The greatest challenge facing humanity right now is an energy shortage — and China has a plan to solve it.
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Earth's fossil fuel reserves, such as coal and oil, cannot indefinitely feed our endless appetite for energy.
Artificial intelligence and Bitcoin are only adding fuel to the fire, as the vast server farms that power them consume energy in staggering quantities.
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China has announced that it will build a solar panel in outer space, 36,000 kilometers above Earth's surface.
The panel will be launched in sections aboard giant Chinese rockets, where the pieces will be assembled to form a surface one kilometer wide.
The energy efficiency of such a solar panel would be exceptionally high, because unlike on Earth, there is no atmosphere or dust to degrade its absorption capacity.
According to the Chinese, a single year in space for such a panel would yield energy comparable in scale to all the oil reserves remaining on Earth.
From space, the energy would be beamed down to Earth via microwaves.
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The Chinese have not released a timeline for the project — and it's easy to understand why.
A project like this sounds impressive on paper, but it involves enormous engineering challenges, high construction costs, and considerable difficulty in maintaining it should anything go wrong.
Even so, one can hope that the project does come to fruition, and that in a few years we will be receiving Chinese energy beamed directly from the skies.