Random Thought of the Day

I ended up on one of those pages which tries to lock you in, and tells how your computer is being raped repeatedly and compromised by viral malignant entities..

The thing that drives me nuts is I'm never really clear which messages are coming from my anti-virus software and which are being mimicked. All the regular means of closing the browser and page become inoperable. This one had sound and vocal messages.

Most of the time I just shut down the computer when this happens, unfortunately, the rather unhelpful recovery process saved my lost pages and returned me right to the same page!

Finally, got it fixed.

PITA!

The first thing those viruses do is turn off the program that restores to an earlier date.
Even if you are later successful at zapping the virus the altered System Restore program probably remains.

Humanity uses up around 18 terawatts in energy in all forms (from lighting, to heating water, to machinery, to transportation of all sorts, etc.) every year. The Sun delivers that much energy in 75 minutes.

This means the Sun delivers around 345.60 terawatts every day (24 hours; it's always daytime somewhere), or 126,144 terawatts per year.

Ok, but the Earth is a little dot compared to the Sun. The surface area of Earth is about 510 million square kilometers. The Earth travels around 940 million kilometers per year.

So suppose you could build a ring of solar panels 940 million kilometers in circumference, just ten kilometers wide. Simplistically, perhaps, I assume it's area would be 9.4 billion square kilometers.

That surface would capture, about 18.5 times as much energy from the Sun as Earth does in a year, and all of it could be turned into electricity. So 126,144 terawatts times 18.5 = 2.3 million terawatts, every day.

In one year, the ring would get 851.78 million terawatts. Assume a 70% efficiency for the solar panels (way above what we can get, but well within the possible), and you obtain 596 million terawatts per year.

So a novel called "One Trillion Terawatts" would require a bigger ring, or one closer to the Sun...

BTW, the Sun puts out about 400 trillion terawatts per year. You could build a structure around the Sun, in theory, and capture all that energy (that's a freaking lot of energy!) IN fact, that was the idea thought up by Freeman Dyson, since dubbed a Dyson Sphere. It needn't be a solid sphere, as was featured in TNG, but maybe an effing big fleet of satellites orbiting at various distances.

Now, assuming a solid sphere, a larger one is more expensive, but it rotates more slowly and therefore can be structurally weaker. (A ring one earth orbit radius, like I propose, rotating fast enough to have an inner surface gravity of 1 g, would require a tensile strength stronger than the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei).

If you were to build such a solid shell one Neptune radius big, how much of the Sun's energy could it capture?

Don't jump to conclusions.

Yeah, i screwed up the math. multiply all the ring energy amounts by 2, I think.

A contestant on "Wheel of Fortune" just wrongly guessed one letter.

"A Streetcar Na_ed Desire"

Sorry dude it's not "k".

Quote: rxwine

Sorry dude it's not "k".

That's not even a verb, much less a transitive one (I may have the terminology wrong).

Quote: Nareed

That's not even a verb, much less a transitive one (I may have the terminology wrong).

I think many women would consider it a well known activity.

This is so ridiculous. I arrived home today at almost 6 am and went right to bed. I woke up a few times, but by 8 am I couldn't fall back asleep.

WTF!

darken the room, if you are not tired, get up.

Quote: Nareed

...If you were to build such a solid shell one Neptune radius big, how much of the Sun's energy could it capture?...

I'll go out on a limb and say 0%. According to Google, the radius of Neptune is only 15,299 miles. A solid shell with a diameter of 15,299 miles, would be swallowed pretty easily by the Sun which is 56 times wider (a diameter of 864,576 miles).