"Going forward, to avoid embarrassing situations, all jokes on X must include the number 69 or be in the form of a Doge meme. Failure to comply will result in a ban."
It constantly fascinates me that you can get useful energy from such an insignificant fraction of the sun's output.
A sphere with a radius of 1 AU has a surface area of 2.8 × 1023 m2. That means a 1 m2 solar panel can capture, at most, 0.00000000000000000000036% of the sun's rays.
It's always a bit funny when singularity techbro types start talking big ideas about megastructures and Dyson spheres like dude, we aren't even harvesting a fraction of a percent of the energy that is being hand delivered to us on earth right now. Maybe we should try capturing a little more of that
Same with going to go live on Mars and the moon and Jupiter’s moons, etc.
Like homies. We ain’t even brought civilization to our oceans or mountains right here on Earth, which are much closer and more hospitable.
You would think the next big bazinga thing would be seasteads and terraforming new islands and the like on Earth, but they blew right past that. China, Saudis and the gulf states are the only ones trying to do the terraforming sci-fi stuff.
Not only that, but you lose a bit of energy from atmosphere, the spectrum the panels can theoretically absorb and then what you can actually get out of a panel (below)
And that relatively tiny amount of energy is enough to say fuck it, we'll build a global energy grid of ultra high voltage DC transmission lines and go wild on solar installation, and we've got incredibly cheap energy for at least 25 years (the lowest tier of panels degrades at 0.8 percent a year, so you're looking at 60 percent generation capacity after half a century)
Imagine an undercity of sorts where natural sunlight won’t reach, so all light and energy must be leased at a premium. Wait, that’s just the inside of my apartment.
I admit I almost missed it until the talk about solar panels collecting the energy on Earth, but then again I don't proclaim myself to be the smartest man in the world and the world's authority on engineering or science.
If they master the art of making shit up in a way that seems convincing enough for a credulous 50something divorce dad to believe it, they could make bank.
The real challenge would be laughing at all his stale edgy jokes whenever he bumblefucks by.
How can you expect a poster of Elon's voluminous prolific (dare I say: virile??) profile to spend time Grok-ing every Xeet? He's saving the world with posting!