Space and Disaster Recovery

[g.w.]

Is it possible that space systems could contribute more to disaster recovery than just communications, navigation, and remote sensing? That's the premise behind the essay, "Space and Katrina," available at http://www.ornery.org/essays/2005-09-16-1.html. Far-fetched, I admit...but so were satellites themselves, at one point.

Thoughts?
G

[g.w.]

Received this comment by e-mail from Allen Moore:

"You know I'm always going to bug you on technical issues....

"I'm familiar with the concept of space-based solar power transmitted to the surface, and I don't have any problem with it; I think the idea of having it available as a flexible power source for disaster areas is really neat. Where I start getting antsy is where you start talking about using it for weather modification -- steering or weakening or breaking up hurricanes particularly.

"The amount of energy available from this source is limited by the amount of sunlight falling on a unit's collector assembly, which you describe as being perhaps the size of a football field (one hectare to be generous, or 0.01 km^2). Compared to the amount of energy falling on the area occupied by a hurricane (hundreds or thousands of square km), a football field's worth of sunlight just isn't enough to do much. I know the available energy in space is about double the amount that would fall on the same area on the ground and that it would be concentrated for delivery as microwave energy, but concentration doesn't change the total amount available. The only way I can see it affecting a hurricane at all would be to deliver it strategically for steering, and even then you have to invoke the "butterfly dffect" and assume you know exactly where to put that butterfly to have the effect you want.

"Even if you assume enough energy to make a difference, trying to weaken a hurricane by delivering heat to the eye seems counterproductive. A major part of the hurricane's driving force comes from water vapor condensing out of warm saturated air as it rises and cools. Condensation releases the moisture's latent heat of vaporization as sensible heat (600 cal/gram of water vapor, a heck of a lot more energy than any substance can contain as sensible heat within a reasonable temperature range). This keeps the air warm and buoyant so it continues to rise. Delivering heat to re-vaporize the condensed water would just allow the moisture to repeat the cycle and make things even warmer higher up, feeding the beast you're trying to kill. Am I missing something?"

Allen doesn't miss much. Later I'll post my reply...

[g.w.]

Okay, here's the reply I sent Allen by e-mail:

"I used 'football field-sized' as a convention for the sake of making the essay readable. I actually remember the old proposals involving much larger collectors, but decided that vagueness would suffice for a non-tech essay. Could've been a bad choice. The only thing to get out of it was 'big.'

"Another friend of mine [and a SWF member--ed.] also tossed out the Gaia hypothesis butterfly-wing idea, and it's valid. The only answer I have to that is: folks don't worry about how windmills are taking energy out of the winds in California (the HQ for US environmentalists, I'd think) and what that may be doing to downwind places. Okay, maybe the effect is too small to notice, but mainly the benefit ('clean' electricity) outweighs whatever negative effect it may produce. Similarly, if you can 'lead' a hurricane around until it fizzles out, I say go for it...better than it slamming into the shore.

"Now, as to whether it's even feasible to do so: probably not. The 'beam power down for emergencies' idea is the most workable of the three. Whether we can ever 'steer' a storm is doubtful, and would require much more power than the first idea. The third is probably impossible given the power it would require; and I admit I'm no meteorologist, so weakening a storm by vaporizing part of it may not work at all. And my choice of the eye wall may be particularly bad: I just thought of it as a convenient target and reference point. (I have this forlorn hope that you could disturb the wind pattern enough that the thing would begin to collapse on itself, but I don't have the same familiarity with hurricane dynamics that you do.)

"Perhaps one thing in favor of the 'steering' idea is the fact that water is valent: if it were possible to put a charge on the beam, the water might be affected more by the charge than by anything else. But again, the power required would be immense.

"In the end, all of this falls under the old saying, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'"

He replied back, and I'll post that another time...

[g.w.]

And finally, here was Allen's reply to me:

"Water is polar all right, and recent research seems to indicate that this has something obscure to do with the process that generates lightning. But again, the lighning in an average summer thunderstorm casually tosses around amounts of electrical charge that pretty well dwarf anything you're likely to have available to play with, regardless of how many amorphous-silicon-covered football fields you've sent into space. How much does it matter whether your orbiting solar collector is 1/10,000 or 1/100,000,000 the size of the hurricane's heat collector?

"I mentioned the butterfly effect in a positive sense: weather tends to approach the definition of a chaotic system, and the evolution of chaotic systems can be exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions: hence the "butterfly effect." And if you're going to try to affect a huge energetic system with a pinprick of energy, you'd better HOPE it's exquisitely sensitive. I wasn't worried about reversing the Earth's magnetic poles or starting the next ice age. Should I have been?"