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Why don't we just put a bunch of reactors on the moon? Seems safer than putting them on earth.

When we need to power things on the moon, we'll put them there, too. For now, we need to generate the power near (within a few tens of miles) where it must be used. The reason for this is that as we transmit power, we lose some as heat. The further we transmit, the more we lose.

Why can't we just connect a really long cable from the moon back to earth and wrap it in insulation??

There’s a 50k km difference between the shortest and longest answer to “how far is the moon?”, depending on orbit and phase. The distance can change by about 75m per second.

I don’t know of a reel that can spool up a cable at 270 km/h.

Our current longest power cable is 5376 m long. So we’re only 406k km short of bridging the gap (our longest is only 0.0013% the length required).

if we can split an atom we can make a really long cable surely

Maybe we can offload all bitcoin mining to the moon instead, and just transmit the winning blocks to the earth via radio instead. That way, we can outsource the tremendous emissions caused by bitcoin mining, and use the extra capacity on earth to cut down on fossil fuels.

Half /s

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