This is rapidly becoming my favorite channel. Thank you Isaac Arthur for making these videos. The best part is I discovered this channel not 6 months ago, so I can unlimited binge watch it for a long minute!
@@Sangano1 he really is. I am surprised he doesnt have a few million subs. But it is awesome that I found a channel I love that has several HUNDRED well made and interesting videos to watch!
I'm a huge advocate of SPS. And, of course, of all the potential power sources that aren't just dumping Carbon into the atmosphere. I'm also a big fan of multiple baskets for our eggs.
You wouldn't be able to target an individual house from that far up, plus there have been times when my internet has been cut off even though I paid the bill on time, wouldn't want that happening to someone because the billing department failed to process their payment in time.
makes more sense returning space resources as a replacement for what would be needed here. dirty mining . or some dirty steel/chemical production. also sky-hook ship with orbital refueling as a way to to get to space. just breaking up moon water gives you both fuel and oxygen. already a good energy use
I really gained more knowledge from this episode than your previous ones on space power. Especially space power satellites. One especially compleling points was the incorporation of the recievers into greenhouses or other structures. Lately, I have been viewing an architects channel where she advocates for floating cities. I am big on hybridization. The big thing there is getting away from land based regulations. A city that could export power from solar and nuclear, as well as food crops and fresh water, could go a long way towards making such a city profitable business as well as self-sustaining. After all societies' ultimate goals should be clean air, water, and post scarcity!
I became entranced by SPS in the 1970s and almost dropped my entire adolescent savings of $250 to become a lifetime member of the L5 Society in 1975. *_"L5 in '95!"_* If I had, I suppose I would today be a member of the National Space Society.
As a future topic I would like to suggest: "Biotechnological Civilizations" at the same biopunk level. Something like the Navi from Avatar in their symbiosis with Nature, the Engineers from Prometheus, or like in the game Scorn. What would a civilization (alien or human) be like, where all its technology was biologically constructed, where resources are recyclable because they are biological, vehicles, houses were cultivated or organic, biocomputers, etc. A "forest city" for example. It would be interesting to analyze such a society. 👍
Solar collection mirrors could be set up to orbit in a near-polar orbit, in the "plane" of the circumference of Earth's orbit. Then nearly all the reflection would be away from Earth, allowing the units to be nearly invisible on the ground. This has huge complexity as far as delivery.
I usually just wash my electricity in the utility sink. You need a pair of rubber gloves, but it comes out a lot cleaner and it's easier than going to space.
This is incidentally why some people think microwaves cook food "from the inside out". They don't actually do that, but different layers of the food are better at absorbing them than others, so they do cook the spots they are absorbed most efficiently by first, which may be a pocket of high water saturation that is deep within the food. It will cook that pocket from the outside in, but if it's far below the surface it may appear that it's "cooked the inside first".
What about a video about the future shapes? Circle is omnidirectional resistance, Triangle is unidirectional resistance. Square is spatial eficency. See my blog about the ideal shape of city and lanes
I was just pondering how beaming energy in space actually worked and its limitations since playing with transmitters and receivers in spave in Final Factory. This is very enlightening.
Gundam 00 did feature a kind of space based solar power but it turn into a cold war between 3 power blocs on Earth. Any nation that complete this kind of thing shall be a superpower. Clean energy equals influence.
Weren't you going to redo more older videos? I would love an update to the trillion people on Earth and launch loop videos. Love your stuff, new and old, thanks for being awesome.
Weird idea but what if most aliens wipe themselves out by researching methods of FTL travel? Like they get to space, look around and realize they're gonna need a faster boat but in attempting to warp space and time or whatever other methods they wind up blinking their whole system out of existence? Such irony if everyone who tries to search for others winds up going extinct...
Haha. One option, though not the most favorable one, is "survival of the fittest". The birds who fry in the solar thermal plant earn the proverbial "Darwin Award", for enhancing the gene pool by their absence. Eventually, you will have a surviving bird population that avoids the death trap of reflecting mirrors.
Some rough numbers for SPS: a Starship launch/landing costs $60M carrying 200 tons of payload. That's a bare launch cost of $300/Kg to Earth orbit. If SpaceX charges $500/Kg they get 80% gross margin - decent business. Can SPS be made economical at $500/Kg launch cost? I reckon yes.
@@bobo-cc1xw Lot of wear and tear on anything left open to the elements in the Sahara though. Put solar in space and it'll be fine for years with little to no maintenance, the same cannot be said for the Sahara.
as a person that plays modded KSP, using space energy transmission to power space craft is a massive save in weight and makes electric engines more viable since most of the energy you need will be used to get the speed to the target orbit
Another idea - place a SPS in Earth-sun L2 point and use earth atmosphere as a giant lens to focus sunlight by a factor of 45,000 (according to David Kipping's Terrascope principle). Earth atmosphere will act like giant collector with zero mass to haul from Earth. The SPS at L2 will turn sunlight to laser using solar pumped laser and beam to earth night side.
Having gone through the recent eclipse there seemed to be no change in brightness even when the sun was half obscured. We can put a lot of stuff in space before it starts changing much.
You could also direct the microwave beam at the ocean when the satellite isn't over land, this would lead to grater water evaporation and increased cloud cover which improves the albedo of the earth.
When Gerard Oneill wrote The High Frontier he himself said that the economic assumptions he made about solar power satellites would be wrong if the efficiency and price of photovoltaics suddenly improved, and that's what happened. It's also important that he proposed SPS as an industry that space habitats could use as trade value with the Earth, because a population living in space could export energy at a low cost.
The main barrier to attaining this or any other Post Scarcity ideal is the fact that our society and the derivation of economic and political power is currently based 100% on scarcity and deprivation. Why do any hard work growing a company or building value (outside borderline meaningless metrics that only prop up stock price) when reactionary Austerity will shrink the entire pie therefore increasing the proportion held by the already wealthy. Frankly a description of trends across the last few decades that fits all too well.
It will be hard for even our elites to shrink the pie when someone starts mining 10 km diameter / 9 Billion ton asteroids worth $1 Trillion or more (depending on amount of rare-earth elements on board) each.
@@dansmith16 Everything I have seen and read throughout my time on this planet has convinced me that "Keep the government out of everything" is almost always a good sentiment.
Suppose we had two miraculous materials: a tether strong enough for a space elevator, and a room-temperature superconductor. Would it make sense to build tethered power satellites and use superconductors in the tether to get the electricity down to Earth? I can imagine some downsides, even assuming wonder materials -- the tether would presumably force the satellite to be in geostationary orbit, and if it's a solar satellite, the sunlight collectors would be an obstacle to spacecraft using the elevator.
We have to be careful about having too much cheap energy. If we have too much, that would discourage efficiency and lead to waste. Waste = heat. Another thing we need to watch out for is filling the electrometric spectrums with too much energy, such as beaming energy to Earth, which could also cause heating of the atmosphere.
Watch the ecumenopolis video. Waste heat is not going to be a problem. And no, beaming energy down to Earth would not warm the atmosphere. That is the whole reason why the proposed mechanism is Microwaves. Because they do not interact with the atmosphere.
@@Alexander_Kale You know how microwaves work right? That band of energy is specifically in the range that water reacts too, remind me again what humans and the atmosphere is full of? Oh, right water. Don't quit your day job.
@@IraFox84 And how much time exactly do you plan to spend standing on top of a rectenna? Oh, right, that necessity probably hasn't crosse your mind. Presumably, Microwaves are magic that kill you instantly when they pass down next to you and hit the rectenna while you are nowhere near them. Or that such waves are death rays that will incinerate planes or some such nonsense... And the amount of water in the atmosphere per meter cubed is what exactly? Oh, would you look at that, not enough to result in significant power loss, why am I not surprised. What's that? you can improve on even that by placing rectennas in predominantly dry climates? who would have thought? At least check your accusations first becfore calling other people idiots.
@@IraFox84 Less heat to the Earth because our best heat engines are 30% efficient and microwave to electricity is more than 80% efficient (the other inefficiencies of SPS don't matter for Earth's heat budget because they radiate heat into space). The only humans that get heated directly are those who hang out between the transmitter and the rectenna, presumably irrational greeny protestors, so net gain. Losses to atmospheric absorption are insignificant. This means that carbon neutral SPS can provide more than twice as much usable power than carbon neutral nuclear plants for the same level of waste heat. And those concerned with anthropogenic heat are concerned with the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, which, whether catastrophic or not, raises the temperature more by trapping solar heat than the direct heat input from the burning. Whether the alarmists are right or not, we could use several times as much SPS energy replacing fossil fuel energy without having the net warming effect of the fossil fuel use.
When Starship + Booster becomes as common as Falcon-9, launched over 30 times in March I think I heard, then solar power satellites and O'Neal cylinders are the least of what will be possible. 200 miles strait up from where you are reading this and you are half way to anywhere from Belt in. All it takes is Delta V.
And kill everyone on the planet, you know because its a fucking microwave. This guy really didn't think that one through. Assuming you could even figure out a way to precisely and continually aim a microwave from space to the surface, someone is going to turn that into a weapon.
Big mirror Lagrange 3 to big molten salt or otherwise solar receiver, prolly put it at second Lagrange. Surely that can be huge power the mirrors being much closer to the sun?
No, it is not. Money represents real wealth,, it's just a medium of exchange for physical assets and capacity, so if you don't have enough of it, you don't have enough of those, either. Sure, you can inflate the currency and/or arbitrarily change its worth for a very brief time, but people start figuring out what they do and do not have very quickly. Then the value of you unit of currency reconciles, and if you had nothing to begin with, your currency is also worth nothing.
For your next video, could you focus on nanotechnology and the effects it could have on various industries? I would also like to know what would happen if we tried to enhance ourselves with these microscopic machines?
I think we still need to address the "kicking the ladder down behind us" effect of reducing fossil fuel production globally after the developed world has already exploited and benefited from it. Perhaps fisson projects would spot fill gaps...
Developing cheap power production could help with that. Either by providing cheap power options to poorer nations/regions, or by using excess cheap energy to recapture carbon dioxide to produce cheap carbon-neutral "fossil fuels".
The "kicking the ladder" effect only applies to efforts by "international organizations" to prohibit third world development through fossil fuels, not to the developing world transitioning away from it (except insofar as third world development might be financed by the sale of fossil fuels, and that hasn't happened much). Cheaper energy helps everybody, all other things being equal. Given an "installed" production capacity, lower demand should make fossil fuels CHEAPER, facilitating development unless some globalist busybody puts a stop to it.
It is plausible that the solar collectors could be at L4 and L5, and beam the power as a maser to Earth. This very tight beam would spread out in the 93 million mile distance. But if it were very tightly pollinated, it might just spread to the diameter of Earth and provide an analog to Tesla's theoretical power design.
Question - assuming we have an abundance of fossil fuels for centuries to come and our only concern is global warming, could we place space shade in earth-sun L1 to reduce solar flox instead of building millions of SPSs?
I would still be concerned about the changes to atmosphere composition even if the direct heat issue was dealt with. It would definitely be a good way to delay the problem.
@@paperburn We have as much oil left as we have carbon, so it's basically infinite. Everyone forgets that we've been able to synthesize oil for like, a hundred and fifty years. We can make it out of coal, we can make it out of wood, we can make it out of biomass, we can make it out of organic gases like methane, and we usually just don't because that's more energy-intensive than drilling. Changes to the atmosphere aren't a big deal, either, for a couple of reasons. First, Earth just gets greener and more oxygen-rich when there is more carbon-dioxide for plants. This was the case for tens or hundreds of millions of years at a time before humans evolved, and everything was fine. Turns out, life evolves significantly faster than the planetary atmosphere changes unless there's a volcanic winter or something. The mean temperature of Earth is also higher than what we currently enjoy, so shades/mirrors would help a great deal in mitigating natural climate change, should we elect to do that. Second, we already know how to filter all the carbon out of everything, and we've known that for about 60 years now. A carbon lattice like graphene can filter carbon out of air, radiation out of water, and almost anything out of anything else. This is another thing we just don't do now because it's kinda pricey compared to existing carbon-capture tech, and nobody actually cares that much. Yeah, I know they do a whole song and dance about how critical global climate change is, but if that were the case they'd be mobilizing effective technologies as surely as they would for any war. Nobody in charge actually cares.
Microwave ovens are also very good Faraday cages. Think your phone is spying on you and sending data to corporate servers? Put it in the microwave so that no signals whatsoever can be transcieved by your phone.
At the moment there are to many people who want to financially benefit from energy production for humans to seek abudant energy Shareholders want a monopoly.
if you develop a cheap reliable power you will be rich, there are quite literally Tens of billions USD spent on increasing energy production of all sorts yearly. If the oil companies or whoever is the boogie man today could sell power profitably at .5 cent a kilowatt they would and be richer than they are now.
When I saw your section about turning this into a weapon, albeit a poor one, I kept thinking of that seaQuest episode where genetically engineered life forms commandeered the Ronald Reagan Memorial Laser Space Base. But now you have me thinking about installing these mirrors somewhere that'll mess with your nation's enemies sleep. Melt Siberia? Or heat up the ocean somewhere strategic to generate more rain? Would heating the eye of a hurricane help dissipate the rest of it?
In your heat remarks you neglected the fact that it's not just the inefficiency such as 15% heat loss in microwave conversion. _All_ of the electricity that is delivered to Earth is eventually released as heat. E.g. a computer is sometimes described as a "complex system for converting electricity to heat". This heat gain must be included in the equation. But perhaps the improvement in greenhouse effect reduction will compensate.
Yes, whether anthropogenic warming is catastrophic or not, the heat increase from greenhouse trapping is much greater than the direct heat released by burning, both in inefficiency loss and use release combined. If heat is the problem, SPS is the solution. Of course, if we increase our energy use by enough orders of magnitude, we will eventually have a problem, but the solution to THAT is to move most heavy industry and a good portion of the population into space.
I'm _really_ eager for some kind of industrial facility on Luna (or a captured asteroid) pumping out components for simple solar collectors to beam power home (solar-thermal heat engines and microwave beams seem the most brutishly-primitive, and thus economic systems?). While some of the more advanced components (avionics, maybe RCS systems, the transmitter electronics, etc.) might need to be shipped from Earth, if orbital infrastructure can make the mechanical iron/aluminum parts including the heat engines and microwave antennas it should be reasonably affordable. I don't know a lot about engine design, but it seems like design of a closed-cycle heat engine between a sun-heated side and a radiator 'space side' should be relatively close to a solved problem? Turbine blades might be complicated to make on the frontier, but piston engines should be manageable, or turbines could be shipped from Earth until manufacturing in orbit became sufficient. But for all I know, a base might be able to make large batches of photovoltaics on Luna, and bypass the whole 'new steam age' thing. As you said, we should pursue many paths simultaneously. But many of those paths require industrial infrastructure capable of making metal parts on Luna or a similar Earth-orbit location, so that seems like a priority.
Scarcity is driven by consumption. You have excess food? Your people will either start eating more food or tone down production. Now you no longer have excess food.
@@Alexander_Kale Go out to the back of a big corporate grocery store. Then after you watch the employees dumping hundreds of pounds of good food into the dumpster, tell me again how your theory of scarcity works.
@@mcconkeyb I have just told you. If you don't believe me, look at the population explosion of the last 200 years, which followed in the shoes of the agricultural revolution and conclusively proves me correct. your personal anecdote means nothing in the face of that.
@@Alexander_Kale I'm sorry, I didn't know that you were assigned to be the judge, jury, and executioner in all matters related to the word scarcity. I will immediately lie down and die based on your superior knowledge and intellect.
@@mcconkeyb If you want to do that, sure, go ahead, it is a free country after all. But you could also just stop spouting nonsense and then being dramatic about it.
Helios 1 can only power a few buildings at best . Energy ain't a problem in New Vegas there's plenty of nuclear reactors and a hydrogen electric dam to use .
@@tylersoto7465 I know, right? But they're California, so of course they can't figure out how energy works. Even after the apocalypse, they're all gay for solar. Fucking Californians. Leave it to them to somehow cause a resource shortage with infinite nuclear energy.
OK, you've solved the simultaneous problems of power production and greenhouse gas generation. Now what about the next problem for expansion of civilization -- groundwater depletion?
space based solar thermal desalination plants and cheap energy to pump the water inland? hell, you could just focus mirrors on a section of ocean with winds blowing towards your chosen land mass and essentially boil up clouds to rain on the continents
@@digitalnomad9985 Desalination is economically feasible (barely!) for coastal cities. Could it (and requisite pumping) be done for even a living-off-the-luxury-of-the-land city like Las Vegas? No. And to even think about scaling this practice up to meet the demands of agriculture -- is INSANE!!!!
Some years old thing I heard has stuck with me. Kirk Sorenson, NASA engineer turned thorium reactor startup employee (maybe CEO? Don't remember) was looking at SBS and trying to make the profit numbers work on 'paper' (excel sheet). At the time he was running the math, even if launch costs were 0, it wouldn't have been as cheap as the grid suppliers he was comparing against. Now maybe longevity of the systems in question have improved, but i'd be surprised if maintenance and land costs of the groundside receiving stations have changed much. I love the idea, it tickles my scifi predilictions. But i really want to see someone who knows business break down the cosr numbers, and have them talk with an engineer who translates that into required performance for profitability, before i get too excited about it. Or start expecting it to happen.
Yea, but if you have room for a big rectenna, the conversion efficiency matters more. The conversion efficiency for laser/PV or laser/heat engine is MUCH lower at both ends than that of mazer/rectenna. Also higher frequencies (infared/ visible/ UV) don't go through clouds.
The government wouldn't give him the time of day unless he could strategically place certain jobs in certain districts. private enterprise is really the only way to get anything done these days, maybe with a grant and support of NASA
What are the options for mining uranium or scooping up unlimited amounts of methane? I guess with methane there is the problem of also needing oxygen. Are there sources of oxygen other than earth?
Luna is rich in Oxygen. Its bound up in various compounds containing either metals or silicates. One proposed propellant for Lunar surface to Lunar orbit and back down is a Slurry of Aluminum and Liquid Oxygen. Not terribly great performance but any Hydrogen bound up in ice is more valuable as water.
@@mpetersen6 The problem with things "bound up" in chemical compounds is that it takes energy to isolate them. More energy than the chemical would produce in fuel. Like splitting water to make hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. Great for clean burning fuel except it takes energy to get that fuel. Might be useful for converting energy though if you have nuclear power for energy to process things into fuel for rockets. Or solar panels for that lunar thing.
@@mpetersen6 And the heat comes from the oil. It does not take as much energy to refine oil as it yields. That's why it's still the main source. Oil is stored energy from millions of years ago. This is not the same as breaking down molecules. Like combining hydrogen and oxygen yields heat and combines into water. Bringing in energy will break it up into the component parts. Pretty much all energy sources are merely storage mechanisms in some way or another. The only original sources of energy are the sun and nuclear.
In terms of the Earth's heat budget, the only efficiency we need to consider for SPS is the microwave to power efficiency, which is greater than 80%, the other inefficiencies radiate heat into space. Our best heat engines are 30% efficient, and photovoltaic is worse. So for every usable watt produced, nuclear and fossil release more than two watts of heat directly into the troposphere, and fossil traps many times more to boot, and an SPS watt releases a fifth of a watt. So, replacing any current terrestrial power source (except wind and hydro) with SPS on a per-watt basis REDUCES heat input.
Starship may still be testing, but there is nothing else out there that is comparable for launch cost. it might take 3-6 years but it will be by far the most affordable for over a decade
SpaceX has nearly cornered the launch market by lower cost per pound due to reuse of the first stage booster, which is most of the launch cost. They are launching more than the rest of the world combined. Falcon launches don't make the news anymore, because they are taken for granted. Perhaps you hate Musk for championing free speech. Suffer.
"Not what SpaceX is anticipating a few years down the road" Issac, you of all people know that SpaceX projections aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I get that they're the most well known space company but they're also one that likely won't be around in 10 years and definitely won't be in 20.
considering in 20 years they went from not having an orbital rocket to having THE LION'S SHARE of launches 43% of all global launches in 2023 you are ether ignorant or dishonest to come to that conclusion especially since there is practically no one else in the market that meets the efficiency of the (Old) Falcon 9 and no one has any practical competitor to starship past a rudimentary drawing board sketch. Are Elon's predictions optimistic and early? Yes, but even with delays SpaceX is still coming ahead by years ahead of its rivals.
"likely won't be around in 10 years and definitely won't be in 20." What part of capturing the bulk of the launch market makes you think that? So far, SpaceX projections come through LATE, but inevitably.
@@digitalnomad9985 the part where the only growth in the launch market over the past decade has been Starlink launches and the face that in an impossibility optimistic scenario Starship needs another 10 billion to reach the point of being able to launch anything into orbit.
The speed of progress in this area is ludicrously slow. All the money we currently throw at white elephant wind farms and half baked infrastructure could kick start a worldwide benefit to mankind bringing about a new era of plentiful cost effective power. If only we had politicians and supra national organisations not in thrall to globalist corporate interests.
every time I see 'clean' I think about some just not knowing what's involved in doing something or they are deliberately looking the other way in the hopes that someone else will figure it out for them "Science will fix it" or simply it's Not In My Back Yard so not my problem. I had seen something in passing about extracting magnesium from seawater for ridged lightweight frames, and the process involved adding in 'consumable' chemicals to react with the magnesium and then more steps to separate the magnesium from the sludge settling at the bottom of the tanks. The result is highly toxic seawater and the single metal of interest, and many processes are like that for extracting the element of choice from ore. it would be nice to be able to pick up an asteroid rock and extract out ALL the stuff in it in useful forms without ending up with some form of toxic byproduct that no one wants, I just don't see that readably available today, and for sure not in a zero-G refinery. The same goes for Aluminum, what is the Bayer process, there is more to it than just heating rocks and magically getting aluminum ingots (1, get ore. 2, ? 3, profit. lol).
This is rapidly becoming my favorite channel. Thank you Isaac Arthur for making these videos. The best part is I discovered this channel not 6 months ago, so I can unlimited binge watch it for a long minute!
You'll be binging for a long time! 😊
Enjoy. This guy is brilliant. Been devouring his content for many years now.
Don't forget to grab a drink and a snack
@@LoLaSn oh dont worry, not gonna forget that!
@@Sangano1 he really is. I am surprised he doesnt have a few million subs. But it is awesome that I found a channel I love that has several HUNDRED well made and interesting videos to watch!
Welcome to the family (:
I'm a huge advocate of SPS. And, of course, of all the potential power sources that aren't just dumping Carbon into the atmosphere. I'm also a big fan of multiple baskets for our eggs.
Designing power satelites for dual use as death rays would make a convincing argument for paying the electricity bill on time
You wouldn't be able to target an individual house from that far up, plus there have been times when my internet has been cut off even though I paid the bill on time, wouldn't want that happening to someone because the billing department failed to process their payment in time.
It'd be pretty amusing to wake up and see Dave's house go up in smoke cuz he's out of town or something and forgot to set up some kind of auto pay
Best hard sci-fi channel out there!
ArThur's Day, my favorite day of the week.
makes more sense returning space resources as a replacement for what would be needed here. dirty mining . or some dirty steel/chemical production. also sky-hook ship with orbital refueling as a way to to get to space. just breaking up moon water gives you both fuel and oxygen. already a good energy use
I really gained more knowledge from this episode than your previous ones on space power. Especially space power satellites. One especially compleling points was the incorporation of the recievers into greenhouses or other structures. Lately, I have been viewing an architects channel where she advocates for floating cities. I am big on hybridization. The big thing there is getting away from land based regulations. A city that could export power from solar and nuclear, as well as food crops and fresh water, could go a long way towards making such a city profitable business as well as self-sustaining. After all societies' ultimate goals should be clean air, water, and post scarcity!
I became entranced by SPS in the 1970s and almost dropped my entire adolescent savings of $250 to become a lifetime member of the L5 Society in 1975. *_"L5 in '95!"_*
If I had, I suppose I would today be a member of the National Space Society.
Ahhhhh, fond memories of the microwave satellite disaster button from SimCity 2000...
"A single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic...."
[SIM-City player]
A new Arthursday video about a favorite topic of mine. Really do wish to see progress made on SPS in the near future.
Good work, Isaac.
Isaac, I think the topic of gamma-ray lasers might warrant its own episode at some point. Those would be super neat to have.
As a future topic I would like to suggest:
"Biotechnological Civilizations" at the same biopunk level. Something like the Navi from Avatar in their symbiosis with Nature, the Engineers from Prometheus, or like in the game Scorn.
What would a civilization (alien or human) be like, where all its technology was biologically constructed, where resources are recyclable because they are biological, vehicles, houses were cultivated or organic, biocomputers, etc. A "forest city" for example. It would be interesting to analyze such a society. 👍
As long as we don't go the route of the Venusians from Battle Angel Alita......
I'm also a fan of space solar power, even if we use that power for other off world applications as long as it doesn't hit the earth
Solar collection mirrors could be set up to orbit in a near-polar orbit, in the "plane" of the circumference of Earth's orbit. Then nearly all the reflection would be away from Earth, allowing the units to be nearly invisible on the ground. This has huge complexity as far as delivery.
Sir Arthur returns with the goods yet again! Consistently quality as always mate.
Sir Isaac Arthur really does sound like it should be that way
I usually just wash my electricity in the utility sink. You need a pair of rubber gloves, but it comes out a lot cleaner and it's easier than going to space.
Now that's funny!
This is incidentally why some people think microwaves cook food "from the inside out".
They don't actually do that, but different layers of the food are better at absorbing them than others, so they do cook the spots they are absorbed most efficiently by first, which may be a pocket of high water saturation that is deep within the food. It will cook that pocket from the outside in, but if it's far below the surface it may appear that it's "cooked the inside first".
What about a video about the future shapes? Circle is omnidirectional resistance, Triangle is unidirectional resistance. Square is spatial eficency.
See my blog about the ideal shape of city and lanes
I was just pondering how beaming energy in space actually worked and its limitations since playing with transmitters and receivers in spave in Final Factory.
This is very enlightening.
Happy Arthursday everybody!
Thank you Arthur for your videos. I really enjoy them. 😊
Happy Arthursday!
Gundam 00 did feature a kind of space based solar power but it turn into a cold war between 3 power blocs on Earth. Any nation that complete this kind of thing shall be a superpower. Clean energy equals influence.
Weren't you going to redo more older videos?
I would love an update to the trillion people on Earth and launch loop videos.
Love your stuff, new and old, thanks for being awesome.
See "Tethered Ring Space Launchers" and "Interplanetary Infrastructure".
Imagine how amazing a space game 1960 to 3000 would be if Isaac was lead scientist. I would play the hell out of that game 😂🎉
KSP 2 had this potential but it was handed over to incompetents.
Love this
I used this topic for my research thesis for college
If you have a populated Archology, the heat from said population can be used as a source of power by using it's differencial to the outside tempeture.
Weird idea but what if most aliens wipe themselves out by researching methods of FTL travel? Like they get to space, look around and realize they're gonna need a faster boat but in attempting to warp space and time or whatever other methods they wind up blinking their whole system out of existence?
Such irony if everyone who tries to search for others winds up going extinct...
Awesome episode! Rich in technical detail and well-considered perspectives.
Get a bunch of drones that look like eagles to fly around constantly to keep the birds away. Could be very automated.
Haha. One option, though not the most favorable one, is "survival of the fittest". The birds who fry in the solar thermal plant earn the proverbial "Darwin Award", for enhancing the gene pool by their absence. Eventually, you will have a surviving bird population that avoids the death trap of reflecting mirrors.
Now here is a solution, and the one that can be used now (well, in a few years). To solve energy by building instead of restricting.
Indeed, I'm convinced of the possibility.
Some rough numbers for SPS: a Starship launch/landing costs $60M carrying 200 tons of payload. That's a bare launch cost of $300/Kg to Earth orbit. If SpaceX charges $500/Kg they get 80% gross margin - decent business. Can SPS be made economical at $500/Kg launch cost? I reckon yes.
Solarcells in the Sahara are what $ a kg? Sure camels are cheaper than starships
@@bobo-cc1xw Lot of wear and tear on anything left open to the elements in the Sahara though. Put solar in space and it'll be fine for years with little to no maintenance, the same cannot be said for the Sahara.
I'd presume most of the mass would be sourced off-Earth, too.
stuff in space should be made from space stuff. I say Lunar mining and launch from the moon to GEO
SpaceX was targeting $7 million to launch 150 tons to LEO…
as a person that plays modded KSP, using space energy transmission to power space craft is a massive save in weight and makes electric engines more viable since most of the energy you need will be used to get the speed to the target orbit
Another idea - place a SPS in Earth-sun L2 point and use earth atmosphere as a giant lens to focus sunlight by a factor of 45,000 (according to David Kipping's Terrascope principle).
Earth atmosphere will act like giant collector with zero mass to haul from Earth.
The SPS at L2 will turn sunlight to laser using solar pumped laser and beam to earth night side.
Having gone through the recent eclipse there seemed to be no change in brightness even when the sun was half obscured. We can put a lot of stuff in space before it starts changing much.
Why is Florida always getting nuked on these videos LMAO
What are these solar satilites with the 2 giant mirrors and the inflateble radiator for the turbines?
You could also direct the microwave beam at the ocean when the satellite isn't over land, this would lead to grater water evaporation and increased cloud cover which improves the albedo of the earth.
When Gerard Oneill wrote The High Frontier he himself said that the economic assumptions he made about solar power satellites would be wrong if the efficiency and price of photovoltaics suddenly improved, and that's what happened. It's also important that he proposed SPS as an industry that space habitats could use as trade value with the Earth, because a population living in space could export energy at a low cost.
All hail president Arthur. Praise be to him, on this Arthursday of contemplation.
Sun sails rotating a dynomo outer eged ,,like solar lightbulb when were kid's in the 80s and 90s but large scale,,,I can picture it 🤔🤙👍🇺🇲👽😎
I don't know about you, but I would absolutely love to see a sky filled with cool looking sci-fi satellites.
The main barrier to attaining this or any other Post Scarcity ideal is the fact that our society and the derivation of economic and political power is currently based 100% on scarcity and deprivation. Why do any hard work growing a company or building value (outside borderline meaningless metrics that only prop up stock price) when reactionary Austerity will shrink the entire pie therefore increasing the proportion held by the already wealthy. Frankly a description of trends across the last few decades that fits all too well.
Keep government out of everything then.
It will be hard for even our elites to shrink the pie when someone starts mining 10 km diameter / 9 Billion ton asteroids worth $1 Trillion or more (depending on amount of rare-earth elements on board) each.
@@dansmith16 Everything I have seen and read throughout my time on this planet has convinced me that "Keep the government out of everything" is almost always a good sentiment.
@@VainerCactus0because who needs to hold anyone accountable, am I right?
Suppose we had two miraculous materials: a tether strong enough for a space elevator, and a room-temperature superconductor. Would it make sense to build tethered power satellites and use superconductors in the tether to get the electricity down to Earth? I can imagine some downsides, even assuming wonder materials -- the tether would presumably force the satellite to be in geostationary orbit, and if it's a solar satellite, the sunlight collectors would be an obstacle to spacecraft using the elevator.
love this❤
Last time I was this early I disappointed the wife
Dropped this king👑
😂
Omg lol
That's what round two is for
Drink check snack check
Happy Arthursday
We have to be careful about having too much cheap energy. If we have too much, that would discourage efficiency and lead to waste. Waste = heat. Another thing we need to watch out for is filling the electrometric spectrums with too much energy, such as beaming energy to Earth, which could also cause heating of the atmosphere.
Watch the ecumenopolis video. Waste heat is not going to be a problem.
And no, beaming energy down to Earth would not warm the atmosphere. That is the whole reason why the proposed mechanism is Microwaves. Because they do not interact with the atmosphere.
@@Alexander_Kale You know how microwaves work right? That band of energy is specifically in the range that water reacts too, remind me again what humans and the atmosphere is full of? Oh, right water. Don't quit your day job.
@@IraFox84 And how much time exactly do you plan to spend standing on top of a rectenna? Oh, right, that necessity probably hasn't crosse your mind. Presumably, Microwaves are magic that kill you instantly when they pass down next to you and hit the rectenna while you are nowhere near them.
Or that such waves are death rays that will incinerate planes or some such nonsense...
And the amount of water in the atmosphere per meter cubed is what exactly? Oh, would you look at that, not enough to result in significant power loss, why am I not surprised.
What's that? you can improve on even that by placing rectennas in predominantly dry climates? who would have thought?
At least check your accusations first becfore calling other people idiots.
@@IraFox84 Less heat to the Earth because our best heat engines are 30% efficient and microwave to electricity is more than 80% efficient (the other inefficiencies of SPS don't matter for Earth's heat budget because they radiate heat into space). The only humans that get heated directly are those who hang out between the transmitter and the rectenna, presumably irrational greeny protestors, so net gain. Losses to atmospheric absorption are insignificant. This means that carbon neutral SPS can provide more than twice as much usable power than carbon neutral nuclear plants for the same level of waste heat.
And those concerned with anthropogenic heat are concerned with the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, which, whether catastrophic or not, raises the temperature more by trapping solar heat than the direct heat input from the burning. Whether the alarmists are right or not, we could use several times as much SPS energy replacing fossil fuel energy without having the net warming effect of the fossil fuel use.
When Starship + Booster becomes as common as Falcon-9, launched over 30 times in March I think I heard, then solar power satellites and O'Neal cylinders are the least of what will be possible. 200 miles strait up from where you are reading this and you are half way to anywhere from Belt in. All it takes is Delta V.
Okay if we could do microwave beaming... wouldn't the microwaves also heat the surrounding air?
And kill everyone on the planet, you know because its a fucking microwave. This guy really didn't think that one through. Assuming you could even figure out a way to precisely and continually aim a microwave from space to the surface, someone is going to turn that into a weapon.
the water in the air yes, much like a microwave oven or your cell phone
Microwave power beaming has been tested on Earth through an equivalent amount of air. The losses were negligible.
Would you consider doing a commentary/documentary on current fusion research projects ❤
I probably should do an update, its been a while
I am going to write in Isaac Arthur For president next November
Big mirror Lagrange 3 to big molten salt or otherwise solar receiver, prolly put it at second Lagrange. Surely that can be huge power the mirrors being much closer to the sun?
Why money is an artificial limitation.
No, it is not. Money represents real wealth,, it's just a medium of exchange for physical assets and capacity, so if you don't have enough of it, you don't have enough of those, either. Sure, you can inflate the currency and/or arbitrarily change its worth for a very brief time, but people start figuring out what they do and do not have very quickly. Then the value of you unit of currency reconciles, and if you had nothing to begin with, your currency is also worth nothing.
Should have remained with the gold standard, but the government wouldn't be able to print trillions for itself each year.
I wonder if beaming energy threw the atmosphere will heat it up, and how the heating from the beam compares to the waste heat from power plants
quite a bit of heat, but as long as the collectors collect solar energy that would have landed on earth it is basically a wash.
We already extract rotational energy from earth, very indirectly, through tidal power.
Last time I was this early I was in high school
That drone flyover at 43 seconds, where is that? I want to live there! :P
For your next video, could you focus on nanotechnology and the effects it could have on various industries? I would also like to know what would happen if we tried to enhance ourselves with these microscopic machines?
How close are we to the FTL drives? are there any theories yet on how to do that?
no
I think we still need to address the "kicking the ladder down behind us" effect of reducing fossil fuel production globally after the developed world has already exploited and benefited from it.
Perhaps fisson projects would spot fill gaps...
Developing cheap power production could help with that. Either by providing cheap power options to poorer nations/regions, or by using excess cheap energy to recapture carbon dioxide to produce cheap carbon-neutral "fossil fuels".
The "kicking the ladder" effect only applies to efforts by "international organizations" to prohibit third world development through fossil fuels, not to the developing world transitioning away from it (except insofar as third world development might be financed by the sale of fossil fuels, and that hasn't happened much). Cheaper energy helps everybody, all other things being equal. Given an "installed" production capacity, lower demand should make fossil fuels CHEAPER, facilitating development unless some globalist busybody puts a stop to it.
Watched on nebula already, worth the money to get my weekly futurism fix a few days early 😎
68000 gigs watts? That would power a LOT of Deloreans.
Hi ☄️
Hi 😂
@@unknown-ob1qu هلوات ههه
Hey#+×
Like your work.
Much.
Industrializing the moon is one of my favorite episodes 🎉🎉🎉
It is plausible that the solar collectors could be at L4 and L5, and beam the power as a maser to Earth. This very tight beam would spread out in the 93 million mile distance. But if it were very tightly pollinated, it might just spread to the diameter of Earth and provide an analog to Tesla's theoretical power design.
Question - assuming we have an abundance of fossil fuels for centuries to come and our only concern is global warming, could we place space shade in earth-sun L1 to reduce solar flox instead of building millions of SPSs?
yes but I do not think we have centuries of oil left
I would still be concerned about the changes to atmosphere composition even if the direct heat issue was dealt with. It would definitely be a good way to delay the problem.
@@brycehunter3457
More CO2 in the atmosphere is better for plants, isn't it?
@@paperburn We have as much oil left as we have carbon, so it's basically infinite. Everyone forgets that we've been able to synthesize oil for like, a hundred and fifty years. We can make it out of coal, we can make it out of wood, we can make it out of biomass, we can make it out of organic gases like methane, and we usually just don't because that's more energy-intensive than drilling.
Changes to the atmosphere aren't a big deal, either, for a couple of reasons. First, Earth just gets greener and more oxygen-rich when there is more carbon-dioxide for plants. This was the case for tens or hundreds of millions of years at a time before humans evolved, and everything was fine. Turns out, life evolves significantly faster than the planetary atmosphere changes unless there's a volcanic winter or something. The mean temperature of Earth is also higher than what we currently enjoy, so shades/mirrors would help a great deal in mitigating natural climate change, should we elect to do that.
Second, we already know how to filter all the carbon out of everything, and we've known that for about 60 years now. A carbon lattice like graphene can filter carbon out of air, radiation out of water, and almost anything out of anything else. This is another thing we just don't do now because it's kinda pricey compared to existing carbon-capture tech, and nobody actually cares that much. Yeah, I know they do a whole song and dance about how critical global climate change is, but if that were the case they'd be mobilizing effective technologies as surely as they would for any war. Nobody in charge actually cares.
@@arcdecibel9986 I bet you were a jock in School .
Just a reminder for all my fellow RUclipsrs, when you watch his new videos make sure your liking it for that Algorithm
Cheap vocal refraction as well
Microwave ovens are also very good Faraday cages. Think your phone is spying on you and sending data to corporate servers? Put it in the microwave so that no signals whatsoever can be transcieved by your phone.
Not corporate, government servers.
@@dansmith16It offers protection from all authority.
petrol is 0.02usd/liter in venezuella ;)
but is it really, or is that due to subsidies?
Can't wait until the Stargate episode -- I got some questions.👀
At the moment there are to many people who want to financially benefit from energy production for humans to seek abudant energy
Shareholders want a monopoly.
if you develop a cheap reliable power you will be rich, there are quite literally Tens of billions USD spent on increasing energy production of all sorts yearly. If the oil companies or whoever is the boogie man today could sell power profitably at .5 cent a kilowatt they would and be richer than they are now.
When I saw your section about turning this into a weapon, albeit a poor one, I kept thinking of that seaQuest episode where genetically engineered life forms commandeered the Ronald Reagan Memorial Laser Space Base.
But now you have me thinking about installing these mirrors somewhere that'll mess with your nation's enemies sleep. Melt Siberia? Or heat up the ocean somewhere strategic to generate more rain? Would heating the eye of a hurricane help dissipate the rest of it?
In your heat remarks you neglected the fact that it's not just the inefficiency such as 15% heat loss in microwave conversion. _All_ of the electricity that is delivered to Earth is eventually released as heat. E.g. a computer is sometimes described as a "complex system for converting electricity to heat". This heat gain must be included in the equation. But perhaps the improvement in greenhouse effect reduction will compensate.
Yes, whether anthropogenic warming is catastrophic or not, the heat increase from greenhouse trapping is much greater than the direct heat released by burning, both in inefficiency loss and use release combined. If heat is the problem, SPS is the solution. Of course, if we increase our energy use by enough orders of magnitude, we will eventually have a problem, but the solution to THAT is to move most heavy industry and a good portion of the population into space.
I'm _really_ eager for some kind of industrial facility on Luna (or a captured asteroid) pumping out components for simple solar collectors to beam power home (solar-thermal heat engines and microwave beams seem the most brutishly-primitive, and thus economic systems?). While some of the more advanced components (avionics, maybe RCS systems, the transmitter electronics, etc.) might need to be shipped from Earth, if orbital infrastructure can make the mechanical iron/aluminum parts including the heat engines and microwave antennas it should be reasonably affordable. I don't know a lot about engine design, but it seems like design of a closed-cycle heat engine between a sun-heated side and a radiator 'space side' should be relatively close to a solved problem? Turbine blades might be complicated to make on the frontier, but piston engines should be manageable, or turbines could be shipped from Earth until manufacturing in orbit became sufficient.
But for all I know, a base might be able to make large batches of photovoltaics on Luna, and bypass the whole 'new steam age' thing. As you said, we should pursue many paths simultaneously. But many of those paths require industrial infrastructure capable of making metal parts on Luna or a similar Earth-orbit location, so that seems like a priority.
Scarcity!
Scarcity will always exist, because it is driven not by technology, or by resources, but by politics!
Scarcity is driven by consumption. You have excess food? Your people will either start eating more food or tone down production. Now you no longer have excess food.
@@Alexander_Kale Go out to the back of a big corporate grocery store. Then after you watch the employees dumping hundreds of pounds of good food into the dumpster, tell me again how your theory of scarcity works.
@@mcconkeyb I have just told you. If you don't believe me, look at the population explosion of the last 200 years, which followed in the shoes of the agricultural revolution and conclusively proves me correct.
your personal anecdote means nothing in the face of that.
@@Alexander_Kale I'm sorry, I didn't know that you were assigned to be the judge, jury, and executioner in all matters related to the word scarcity. I will immediately lie down and die based on your superior knowledge and intellect.
@@mcconkeyb If you want to do that, sure, go ahead, it is a free country after all. But you could also just stop spouting nonsense and then being dramatic about it.
We will retake Helios 1 from NCR!.
I don't know why, considering that we have fusion reactors, but Ad Victoriam! Those primitives would no doubt misuse the facility, if nothing else.
Helios 1 can only power a few buildings at best . Energy ain't a problem in New Vegas there's plenty of nuclear reactors and a hydrogen electric dam to use .
@@tylersoto7465 I know, right? But they're California, so of course they can't figure out how energy works. Even after the apocalypse, they're all gay for solar. Fucking Californians. Leave it to them to somehow cause a resource shortage with infinite nuclear energy.
OK, you've solved the simultaneous problems of power production and greenhouse gas generation. Now what about the next problem for expansion of civilization -- groundwater depletion?
space based solar thermal desalination plants and cheap energy to pump the water inland? hell, you could just focus mirrors on a section of ocean with winds blowing towards your chosen land mass and essentially boil up clouds to rain on the continents
Energy solves a lot of problems. Given energy, you can desalinate seawater and pump it uphill to market.
@@digitalnomad9985 Desalination is economically feasible (barely!) for coastal cities. Could it (and requisite pumping) be done for even a living-off-the-luxury-of-the-land city like Las Vegas? No. And to even think about scaling this practice up to meet the demands of agriculture -- is INSANE!!!!
As for the expansion of civilization, expand into space.
Some years old thing I heard has stuck with me.
Kirk Sorenson, NASA engineer turned thorium reactor startup employee (maybe CEO? Don't remember) was looking at SBS and trying to make the profit numbers work on 'paper' (excel sheet). At the time he was running the math, even if launch costs were 0, it wouldn't have been as cheap as the grid suppliers he was comparing against.
Now maybe longevity of the systems in question have improved, but i'd be surprised if maintenance and land costs of the groundside receiving stations have changed much.
I love the idea, it tickles my scifi predilictions. But i really want to see someone who knows business break down the cosr numbers, and have them talk with an engineer who translates that into required performance for profitability, before i get too excited about it. Or start expecting it to happen.
What needs to benefit from cheaper launch costs is the industrial base to manufacture such systems off Earth.
Lasers spread out more the longer their wavelength.
Yea, but if you have room for a big rectenna, the conversion efficiency matters more. The conversion efficiency for laser/PV or laser/heat engine is MUCH lower at both ends than that of mazer/rectenna. Also higher frequencies (infared/ visible/ UV) don't go through clouds.
Isaac please go before congress and play this. We who want to hear you arnt who should be listening
The government wouldn't give him the time of day unless he could strategically place certain jobs in certain districts. private enterprise is really the only way to get anything done these days, maybe with a grant and support of NASA
60 cents/kWh? That's almost what we're paying in California right now lol!
2 probes, 1 comet
What are the options for mining uranium or scooping up unlimited amounts of methane? I guess with methane there is the problem of also needing oxygen. Are there sources of oxygen other than earth?
Luna is rich in Oxygen. Its bound up in various compounds containing either metals or silicates. One proposed propellant for Lunar surface to Lunar orbit and back down is a Slurry of Aluminum and Liquid Oxygen. Not terribly great performance but any Hydrogen bound up in ice is more valuable as water.
@@mpetersen6 The problem with things "bound up" in chemical compounds is that it takes energy to isolate them. More energy than the chemical would produce in fuel. Like splitting water to make hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. Great for clean burning fuel except it takes energy to get that fuel. Might be useful for converting energy though if you have nuclear power for energy to process things into fuel for rockets. Or solar panels for that lunar thing.
@@dougcox835
TANSFAL. No free lunches. There is always a cost. Even with gasoline the oil has to be refined. And that takes heat.
@@mpetersen6 And the heat comes from the oil. It does not take as much energy to refine oil as it yields. That's why it's still the main source. Oil is stored energy from millions of years ago. This is not the same as breaking down molecules. Like combining hydrogen and oxygen yields heat and combines into water. Bringing in energy will break it up into the component parts. Pretty much all energy sources are merely storage mechanisms in some way or another. The only original sources of energy are the sun and nuclear.
I'm not convinced that space birds don't exist. There are no space birds in atheist holes.
Earth is a rather closed system. Introducing energy (heat) from above or below will cause global heating.
In terms of the Earth's heat budget, the only efficiency we need to consider for SPS is the microwave to power efficiency, which is greater than 80%, the other inefficiencies radiate heat into space. Our best heat engines are 30% efficient, and photovoltaic is worse. So for every usable watt produced, nuclear and fossil release more than two watts of heat directly into the troposphere, and fossil traps many times more to boot, and an SPS watt releases a fifth of a watt. So, replacing any current terrestrial power source (except wind and hydro) with SPS on a per-watt basis REDUCES heat input.
So much Bitcoin mining potential
Seeing as Space-X can't really Launch anything, please pick anybody else's pricing model
Starship may still be testing, but there is nothing else out there that is comparable for launch cost. it might take 3-6 years but it will be by far the most affordable for over a decade
SpaceX has nearly cornered the launch market by lower cost per pound due to reuse of the first stage booster, which is most of the launch cost. They are launching more than the rest of the world combined. Falcon launches don't make the news anymore, because they are taken for granted. Perhaps you hate Musk for championing free speech. Suffer.
"Not what SpaceX is anticipating a few years down the road"
Issac, you of all people know that SpaceX projections aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I get that they're the most well known space company but they're also one that likely won't be around in 10 years and definitely won't be in 20.
considering in 20 years they went from not having an orbital rocket to having THE LION'S SHARE of launches 43% of all global launches in 2023 you are ether ignorant or dishonest to come to that conclusion especially since there is practically no one else in the market that meets the efficiency of the (Old) Falcon 9 and no one has any practical competitor to starship past a rudimentary drawing board sketch. Are Elon's predictions optimistic and early? Yes, but even with delays SpaceX is still coming ahead by years ahead of its rivals.
"likely won't be around in 10 years and definitely won't be in 20."
What part of capturing the bulk of the launch market makes you think that? So far, SpaceX projections come through LATE, but inevitably.
@@digitalnomad9985 the part where the only growth in the launch market over the past decade has been Starlink launches and the face that in an impossibility optimistic scenario Starship needs another 10 billion to reach the point of being able to launch anything into orbit.
The speed of progress in this area is ludicrously slow. All the money we currently throw at white elephant wind farms and half baked infrastructure could kick start a worldwide benefit to mankind bringing about a new era of plentiful cost effective power. If only we had politicians and supra national organisations not in thrall to globalist corporate interests.
Clean Energy will power the IA Algorithm’s Missiles.
Didn't get a notification again.
what about the unlimited energy source from the universe of Doom video game ?
Only if we have buffy
Day 2782 of wondering why we just don't have a global nuclear economy
Isaac Arthur microwave reveal??
Any solution to the energy crisis will be outlawed in order to ensure the crisis continues.
👍🏻😎👽🐄
every time I see 'clean' I think about some just not knowing what's involved in doing something or they are deliberately looking the other way in the hopes that someone else will figure it out for them "Science will fix it" or simply it's Not In My Back Yard so not my problem. I had seen something in passing about extracting magnesium from seawater for ridged lightweight frames, and the process involved adding in 'consumable' chemicals to react with the magnesium and then more steps to separate the magnesium from the sludge settling at the bottom of the tanks. The result is highly toxic seawater and the single metal of interest, and many processes are like that for extracting the element of choice from ore. it would be nice to be able to pick up an asteroid rock and extract out ALL the stuff in it in useful forms without ending up with some form of toxic byproduct that no one wants, I just don't see that readably available today, and for sure not in a zero-G refinery. The same goes for Aluminum, what is the Bayer process, there is more to it than just heating rocks and magically getting aluminum ingots (1, get ore. 2, ? 3, profit. lol).
Trusting what Elon says might not be a sound business plan.