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ESA SOLARIS: Wireless Power Beamed Down From Space

Solar power could be gathered far away in space and transmitted wirelessly down to Earth to wherever it is needed. The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to investigate key technologies needed to make Space-Based Solar Power a working reality through its SOLARIS initiative. Recently in Germany, one of these technologies, wireless power transmission, was demonstrated to an audience of decision-makers from business and government.

The demonstration took place at Airbus’ X-Works Innovation Factory in Munich. Microwave beaming was used to transmit green energy between two points representing ‘Space’ and ‘Earth’ over a distance of 36 meters.

The received power was used to light up a model city and produce green hydrogen by splitting water. It even served to produce the world’s first wirelessly cooled 0% alcohol beer in a fridge before being served to the watching audience.

Sun is Older Than The Earth But The Water You Drink is Older Than The Sun

Remember that some of the molecules in your “fresh” sip of water are actually billions of years old—far older than the solar system itself.

It looks doubtful that water existed on Earth before the solar system in which it is located. However, a recent peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science supports this.

Astronomers arrived at this conclusion by demonstrating that water in our solar system had to have been produced inside the huge cloud of gas and dust that preceded and was required for the creation of the star known as the Sun. This implies that water existed before the Sun exploded into a star, water that eventually made its way to Earth via “wet rocks” such as asteroids or comets.

The Future of Human Civilization (2022 — 3355 AD)

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In this video, we’ll sit down in our time machine and go forward a few millenniums into the future, to see where we would be progressing as a civilization.

Chapters:
0:00 Opening.
0:51 The levels of civilization.
2:13 Timelapse of the future.
5:25 Year 2141
6:34 Year 2768
8:43 Conclusion.

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Latest Webb image shows what our Sun looked like as a baby protostar

Webb’s NIRCam instrument recently captured this detailed image of the cloudy region around a very young protostar called L1527. Only about 100,000 years old, L1527 isn’t a star yet: it hasn’t fully pulled itself into a proper, stable sphere, and it hasn’t piled on enough mass to kickstart nuclear fusion and start pumping out its own energy. It’s more like “a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas, somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent the mass of our Sun,” according to the European Space Agency.

But as the latest Webb photos reveal, the young protostar is making an ambitious start.

Early meteorites brought enough water to Mars to create a global ocean

The meteorites that bombarded Mars during the early days of the inner solar system may have carried enough water to create a 300-metre-deep ocean on the planet.

Martin Bizzarro at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have analysed the concentration of a rare chromium isotope, known as chromium-54, in samples of meteorites that have come to Earth from Mars to estimate how much water was deposited on the Red Planet by asteroids.

The uppermost layer of Mars contains the chemical signatures of carbonaceous, or C-type, meteorites that bombarded it as its crust solidified some 4.5 billion years ago.

Accessing Earth’s Core

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All of our civilization exists only a thin layer of Earth’s surface, and our deepest mines barely scratch our planet. We often talk about finding new mineral resources on other worlds or asteroids in the future, but are we ignore a treasure beneath our feet, and what other technologies and engineering might we utilize in Earth’s depths?

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Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/accessing-earths-core.
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Credits:
Accessing Earth’s Core.
Episode 216, Season 5 E50

Written by:

Living Planets: The Gaia Hypothesis

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Many have believed Earth might have a spirit, but Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis contemplates this as a scientific possibility. Could our world be alive itself?

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Credits:
Living Planets: The Gaia Hypothesis — Is Earth Alive?
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 369, November 17, 2022
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
Lukas Konecny.

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