..https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62636746 Interesting, decades ago I read a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov called 'I Robot' published in 1950 and which contained a short story first published in the April 1941'Reason'. All of them related to the concept of AI and developing robots but this particular short story revolved around a space station that collected energy from the sun and beamed it in concentrated form to Earth. The main plot was the Robots taking over the space station and forming a religious cult endangering, or so the human operators thought, the safe operation of the beam. The main difference between the energy transmission in Asimov's 80 year old sci-fi story and present day science facts is that Asimov's beam was pure energy and required directing with pinpoint accuracy towards a collector on the Earth's surface. Any deviation of the beam could destroy populated areas. The modern proposed method is to convert the solar energy into microwaves at source and reconvert back to energy at the receivers making it safe. Incredible how absurdly 'far fetched' ideas can become reality. Obviously there is a long way to go but the huge drop in the cost of delivering payloads into orbit and solar energy efficiency improvements (given the fact that they would be hugely more efficient outside of Earth's atmosphere) makes the concept viable. Similarly Arthur C Clarke popularised the concept of geo stationery communication satellites long before Sputnik. It all kind of reinforced the idea that 'If you can imagine it...you can do it'
It's quite an old idea and has been technically feasible for decades but is only now being taken seriously due to the urgency of climate crisis. Seems a bit extreme to me when we can fix the climate here on earth by switching to wind, tide and solar energy.
