Feel the universe sucking the heat (was Descriptions of SPS growth)

> > there might be three gathering-arrays, 120 degrees apart.
> Not sure why we would want to limit it to 3 arrays.

I figured that that would help limit the fraterclipsing, while
maximizing coverage-area from a single orbital-plane. Maybe I
was wrong.

> even assuming your 60,000 Terawatts is in the ballpark, I'd
> say that's an admirably-distant limit to growth.

It is a failure if the electricity market grows at even a mere
2.33% per year (10-fold per century) for more than a few
centuries. After 5 centuries, that would be 100,000-fold
growth. If 2 terawatts of electric were the starting point,
5 centuries of growth would bring it to 200,000 terawatts.

Even on the basis of only 1% (which would let society be choosy
about which parts of its Earth-crust it would prefer to remain
unmined) of its existing 200-trillion-ton fuel supply, nuclear
fission could scale beyond the solar flux Earth-intercept of
174,000 terawatts, and still sustain for many tens of
millennia.

> I think every other potential source of power would run
> into technical absurdities before that.

Nuclear units don't run into their own shadows. There *is* a
heat-dissipation issue. Thankfully, artificially removing some
greenhouse gas is easy to do and can drop the atmospheric
temperature by some 20 degrees celsius -- and there is also
this half-baked parabolic Cosmic Background Refrigerator:
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Cosmic_20Background_20Refrigeration

"You can literally feel the universe sucking the heat from
your body."

> A lot of your questions indicate that you probably need to
> better acquaint yourself with the SBSP concept before
> confidently asserting that nuclear is clearly superior.

Likewise, vice versa. Megawatts and Megatons might be a good
place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/Megawatts-Megatons-Turning-Point-
Nuclear/dp/0375403949
http://tinyurl.com/4lg96w