For practical reasons I suggest you just buy your winter vegetables from Spain like the rest of Northern Europe. Before solar mirrors are cheap enough to lighten up your vegetable patch I suspect the environmentalists will have stopped them for global warming reasons.
By Tove's description, you're already living the dream of six months over 10C and six months below 10C. If you're so desperate for year-long warmth, move where it's warm; don't wreck it for the rest of us!
I just need some more light! Nothing grows here in the winter. Not even in a greenhouse. It's just too dark. But temperatures are indeed mild and nice, I can't complain much of them.
"Solar power in space is much simpler than solar power on Earth's surface. But it is still not uncomplicated. At least not when done on scale. And beaming great amounts of power through the atmosphere is untested and might be unfeasible or at least uneconomical."
At first this seemed not uneconomical, but daft; transferring energy long distances would naturally be done by laser. You can't transport electricity this way - but you *can* transport it along a space elevator, if the mass of wire isn't prohibitive. Thus:
1. Sunlight is collected in space.
2. Light is either reflected, or absorbed and then fired as a laser, to a space station.
3. Solar panels at the space station convert the light to electricity for use there.
4. Excess electricity is sent down through a space elevator.
But frankly I have my doubts that this will be that useful. Fusion power will probably have been developed by this point, making space sunlight seem more of an upper class extravagance than a practical commodity.
Gerard K. O'Neill suggested microwaves as the medium to transfer energy from space to Earth. Microwaves are harmless to biological life and not affected by clouds or other adverse weather. But it is also weak, requiring very large antennas. Fusion power never seems to be quite ready for the market. But I agree with you that even fusion power will probably have been introduced before we have working space elevators.
A bit off topic maybe, but space elevators almost certainly requires asteroid mining or other forms of space based resource extraction since they are much more easily built from the top down rather from the base up. Lowering down a ladder from space is significantly easier than raising a ladder from Earth.
Neither fusion power nor space elevators ever seem to be quite ready for the market, but progress is developing for both. I'm the sort of miser who thinks naturally of conserving resources (whether they are scarce or not) and the space elevator combined with solar-powered expansion into space - including solar sails - seems very much like The Thing To Do. But fusion will make that entire mindset obsolete. Up until now, coordination, know-how, and energy have been limiting factors in development; but telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and fusion are together erasing those limitations, leaving a confusing economy behind. Is *anything* scarce if you have limitless energy to extract, fabricate, distribute, and clean up after everything? In a sense, fusion itself will push us into a post-singularity world, because of the enormous difficulty of making predictions about that world.
"Not even a simple sieve will work in space. Most probably there are methods for extraction that will work even in zero gravity, zero atmosphere conditions. But finding them, and finding out that they work, will most probably take a lot of time and cost a lot of money."
Well, this isn't an insurmountable challenge. Mr. Apple Pie suggests a centrifuge. #1 Suggests crashing the asteroids into the moon. #4 suggests using magic. There are many options.
There are numerous extraction techniques that work very well in space. Everything involving heat should work fine or even better than on Earth, for an example. But the sieve is a good example of something that is simple on Earth but difficult in zero gravity. Some sort of centrifuge will do the trick, but it will require some heavy and bulky machinery which will be very expensive to transport to space. And sieve-based sorting is nothing compared to flotation-based sorting which is very widespread on Earth and requires gravity AND extraordinary amounts of water. No chance of using that in space. Which means that new techniques will have to be developed (perhaps including magic).
Why only street lights? Can't I have some light for my cold frames in winter so I can grow vegetables between November and April?
For practical reasons I suggest you just buy your winter vegetables from Spain like the rest of Northern Europe. Before solar mirrors are cheap enough to lighten up your vegetable patch I suspect the environmentalists will have stopped them for global warming reasons.
The environmentalists should have them stopped because they ruin the pristine essence of your beautiful mesothermal climate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trewartha_climate_classification#Group_D:_Temperate_and_continental_climates
By Tove's description, you're already living the dream of six months over 10C and six months below 10C. If you're so desperate for year-long warmth, move where it's warm; don't wreck it for the rest of us!
I just need some more light! Nothing grows here in the winter. Not even in a greenhouse. It's just too dark. But temperatures are indeed mild and nice, I can't complain much of them.
"Solar power in space is much simpler than solar power on Earth's surface. But it is still not uncomplicated. At least not when done on scale. And beaming great amounts of power through the atmosphere is untested and might be unfeasible or at least uneconomical."
At first this seemed not uneconomical, but daft; transferring energy long distances would naturally be done by laser. You can't transport electricity this way - but you *can* transport it along a space elevator, if the mass of wire isn't prohibitive. Thus:
1. Sunlight is collected in space.
2. Light is either reflected, or absorbed and then fired as a laser, to a space station.
3. Solar panels at the space station convert the light to electricity for use there.
4. Excess electricity is sent down through a space elevator.
But frankly I have my doubts that this will be that useful. Fusion power will probably have been developed by this point, making space sunlight seem more of an upper class extravagance than a practical commodity.
Gerard K. O'Neill suggested microwaves as the medium to transfer energy from space to Earth. Microwaves are harmless to biological life and not affected by clouds or other adverse weather. But it is also weak, requiring very large antennas. Fusion power never seems to be quite ready for the market. But I agree with you that even fusion power will probably have been introduced before we have working space elevators.
A bit off topic maybe, but space elevators almost certainly requires asteroid mining or other forms of space based resource extraction since they are much more easily built from the top down rather from the base up. Lowering down a ladder from space is significantly easier than raising a ladder from Earth.
"Gerard K. O'Neill suggested microwaves as the medium to transfer energy from space to Earth."
The word you are looking for my dear fellow is "maser:" https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=microwave+laser&ia=web
Neither fusion power nor space elevators ever seem to be quite ready for the market, but progress is developing for both. I'm the sort of miser who thinks naturally of conserving resources (whether they are scarce or not) and the space elevator combined with solar-powered expansion into space - including solar sails - seems very much like The Thing To Do. But fusion will make that entire mindset obsolete. Up until now, coordination, know-how, and energy have been limiting factors in development; but telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and fusion are together erasing those limitations, leaving a confusing economy behind. Is *anything* scarce if you have limitless energy to extract, fabricate, distribute, and clean up after everything? In a sense, fusion itself will push us into a post-singularity world, because of the enormous difficulty of making predictions about that world.
"Not even a simple sieve will work in space. Most probably there are methods for extraction that will work even in zero gravity, zero atmosphere conditions. But finding them, and finding out that they work, will most probably take a lot of time and cost a lot of money."
Well, this isn't an insurmountable challenge. Mr. Apple Pie suggests a centrifuge. #1 Suggests crashing the asteroids into the moon. #4 suggests using magic. There are many options.
There are numerous extraction techniques that work very well in space. Everything involving heat should work fine or even better than on Earth, for an example. But the sieve is a good example of something that is simple on Earth but difficult in zero gravity. Some sort of centrifuge will do the trick, but it will require some heavy and bulky machinery which will be very expensive to transport to space. And sieve-based sorting is nothing compared to flotation-based sorting which is very widespread on Earth and requires gravity AND extraordinary amounts of water. No chance of using that in space. Which means that new techniques will have to be developed (perhaps including magic).