PowerLoop

A simplified version of Launch Loop technology can be used to store global-scale energy. Peak load power production and transmission on an international scale will pay for the development and optimization of loop technology, while financing the expansion of life into the solar system. A shared global power storage system will move power around the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, moving unused power around the world to peak loads in eastern Asia, North America, and Europe. Later, power loops will connect South America with Australia and Africa, and Africa with India and Australia.

As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, a globally shared power grid is a powerful incentive for peace. If 50% of your country's peak load energy comes from other countries, it is stupid to attack them, immediately crippling your domestic economy. Nations are capable of great stupidity, and war is one of the stupidest things they do, so a global power economy will not ensure world peace. But it can help make citizens wealthy and cosmopolitan enough to resist the calls of the demagogues. Here's hoping!

Hundreds or thousands of power loops may be constructed on paths along the lower continental shelf, with emergency rotor dump zones sited in lifeless portions of the deep ocean. Prudent "design for failure" will minimize risk to human and animal life. Indeed, a dumped rotor may stir up bottom sediments, providing nutrients for plankton, attracting fish and fishermen to these dump sites, subjecting them to the risk of future rotor dumps. Paradoxically, increasing the abundance of life can lead to more death. But increasing experience and improved designs will reduce these expensive accidents over time.

Eventually, when rotor and magnetic deflection technology matures, and hyper-automated production of power loops drives costs to unimaginable lows, the power loops will be the way we move power from mid-oceanic space power receiving antennas, and to mid-oceanic launch loops.

Global energy abundance may permit forms of geoengineering to mitigate the ecological damage caused by the agricultural and industrial damage of past millenia - however, we don't know nearly enough to do that yet.

Scaling Power Loops

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