-speed internet access to a handful of Arctic Circle communities ....... All three cables are being laid for the same reasons: Redundancy and speed. As it stands, it takes roughly 230 milliseconds for a packet to go from London to Tokyo; the new cables will reduce this by 30% to 170ms. This speed-up will be gained by virtue of a much shorter run: Currently, packets from the UK to Japan either have to traverse Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean, or the Atlantic, US, and Pacific, both routes racking up around 15,000 miles in the process. It’s only 10,000 miles (16,000km) across the Arctic Ocean, and you don’t have to mess around with any land crossings, either. ...... The massive drop in latency is expected to supercharge algorithmic stock market trading, where a difference of a few milliseconds can gain (or lose) millions of dollars. It is for this reason that a new cable is currently being laid between the UK and US — it will cost $300 million and shave “just” six milliseconds off the fastest link currently available. The lower latency will also be a boon to other technologies that hinge heavily on the internet, such as telemedicine (and teleconferencing) and education. Telephone calls and live news coverage would also enjoy the significantly lower latency. Each of the fiber optic cables will have a capacity in the terabits-per-second range ..... Currently, almost every cable that lands in Asia goes through a choke point in the Middle East or the Luzon Strait between the Philippine and South China seas. If a ship were to drag an anchor across the wrong patch of seabed, billions of people could wake up to find themselves either completely disconnected from the internet or surfing with dial-up-like speeds. The three new cables will all come down from the north of Japan, through the relatively-empty Bering Sea — and the Arctic Ocean, where each of the cables will run for more than 5,000 miles, is one of the least-trafficked parts of the world. That said, the cables will still have to be laid hundreds of meters below the surface to avoid the tails of roving icebergs

New Scientist: Fibre optics to connect Japan to the UK – via the Arctic

In mid-August, construction should start on the first submarine fibre-optic cables to cross the Arctic Ocean ....... The longest of these links will become the world's longest single stretch of optical fibre. ....... the biggest threats to cables in warmer waters: fishing trawlers and ships' anchors ........ Reduced transmission time will be a boon for high-frequency traders who will gain crucial milliseconds on each automated trade. Optical amplifiers will boost signal strength every 50 to 100 kilometres. The firm also plans to drill a tunnel 40 metres deep to take a shortcut through the Boothia isthmus in the Canadian Arctic ....... Isolated Arctic communities will also be connected by extra sections of cable that branch off from the main one. ........ "choke points" such as the Luzon strait near Taiwan, the strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia, and the crowded and politically unsettled Middle East. ....... Ships must be built to withstand the pounding of ice as well as waves. ...... Icebergs can plough more than a metre into the ocean floor, endangering cables. Greenland's icebergs extend to depths as great as 170 metres below the sea surface, so Arctic Fibre will lay cable at least 600 metres deep in the Davis strait, where icebergs are most likely. The underside of sea ice also has ridges, or "bummocks", that reach depths of 18 metres, so Arctic Fibre aims to stay at least 50 metres down.

Ars Technica: Europe moving 60 ms closer to Japan with new undersea cables

The climate change-induced retreat of Arctic ice has had one positive effect. The Arctic Ocean is now sufficiently navigable that cable-laying ships will be able to plant undersea cables directly linking London with Tokyo. ...... 6 pairs of fibers with a 1.6 Tbit/s capacity per pair will be laid, and minimum latency between London and Tokyo will be 76.58 milliseconds.

A Day In The Life Of Amy Cao

Amy Cao's Political Incorrectness

Many of you might know Amy Cao does social media for FoodSpotting. This is a day in the life of Amy Cao.

Amy Cao wakes up to the chirps of birds that remind her to tweet, and she gets to tweeting right away, first thing in the morning. She often finds herself dealing with six hours worth of tweets from fans from Japan who all expect individual reply tweets. So far she has managed to meet those expectations, but she wonders for how long. She says she is looking for an intern/assistant. A look alike would be nice.

Distributed Search

Image via Wikipedia

Silicon Valley VCs Don't Want Obama's Money, Think Google Is Passe CNet "The triumph of the distributed Web." ....... the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. ........ Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people's browsers at the moment that people are searching ........ "All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying" ......... the future is "federated search," in which the Web's users don't just execute search queries, they participate in building the index by the very act of searching, immediately and directly. ............you probably also want to know what's showing up on users' computers in apps other than the Web browser. ....... the value of real-time searching, as well as social-network-aware searching, will increase dramatically and quickly. .......... the United State's subsidies on ethanol, France's decision to skip the Internet in favor of the state-sponsored Minitel, and Japan's direct investment in supercomputers as it tried to spend its way out of a recession were examples of poor investments. "Government is a particularly poor judge of new technology" ....... . The millennials are here. Everything changes. The current generation of graduating college students won't remember a life offline. A deluge of unstructured data creates the next great information leaders. ("The dark matter of the enterprise is unstructured data" ........ Wireless broadband will be one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year and in the future......... Maintech, not Cleantech ....... Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. ......Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is the growth story of the coming decade. ....... Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and next. ..... The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated.

David Gelernter: Manifesto

Is Google passe? I am not so sure. But Twitter and Wolfram Alpha have put some blood into the water. Suddenly Yahoo and Microsoft are energized on search like never before. The wisdom was Yahoo has lost the game. Now Yahoo is yelling, not so fast. Google has been challenged, that's for sure.

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
Search: Much Is Lacking

This had to happen sooner or later. Search is such a vast terrain. It will stay the number one challenge online. Content creation is not about to slow down. How do you keep up with the exponential explosion in content creation? You got to come up with new ways of doing search. There has always been a ton of room for innovation in search. But now we are seeing new energy in the domain.

Wolfram Apha Is Cool
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
What Does Your Resume Look Like Today?
Google Is Working On Search
Job Hunting And 2.0
Is Reading Socializing?
Reimagining The Office
Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Define Social Media
The Stream, The Lifestream, The Mindstream
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing

Related articles by Zemanta

• Deep Web, Surface Sparkles Occlude Deeper Look (arnoldit.com)
• Semantic searching - Evri (digital-constructions.com)
• What Is Google Squared? It Is How Google Will Crush Wolfram Alpha (Exclusive Video) (techcrunch.com)
• Clinging to Dying Web 2.0 Dreams (gawker.com)
• Microsoft-Seeqpod acquisition: Good idea, wrong company (news.cnet.com)
• Break Google's Monopoly on Your Data: Switch to Yahoo Search (lifehacker.com)
• Search Gets Organized With Google Squared (inquisitr.com)
• Bing Kumo: The New Search Super Star (arnoldit.com)
• LIVE: The Wolfram Alpha Non-Launch (mashable.com)
• For Yahoo's New Search, Form Follows Function Follows Form (gigaom.com)
• Massucci's Take: Microsoft takes on Google with new search engine (dailyfinance.com)
• Even Social Search Needs an Algorithm: Arguing Against Data Entry As Search Engine (readwriteweb.com)
• Yahoo Search as an Alternative to Telling Google Everything (smarterware.org)
• Search, query syntax, Google and Starbucks (cmswatch.com)
• The Digital Home 49: It's time to get connected (news.cnet.com)
• Search still on Microsoft's research radar (news.cnet.com)
• Google looks for 'next big thing' (strivepr.com)
• Google Chrome: Another 30 Percent Faster? (mashable.com)
• Future of search may not be about indexes and algorithms (financegeek.com)
• Why Are the Search Engines Fixing Something That's Not Broken? (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Yahoo Search, As We Know It, Is Over (techcrunch.com)
• 3 Wolfram Alpha Add-ons to Smarten Up Your Firefox (mashable.com)
• Wolfram Alpha (onlineinsider.net)
• Will Microsoft Kumo Fall Flat, Like Other MS Search Engines? (businesspundit.com)
• Wolfram Alpha search launches: Interesting, but no threat to Google (dailyfinance.com)
• Google Adds More Ads - This Time To Search 'Suggest' Function (paidcontent.org)