Near Future power sources

[His Divine Shadow]

[Q]If wireless power transmission were practical, do you think we'd still have freaking massive high voltage power lines strung all over the place?[/Q]

Atmosphere - Vacuum

[Q]Do you know what a hazard to navigation an invisible beam carrying a significant amount of power would be?[/Q]

Do you know how big space is? The problem would be more like non existant.

Simply telling nav systems where the beams are and the problem is solved, I never said use lasers to transfer it down to earth(did I?), though it would make a good weapon.
I believe microwaves might be good.
Ofcourse one would have to create no-fly zones around the plants that'll recieve them.

And at the same time we might just have an OK system to turn away potential alien invasions

[Nick]

[Q]If wireless power transmission were practical, do you think we'd still have freaking massive high voltage power lines strung all over the place?[/Q]

Atmosphere - Vacuum

I was talking about the transmission down to the surface. However, it looks like that bit wasn't particularly clear

[Q]Do you know what a hazard to navigation an invisible beam carrying a significant amount of power would be?[/Q]

Do you know how big space is? The problem would be more like non existant.

See above. . .

Simply telling nav systems where the beams are and the problem is solved, I never said use lasers to transfer it down to earth(did I?), though it would make a good weapon.

I believe microwaves might be good.
Ofcourse one would have to create no-fly zones around the plants that'll recieve them.

I'm talking about *any* wireless transmission mechanism. These things are, by definition, delivering industrial power levels from orbital satellites to Earthside receivers. Not only that, they are punching through the whole of the atmosphere to get there. The power levels and energy bleedoff into the atmosphere are going to be massive by comparison to the power levels involved in communication transmissions.

Yes, you might be able to create no fly zones to compensate for the navigation problem (well, the no fly zones actually are the navigation problem). But what about the bleedoff of the energy into the surrounding atmosphere? What about the interaction with the ionosphere and the ozone layer? These are not problems with particular technologies - they are fundamental problems with using electromagnetic radiation to transmit large quantities of power through the atmosphere.

Now if, on the other hand, a space elevator or two were in place to provide guided transmission through the atmosphere. . .

And at the same time we might just have an OK system to turn away potential alien invasions

Energy weapons are an entirely different story :>

[Edi]

There was a big item on the news here last night about nuclear fusion. Apparently there's going to be a full size test facility built in the next fifteen years or so (construction takes 8 years), with Canada, France, Germany and a couple of other places vying for the place. This facility would be for the purpose of seeing if nuclear fusion is viable as a power source, but it's obviously facing numerous technical obstacles. And even if all of those are cleared, there is the question of cost, because it will be expensive. But in the next 30 to 50 years, who knows?

Edi

[Shaka[Zulu]]

Fusion is going to be the principal power source of the future, but it isnt goin to be based on the big, tokamak style magnetic confinement devices, or the bigger, inertial confinement (ie pebble collider) systems... my money is on an amateur somewhere managing to perfect a Farnsworth Fusor -- since fusors are generally ignored by the fusion community because they can actually DO serious fusion in a typical garage on a shoestring budget -- running on either a deuterium+trihelium or hydrogen+boron cycle, therefore producing no neutrons... only charged particles that can be nicely gathered up in a direct conversion process -- no turbines, thermocouples etc.

for evidence, I provide the following links:

http://farnovision.com/chronicles/fusion/index.html

http://fusor.net/

eventually Im going to get around to building one... but I have way too much other stuff to do first, and nowhere near enough $ to do more than one of those things at a time...