5 Reasons Going To Mars is a

Hadn't noticed,Mike :-).All this is completely my own personal human being view, not officially endorsed by my affiliations.There is still, in my mind, great value in SPS. Often lately I am told that there is more power than anyone needs what with Solar and Wind "everywhere" and there are the anecdotes of Cali stopping the subsidies and Hawaii shutting off input from the new household and company sources due to "too much product" hitting the grid at once. BUT ... that is during the days, when night comes the light ends and the winds slow and the big old generators are turned on.Down in Long Beach there is the Big Battery. A building sized Lithium Ion ... battery. The idea, as I hear it, is to charge it all day when there is all that extra power then it will drain out over the few minutes it takes to get the legacy plants fired up to keep the SoCal area lit and running through the nights.So the raw Power, in some places anyway, is there now. But only until it is not, which is about half of every day of every year. Batteries, BIG toxic batteries are moving into the mix and few seem to mind, but while the thought is that these are doing the nighttime supply, my reading says that that's not the case, they are just for those transition periods. The traditional power plants are still major parts of the equation. And.. I hear that there isn't a whole lot of interest in making new fossil plants as the old ones age away.SPS is constant. The Grid likes constant. The Grid hates spikes. Electricity doesn't flow like water. The Grid is a complex entity, a whole slew of different entities from different eras all mashed together, all based on a core idea that the raw energy input will be constant, not spiking from a thousand inputs randomly feeding as clouds differently pass individual rooftops. Until we build a second infrastructure that is made to deal with spiked input we are best to feed the grid what it was made to handle.Seems to me, and this is solely based on where I sit and with what I have read so far about the Energy Industry's technologies, that SPS can still be a good way to get rid of the fossil fuel and nuclear plants that we really DO still use quite a bit of every 24 hour period and also to help stop the new toxicity potentials of the Batteries-the-size-of-Buildings idea that is being tested now.I am open to being enlightened and educated on the details of the matter.[I was just yesterday editing a 1989 conference video where SSI President Freeman Dyson said he wasn't keen on SPS. His main concern was that, while it made some sense theoretically and he knew people wanted to believe it all, he needed to see more research done. SSI was selected by NASA as the depository of all NASA/DOE SPS materials in the 90's. Behind me in my office and in the next room I have about three quarters of the collection sitting in stacks waiting for digitization. Just this fraction is over 200 bound studies from every angle you can imagine and many angles I couldn't fathom till I saw them myself. The reports average 200 pages each (the JPL "SPS Red Book" is two 700+ page volumes, few are less than 100 pages). I watch Freeman saying that on the screen and I turn around and see all that sitting right there and I just scratch my head. How much research, how much paper, how much lab work, how much is "enough" before a test machine is put in orbit to prove or disprove the concept already? Hate to admit it but sometimes I just throw my hands in the air and say in frustration 'Come on Japan, Come on China... here's more IP to sell back to the country that created it' :-( ]On May 1, 2018 at 9:25 AM "'Combs, Mike' mikecombs@... [spacesettlers]" wrote: Sorry for the multiple postings. First started sending the below reply Tuesday of last week; for some reason didn't make it to the list until last night. Regards, Mike Combs From: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com [mailto:spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com] Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 3:48 PM To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] [spacesettlers] Re: "5 Reasons Going To Mars is a TER Perhaps, but a point I might be failing to get across is that, in the current era, we cannot point to anyone who is a refugee due to over-crowding from overpopulation, or due to climate change....