A Beam of Light From the Heavens

Posted on | September 24, 2008 |

A recent article on CNN entitled ‘How to harvest solar power? Beam it down from space!’ gives some simple facts about one outside-the-box (and atmosphere) idea that has been picking up steam for the past couple of years: launch a series of satellites covered in solar panels to collect energy from the sun and beam it back down to Earth via electromagnetic beams.

This is a fantastic idea, and could potentially spin-off into dozens of different approaches. It’s also fantastic that it’s getting exposure from a major media network like CNN.

I do, however, take issue with the way CNN presents the piece. From a marketing standpoint, they’ve damaged the cause of space-based solar satellite arrays more than helping it. Here’s why:

First, the article is not included among other news pieces of the moment, but rather in a special section entitled ‘just imagine…what will life be like in 2020?’ This sectionalization is pointless and trite, not to mention childish. It takes a legitimate scientific concept and turns it into an episode of the Jetsons…something to be prophesied for the future, but never achieved. The fact that the title is all in lowercase letters and in two different sizes doesn’t help the case. This is a major media network, not a blog or personal website. A certain level of professionalism is expected; otherwise it’s hard to take the content seriously.

Second, the title of the article itself is worthy of a checkout-line newsprint tabloid. ‘The Batboy Escapes Captivity!’ ‘Jesus Resurrected As Rodeo Clown!’ and ‘Beam It Down From Space!’ all have an ambience of mockery to them. This title is presented to us in a way that says ‘This is not something you have to worry about or take seriously. It’s fluff. Marvel about how crazy that would be then move on to something more important and impactful to your everyday life.’

Which brings me to the third reason this article is more damaging than beneficial to the cause of eco-friendly energy-producing technologies: it gives a date for completion that is both potentially false and so far into the future as to be nonsensical to most of the reading audience. To drop due dates of 2020 or 2030 at this point is tantamount to saying ‘Too far in the future to care.’ The overwhelming feeling among most people is that if it’s not going to happen in the next few years, it’s not impacting our daily lives and therefore other people can worry about it now and tell us what to do in ten years when we’re closer to it meaning something to me personally.

The fact is, with the rate of development in the technology section increasing exponentially and new nanotechnology announcements occurring almost every day, it’s quite likely that something like a series of satellites orbiting the Earth could produce power for a good portion of the people living there sooner rather than later. In fact, I bet that some enterprising individual or company will spearhead the effort within the next 5 years.

Who will be the movers and the shakers in this industry? I think Silicon Valley alumni have a good chance to be doing the right research and development at the right time. They’ve got the money and the scientific know-how, not to mention the business smarts. It very well could be one of the new breeds of energy-entrepreneurs that are popping up in the American Southwest. Former and current oil-tycoons have been quietly building solar farms for the past several years, so it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to think that one or more of them could muster the pioneering ambition to take on a similar project in space.

Unfortunately, the chances that any of these people will take to the front lines is drastically decreased when the press received on the topic is presented as science fiction rather than science fact.

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