The idea …
Send water on a 150 million kilometer pipeline to the sun to super heat it … then pipe the steam back to power a turbine
Baby Dyson Sphere go brrr
dyson tube
I don’t know why you made me laugh so much, thanks for that post.
I think it’s because it turns the concept into something so low tech and banal
What if the pipeline already existed… But it was made of light
I’m an EE by schooling and I’ve worked in both gas turbine and wind power. Photovoltaics blow my fucking mind. Everything else is just spinning magnets to extract power. PVs are insanely cool
Personally, I like the mirror plants that use the suns energy to superheat salt.
And then use that to boil water. /s
For real, what China is doing with PVs is pretty fucking cool.
Nuclear power is just steampunk with magic rocks.
Spicy rocks
So spicy they make everything around them spicy.
What’s the original comic?
I actually don’t know why people get so hung up on this. When you are making energy it’s easiest to make heat, and boiling water through a turbine is a really efficient way to turn heat into motion and we’re really good at doing it and turning motion into electricity. The fact that multiple ways of making heat exist is not surprising, the fact that different methods of making heat use the same, most efficient, well understood method for turning heat into electricity is even less surprising.
If we develop a more efficient way to turn heat into electricity it won’t be “a new way to make energy” it will be “a new more efficient heat engine”
The problem is there’s an upper limit on how much useful energy you can extract from a heat engine.
1 - Tc/Th
The only 100% efficient heat exchanger has a cold side at absolute zero.
AND that can maintain absolute Zero on that cold side. Getting heat to leave into the void at those temps is a battle
Because it feels archaic and inefficient, maybe?
We also have developed solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-electric dams as well as tidal/wave energy devices in the intervening years - so adding another method to boil water just feels “outdated”.
I’m not trying to cast judgement myself, just trying to explain that it feels like it’s just “vibes based”.
Three of your four examples are already outputting mechanical energy of motion so don’t need the intervening conversion step provided by steam.
Take a look at a modern supercritical steam turbine, this thing can run on 600C steam. there’s nothing archaic about it (it can be more efficient as a part of combined cycle)
Hydropower and windmills are older than steam
I had an idea for a dumb Star Trek meme, based on the episode where they explain how Romulan warp drives work, but extrapolating that to “it boils water and spins a turbine”. Maybe one of the Star Trek memers can take this and run with it?
You mean black holes as a power source?
Will technically in Balance of Terror in ToS they were using fusion drives still. They vented excess plasma and wraponized it.
Yeah, the black hole one. Like, they use the heat generated by the black hole to boil water, spin thingy. Super dumb, could be funny!
