How is the energy transmitted from space to earth?

Sounds like a big giant death-ray to me.

And why is he testing it as far away as possible from civilization?...

It's a tightly controlled microwave beam, something originally proposed by Tesla to avoid having to use wires to transmit electricity. Why would you use a death ray when you've got Thor anyway?

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Never argue with an idiot. He'll just drag you down to his level of intelligence and beat you with experience.

I believe he meant the beam not being pointed correctly at the receiver, not the satellite crashing. Also, not every orbit is stable, and unusual parameters, such as jerk and snap, which are the derivative and second derivative of acceleration and are only ever used in satellite positioning and roller coaster construction, must be taken into consideration to keep a stable orbit. If one decimal point is off, then you can end up with an Archimedean spiral down towards the Earth.

Going with what I said above, the calculations as to the positioning of satellites and the considerations of Murphy's Law that go into their engineering are so tedious, redundant, and exact, that the odds of a blunder of these proportions happen are zip. You'd have to hire a retarded monkey in a diaper to do your Calculus for this to happen (so we'd better not hire President Bush).

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The problem is that this is historically rather inefficient. Not only does that beam have to be spot on, but it has to be highly focused to efficiently transmit the energy. Now that we have lasers and satellites, though, it's feasible.

Microwaves are a large enough wavelength that they do not directly interact with humans; they go right through you, just like radio waves.

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Yeah. If we can bounce a laser off the lunar lander modules left on the moon all the way from Earth, I think we can hit a rectifier antenna with a laser from 300 miles up.

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An' it harm none, do as ye' will.


Never argue with an idiot. He'll just drag you down to his level of intelligence and beat you with experience.

Very good. And what if you walk/fly/whatever in front of it while it's operational? What if some space-debris hits it? What if a meteor... I'm not disparaging the idea, but there are risks. Were there none it would be a done deed by now, it was mentioned the idea has been on the table for a very long time.

Microwaves are small potatoes compared to something required to travel that distance and we all know a build up of microwaves supposedly causes cancer etc...

Also, Phaedrus, on the subjec of disparagement, it is possible to debate without disparaging other posters' opinions...

Also, we've used an electromagentic version of sonar to distance some objects in the solar system, such as planets, by beaming certain frequencies that aren't commonly produced by natural sources at planets and then "listening" for their return.

Also, keep in mind that the Voyager 2 spacecraft, on its way past Saturn and toward Uranus, hit within 250 km of its planned trajectory with no corrections; that's like hitting a bullseye in Dallas after firing the gun in Detroit.

Aerospace engineers are very exact.

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If something hits the satellite that knocks it off course, it would have instructions on how to find its bearings and correct itself. That's why our communications don't randomly go out when a paint chip hits a satellite (which would actually do a lot).

If someone moves in front of it, then the beam would be go through them. If an airplane went in front, the beam would be partially reflected, and partially refracted through, but no harm would be done; plus, the station would be remote, so nobody would really be there to get in the way, including aircraft.

If the satellite gets destroyed by a meteor, then there'd be a replacement ready to go if not already up in orbit, and, fail that, we could engineer a second one using other energy sources.

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And Beagle 2 was never seen again...

They think that was an electronic failure, a glitch. Either that or the "Martian Phantom." ;)

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An' it harm none, do as ye' will.


Never argue with an idiot. He'll just drag you down to his level of intelligence and beat you with experience.