00:00Behold, a city-sized power plant built by robotic spiders floating in orbit,
00:06transporting energy down to Earth as a beam.
00:09To us, it sounds like a crazy sci-fi idea.
00:12But for engineers, it's a very real project.
00:16The pieces are being tested, and space agencies want to have the whole system online in less than 30 years.
00:23Now, it wasn't that long ago that large-scale solar power felt unrealistic.
00:28Today, it's widespread and the most affordable form of energy.
00:32The biggest solar power plant on the planet, the Golmud Solar Park, has almost 7 million solar panels,
00:39and it could produce an unbelievable 2.8 gigawatts of electricity.
00:44That's enough to power more than 2 million homes,
00:46and about twice the energy needed to power the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future, if you're keeping
00:52track.
00:53Now, all this sounds great on paper, but in reality, it's a major headache.
00:58Large-scale solar power takes up massive amounts of land and needs constant upkeep.
01:03More importantly, solar panels on Earth never hit 100% efficiency.
01:08Our atmosphere acts like a pair of dirty sunglasses and scatters roughly 30% of the sun's energy before it
01:15even reaches the glass.
01:17Also, sunlight is unreliable.
01:19Remember those puffy things called clouds?
01:22Solar panels are like employees who take sick days when it's cloudy, barely work during winter, and sleep every single
01:29night.
01:30Hey, I had a job like that once.
01:32To keep the lights on at night, we have to rely on massive battery systems to cover that gap.
01:38Well, that's why engineers started looking for a loophole, or better said, a better location.
01:43If you travel about 22,000 miles straight up, you reach a geostationary orbit.
01:50This is the cosmic sweet spot.
01:53Up there, a satellite stays fixed over the same point on Earth.
01:57You get unfiltered sunlight non-stop every single day for a year.
02:02Well, almost.
02:03Twice a year, around the equinoxes, Earth slips in front of the sun and throws a shadow across that orbit,
02:10creating a short blackout that can last up to 72 minutes.
02:13And then the sunshine is back on, as if nothing happened.
02:17Well, finding a reserved parking spot in a 22,000-mile orbit isn't the hardest part.
02:23It's building the thing to do the work there.
02:25Depending on the design, NASA wants the structures to be anywhere from a couple of miles to nearly six miles
02:32across.
02:33We can't fit something like that on a rocket.
02:36The ISS is about the size of a soccer field and took more than a decade and over 40 launches
02:42to assemble.
02:43So, engineers are flat-packing it like IKEA furniture.
02:47The plan is to launch thousands of identical, ultra-thin squares of mirrors and electronics, stacked like dinner plates inside
02:54a heavy-lift rocket.
02:56Something like this would be impossible for humans to assemble.
02:59It would take centuries of going up and down.
03:02That's why it's a job for little robots that might look like spiders, crawling over a giant metal web,
03:09snapping modules into place until the structure grows into a floating power city.
03:14But once the station is assembled, the coolest part is the delivery.
03:19You can have a massive amount of electricity stuck in orbit,
03:22and they don't really make extension cords and cables that reach up that far.
03:26So, engineers would have to turn that electricity into a beam.
03:31The station would convert the raw power into microwaves, or in some designs, low-intensity lasers.
03:38These are basically the same waves that heat your leftover lasagna.
03:41That beam is then aimed at a specific target on the ground.
03:45Wait, a beam from space?
03:47What if some bird gets in the way?
03:49That sounds like something from movies, where a giant laser fries a city.
03:53Well, actually, making and using that kind of weapon isn't unrealistic at all.
03:58It's just impractical.
04:00And the world lacks a proper villain.
04:04But this isn't a tight laser pointer.
04:06Over the distance that long, the beam naturally spreads,
04:10and it's designed to arrive wide for safety and control.
04:13So, by the time it reaches the ground,
04:16it's almost four times weaker than standing outside on a sunny day.
04:20And if a bird flew through the beam,
04:22it wouldn't go poof into feathers and smoke like in a cartoon.
04:26The whole energy beam from out of space isn't just a theory, and it's been tested.
04:32In 2023, Caltech's Maple experiment successfully beam power wirelessly in orbit for the first time.
04:39They prove you can actually send energy through the void and catch it on the other side.
04:45On Earth, we catch it with a rectenna.
04:48That sounds high-tech, but visually,
04:50it looks like a giant fishing net made of wire mesh stretching for miles.
04:54It's not a slab of concrete and is, in fact, almost transparent.
04:59So much so that rain falls straight through it.
05:02That's because it doesn't need to reflect or block light.
05:05It's built to intercept specific microwavelengths.
05:09In theory, you could build multiple rectennas
05:12and switch targets as the station and Earth line up.
05:15Like routing a call to a different tower.
05:18Right now, the space solar project isn't waiting on some technological breakthrough.
05:23It depends more on a bunch of boring things getting cheaper at the same time.
05:27The biggest one is launches.
05:29A few decades ago, putting two pounds into orbit cost tens of thousands of dollars.
05:35Today, reusable rockets have cut that price by a lot.
05:39The more rockets fly, the cheaper each flight gets.
05:42Space solar only starts to make sense when sending cargo to orbit feels less like a scary moon mission
05:49and more like basic freight shipping.
05:51The second piece is mass production.
05:53These stations aren't crafted like you need spacecraft.
05:57Instead, they're more like factories.
05:59They're made up of thousands of identical ultra-thin panels,
06:02all the same shape and size, with the same connections.
06:06It's the kind of stuff you mass produce in millions,
06:09not something workers could assemble by hand.
06:11In the meantime, engineers also have to prove that everything can function on a small scale.
06:17The tests are already happening in bits and pieces.
06:21We're seeing small satellites, short power beams, and demos of autonomous assembly.
06:26NASA's own 2024 study models a path where the tech matures in the 2030s.
06:33The giant station gets assembled in the 2040s,
06:36and power delivery could start around 2050, which is not really that far.
06:41Also, breakthroughs can happen and push the project forward in an unexpected way.
06:47Now, building a project like this sounds wildly ambitious,
06:50but it's actually the first realistic step,
06:53just one of many bigger ideas that are still waiting in the far future.
06:57For example, what if you don't put the panels in Earth orbit at all?
07:01What if you put them closer in instead, where sunlight hits harder
07:05and every panel pulls in more energy per square foot?
07:08You build a station that lives in permanent daylight,
07:11then beams power outward like a lighthouse.
07:15One other idea keeps the same beam-it-down concept, but changes the build strategy.
07:20Instead of one giant city station,
07:23you split it into a whole constellation of smaller power satellites,
07:27like cell towers but in orbit.
07:29One satellite lines up over a rectenna, beams power down for a while,
07:34and then hands-off to the next one, sliding into position.
07:37From the ground, it looks like a relay race in the sky.
07:41A chain of satellites marching around the planet,
07:44passing the beam from one to the next.
07:46And if one unit fails, the whole system doesn't go dark.
07:50The rest keep working, while robots swap in a replacement like a flat battery.
07:55And then, we have the coolest and most famous one, a Dyson swarm.
08:00Not a solid shell, but a cloud of millions of collectors orbiting a star,
08:05grabbing a huge chunk of its output.
08:08If a civilization built that, the star itself could look wrong from far away,
08:13like somebody dimmed it on purpose.
08:15Any of these ideas belongs to a different era,
08:18when building a space is cheaper, easier,
08:21and maybe powered by technology we don't even have yet.
08:24But one thing is already obvious.
08:27From the moment we wake up,
08:29we're surrounded by devices that guzzle electricity,
08:32and we keep demanding more.
08:34So, it's not surprising that, slowly but surely,
08:37people are starting to look up at space as the next place to scale energy.
08:42For now, all we can do is wait for the next big upgrade.
08:46And maybe, remember to turn off your devices when not using them.
08:50Just saying.
08:51That's it for today.
08:52So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity,
08:55then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
08:57Or, if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.
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