What If We Put Solar Panels Around the Sun?

what's the best place to put solar panels well close to the sun of course and in this scenario we're going to build the most efficient solar farm possible and maybe just maybe that would make us a type 2 civilization on the kardashev scale what would a sun orbiting solar farm look like how close to our star would we be able to put the panels and how would we manage to get all that power back to earth this is what if and here's what would happen if we put solar panels around the sun every second the sun produces more energy than we humans have used in the history of humankind and every 90 minutes the earth receives enough sunlight to power humanity for a full year only we're still far from gathering even a fraction of all that energy in 2021 of all the electricity we generated only 3.1 percent came from solar panels even if we built more solar farms here on earth not all of the sun's energy would reach us our star is radiating energy in all directions and not all of the light that hits earth even makes contact with our planet's surface some of it is reflected or absorbed by our atmosphere and clouds considering how much energy is lost before the sunlight even reaches the solar farms down on earth it would be much more efficient to get our solar panels somewhere they could face the sun 24 hours a day every day harnessing all the sun's energy could save you a lot of money but is the risk worth the reward well we won't know until we try but not all investments are this way there are many low risk investments out there but just one that i'm particularly excited about contemporary art yeah our sponsor masterworks is the platform for investing in art by legends like basquiat and monet they purchase financially attractive works they believe will appreciate in value for members to buy shares in they purchase you invest they sell and they know what they're doing the three paintings they've sold have each returned over 30 percent net irr to investors you know legally i do have to add past performance is no guarantee of future results but 30 percent that's incredible similarly our prices have outpaced the standard and poor's index 164 over the past 26 years probably because these assets perform better during periods of inflation i've always been interested in art and now i get to invest in it and for only a fraction of what billionaire collectors have paid skip the wait list by visiting masterworks dot art slash what if or click the link in the description below to start investing if you really wanted to maximize our solar power potential you'd need to start with building a lot of panels solar panels are made of photovoltaic cells or pv cells that convert sunlight into electricity and approximately 95 of the modules sold today are made of silicone unfortunately you'd have to manufacture these cells on earth before bringing your solar panels into space and that transportation would cost a pretty penny to save on expenses you'd want to build your solar panels with the lightest materials possible one idea would be to make your solar cells with lightweight gallium arsenide with this material you could build individual solar cells each about the size of your dinner plate once you carried them into the earth's orbit you'd put them together in blocks as large as 60 square meters that's about the size of four parking lots with a good supply of solar panels you could now start planning their arrangement around the sun one model you could explore would be a dyson sphere that's a gigantic megastructure we could engineer around the sun the scientist who came up with this idea actually stole it from aliens he theorized that a much more advanced alien civilization built this hollow sphere around their star to gather all of its energy so if those theoretical aliens could rearrange their planetary neighborhood like that well we could do it too right well did i mention that this dyson sphere would have to be gigantic yeah the distance around the sun or its circumference is about 4.4 million kilometers so we would need millions if not billions of individual solar panels to hug our sun and our dyson sphere would need to be a little further from the sun so that it wouldn't touch its scorching hot surface well maybe instead of building such an impossibly massive structure you could send a bunch of solar panels that would independently orbit the sun and over time more and more solar panels could be added to create larger more complex structures surely there's no way the materials you used to build your solar panels could get anywhere near the sun without completely melting right well think again nasa's parker solar probe traveled through the sun's corona layer and heated up to 1400 degrees celsius impressive but that's frigid compared to the temperature of the corona itself it gets as toasty as millions of degrees in there yeah you wouldn't be able to get that close to the sun unless humanity came up with lots of super heat resistant materials forget about that but you could build solar power stations a little further from the sun maybe somewhere halfway between it and the earth you'd still be able to receive enormous amounts of power from there theoretically if your space solar power station was 10 square kilometers it could power one and a half million homes compare that to earth's surface where you'd need about 6 million solar panels to generate the same amount of energy speaking of supplying earth with power uh how exactly would you manage to get all that energy back to our planet so we could use it well your power transmission system would have to be wireless and that would mean using microwave radiation you'd need to build massive antennae your space solar farm would send microwaves back to earth and here we turned them into electricity these antennae would take up a lot of land but they'd become your favorite scenic view of course you could strengthen the microwave signal from your solar farm and use smaller antennae to catch it on earth but this would come at a higher risk microwave radiation could heat your body tissue the same way it heats food in a microwave that means a strong enough microwave signal would cause painful burns it could even cook you from the inside out and not just you microwave radiation would roast anything containing water oceans lakes and rivers could start to boil if water reservoirs below the earth's crust heated up enough the internal pressure could result in the whole planet exploding but if you could get around these terrifying downsides putting solar panels in space would be a huge advancement for our civilization it could even be a step up on the kardashev scale this measures how advanced a civilization is based on the usable energy it can produce right now we're ranked as a type zero civilization because we don't even collect all of the energy from our own planet if we were able to harness all the power of the sun through a dyson sphere or solar panels orbiting it we'd jump up to a type 2 civilization that means we'd have more energy than we could even imagine right now and interstellar travel beyond our solar system would become a real possibility but we'd have to become a type one civilization first and you know what that's a story for another what if

Channel: What If

Views: 392,915

Keywords: what if, what happens if, scifi, science documentary, what if scenario, mysteries, what if cosmos, cosmos, hypothetical, hypothetical scenario, hypothetical scenarios, solar, solar panel, solar panels, panel, solar power, solar system, space, space exploration, space photography, science, solar farm, earth, solar panel system, how do solar panels work, solar panel 2022, type ii civilization, type 2 civilization, type i civilization, type 1 civilization, kardashev, kardashev scale

Id: nZf5DIdtzK4

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022