DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming
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Super impressive! My only complain is that this was done at the White Sounds desert in New Mexico, at over 1200 meters of elevation. For maximum impact they should have done it in Florida on a hot humid day
This is a tech for arid environments - which seem to be where the US does most of its deployments these days.
Even Eglin wouldn’t be large enough.
imagine something reflective entering this beam, it could blind people in a very large radius.
for me it means that thus would still need some pipe/fiber that would protect world from this laser.
A friend of mine was looking for a stargazing spot between WSMR and the Rio Grande River a fair bit south of San Antonio, NM and got her Chevy Blazy stuck and figured her best bet was to walk across the security perimeter and get caught by the security force and they caught her pretty quickly.
(1) You always hear it wrongly repeated that the first nuclear bomb was tested at Alamagordo but Alamagordo is 100 miles from the Trinity Site. San Antonio, NM was the closest settlement.
(2) Conrad Hilton, founder of the hotel chain, was born there (in his autobiography "Be My Guest" he talks about riding his horse up to Socorro, where I went to undergrad school)
(3) The Owl Bar and Cafe still serves a great green chili cheeseburger
there was that time I ran from Socorro to San Antonio in a race and, despite being underage, got offered a beer from the bartender.
- Ground-satellite-ground relaying, with at least one geostationary satellite between the ground stations. The satellites being geostationary means that the path of the beam through the atmosphere is constant, and air traffic can be routed around them in a reasonable way. (You could do this with lower orbits, but it'd be a hassle with current aviation industry technology).
- Beaming by tunnel! Can't get hit by a laser if it's under your feet. Obviously, this negates the benefits of the technology, and just turns into fibre lines without the fibre, over shorter distances, with all the pain in the ass of laying underground cable.
In the first approach, there'd have to be an effective exclusion zone around the receiving station (how big, I don't know), and it'd be nice to have satellites fail safe, so that if they end up pitching or rolling off axis, the beam will be shut off before becoming an accidental weapon.
And tunnels, not really, no, if you read my comment you'll see that this is a comically impractical option.
Also see this (with remaining eye): https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye...
The dams could burst and drown millions.
The highrise you live in could topple over or burn.
The bridge carrying the train could crash into the valley.
The passenger plane could lose lift and crash into a residential building.
The power source in your car could catch fire.
We engineer around it.
We've known about global warming for almost 50 years and yet to this day the debate is divided between "eh" and "no, it isn't".
Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our lungs with no end in sight.
Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO) negligence regarding the 737 Max.
Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
So much work is being done on that front.
> Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our lungs with no end in sight.
Not the #1 killer of humans. We're still making lots of progress on healthspan, especially in pulling people out of poverty. We're well ahead of where we were 50 years ago. People are no longer starving to death at unprecedented scale.
> Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO) negligence regarding the 737 Max.
Sometimes bad things happen. Not to diminish these lives, but this is just a footnote in the list of impressive things technology and society have accomplished, though. Boeing and execs should face punishment, but this is a very small downside to a much greater set of accomplishments that vastly outweighs the bad.
> Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
What are you talking about? To just cite one instance, Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved. Or another - look at what Moderna did during Covid.
Life is better than it used to be, not worse. You're wearing miasma-tinted glasses.
Yes, it is, but not nearly enough and it had to be done by dragging corporations kicking, lying and screaming every step of the way. Corporations, mind you, powerful enough to drive several of the wars of the last 50 years.
> We're still making lots of progress on healthspan
Yes, as long as your health insurance covers the treatment. UnitedHealth investors are suing the company for not willing to follow the "aggressive, anti-consumer tactics" that got their CEO murdered [1].
I've also personally heard a mildly drunk executive of a Fortune 500 company brag about how, on a cancer-related lawsuit, the US government would never let them go bankrupt because that would dry up the taxes they would collect otherwise. Time proved him right.
> Boeing and execs should face punishment, but...
They should, but they won't. And they are not the exception.
> Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved (...) look at what Moderna did during Covid.
Uber made ignoring the laws at a worldwide scale their whole business model. And how has the market rewarded Moderna for their to humanity? Their stock is at its lowest since 2020.
People have been making the comparison to the robber barons recently, but I think they miss the point where the robber barons didn't have a worldwide surveillance apparatus and the kind of propaganda power that Orwell could only dream of.
I agree that technology has advanced for good in a lot of areas, but I also think it's worth noticing that many of these advances are behind gatekeepers who will burn a forest to the ground before upgrading infrastructure that's one hundred years old to keep shareholders happy.
[1] https://futurism.com/neoscope/unitedhealthcare-investors-wil...
Defense companies are rather refreshing to read for corporate postings, since they see to always be proud of how many Iraqi's they bulldozed to death.
Is it possible to cancel the vortical formation of a tornado or a hurricane with microwave power beam(s)?
Does heating the atmosphere with microwaves change the weather, or the jet stream, or the cloud cover?
What sort of a fluidic weather simulator could answer this question?
Is there a fluid simulation device that allows for precise wireless heating of certain points in the fluid?
If so, there could be international space law to study and control for the known and presumed risks of space-based microwave power beaming.
I think it's possible to nuke a tornado, but if someone does it to try to save a city, I expect even more destruction.
I don't expect the beam to be energetic enough to change anything. The closest method I can think of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding but it doesn't distribute energy, just tiny crystals to condense oversaturated vapor.
Presumably it's easier to prevent formation of vortices far before visible formation.
A "cancel vortices" sim table might be more useful than the average CFD simulation.
This is no different that what we were considering two decades ago for the space elevator competition. One of the problems with this approach is that as the photovoltaic cells heat up their overall efficiency decreases.
I wonder how big that receiving apparatus is. Whether the receiver is gimballed, or whether the drone itself has to fly a heading to aim at the sender: TBD.
Sorry I really fail to recognise how beaming 1kw of excited particles is a safe thing to do just like this…
i can't recall a scifi story promoting such system either.
Sun's 1kW/m^2, and even then you shouldn't look directly at it, and being out in it all day without protection leads to sunburn.
Using fiber optics for power is like trying to make a solar panel generate electricity from a laser beam.
Isn't that exactly what power beaming is, except typically with frequency range in microwaves instead of visible light?
That's a big freaking deal.
(I can easily imagine "terahertz for terrorism" being a slogan…)
I mean, you can get electricity from PV illuminated by a laser, and everything I've heard so far says it's easier than with sunlight because you can match the frequency of the laser to the band gap of the PV.
For something 15% efficient like a high quality PV cell, for every 100 watts you want to be usable on the receiving side, the receiver has to bleed off 566 watts of heat. And that's 566 watts of waste heat that is highly concentrated.
Consider a single residental power circuit. 12A maximum, 120v, that's 1440 watts at delivery. For PV power delivery via laser, that PV would need to dissipate 8 kilowatts of waste heat. One a very small surface
In a PV cell, you have a semiconductor. Semiconductors have this thing called a "band gap", which is the energy needed to get an electron from the valence band to the conduction band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap
The limits to efficiency of a solar panel is that sunlight has photons of many energy levels; the photons with energy less than the band gap do nothing, those with more, waste the excess.
A laser can have energy tuned to this band gap, at which point the PV part becomes ~99.9% efficient. (The laser part is not close to that efficiency).
The type of laser based PV that you're taking about that's highly tuned is at maximum 27% efficient. Not 99%.
That's a 73% waste you have to manage
You can already buy PV for sunlight with higher efficiency than 27%. Heck, even with a single band gap the limit for *sunlight* with all the problems I've just stated (because a broad spectrum will waste energy and the sun's spectrum is very broad) still gets you to the 33% Shockley–Queisser limit for one junction on the solar spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley–Queisser_limit
But for monochromatic light, tuned to the band gap, stuff people have already built is several times better than that, and the theoretical limit is basically how finely you can tune the laser bandwidth and how precisely you can control impurities that broaden the band gap.
Here's one designed for monochromatic laser use, that was actually built, with results published in early 2019, with 70% where they recon doing it better would get to 80%: https://krichlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Xia18-PVSC.pd...
As with all quantum systems, which is what both PV and lasers are, the ultimate efficiency of a tuned laser-and-band-gap pair is as good as your engineering, hence ~99.9% (on the cell side) if you control absolutely all parts of it properly.
Tiny nuclear reactor?
Even a tiny RTG is in the same range as a dumbbell.
There are other kinds of nuclear battery, but the ones I've heard of outside labs, are extremely low power betavoltaics.
Betavolatics can be just about anything that emits an electron. Could be tritium. Low power due to long half life and low decay energy, but not because it is low-Z.
RTGs can be anything that gets hot from its own radiation. Loads of things with a short half-life and high decay energy, so phosphorus-32 would be a low-Z option, and polonium-210 (which still isn't transuranic) if you're completely disregarding safety.
Big part of the mass budget is shielding, not source. This gets proportionally worse for small sources, as you need a certain thickness (proportional to r^2), while the emitter power is proportional to volume (r^3).
This is so much worse in every aspect it's not really compareable.
So likely much lower than that.
That demo would require about 45 kW of laser power with good beam quality which would be totally possible with a fiber laser
PVs do not have any problem starting up, they produce less than full power with less than full illumination but they produce something and once the illumination is full they produce full power immediately.
Many solar thermal power plants are fired with natural gas in the morning to get them spun up to the point where they can take advantage of the solar energy. Without that they'd probably lose a few hours of production.
I also wonder how difficult/impossible would it be, and the 'throughput'. Assuming that you want to recharge a recon drone (or the 'next generation of Voyagers flying in space) that flies over XYZ area/country/etc. Would it take 1sec or 10seconds 'of beam', and the accuracy/waste/total amount one would have to 'dispense' in order to give that drone the X seconds of 'juice' to keep it running for 1000x X seconds of flight duration. And what about clouds/mist/rain/snow/birds/etc.
'Infinite energy' for a drone (I mean no dependency to come down to refuel) is a game changer.
Would that work with 'instruments buried underground? And at what depth? ('War of the worlds' scenario). Could someone bury a device, with only the receiver protruding from the ground, with a battery to keep it alive, and waiting to be activated by a satellite passing by giving it the "10 seconds beam" to fully charge it and.. (I am thinking of the recent drone-related incidents/attacks within Russia and Iran)(if you park a drone for 10 months, its battery will deplete, right?)(I don't have a drone, but batteries are batteries).
A second thought on the matter, can one 'program' the light to be also transferring data? Park the drones in <insert foreign territory>. No programming. In the middle of nowhere (no 4G-5G). You fly a satellite over it, beam down the 'juice' (together with the instructions - no interception of the transfer is possible). Someone finds it 'before', they only get the hardware but no info/intel.
"The possibilities are endless" (and so are the nightmares)
Great stuff.
Do Seattle, next.
But much of the stuff DARPA does seems weird. It’s not about ideas with solid foundation and thorough engineering, it’s about crapshoots that might work and would pay off in some way - often any financially feasible way.
They once put “cats” on guns in hopes it would surprise opponents even just for a quarter second, giving your spec ops dudes the advantage. They tried to create angled guns that could shoot around corners like 20 years ago. All kinds of crazy stuff! It would be a lot of fun to work there, I think.
Not sure how you would build one of those without the stress of the bullet during firing would not damage the barrel.
The IDF got a gun that does this[0] into service in 2003.
A future with having wireless energy transfer everywhere is one where energy is so abundant that we don't mind throwing out 80% of it powering wireless things.