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They receive 8 times more energy per year than ground-based solar power. Even if you lose 50 % during transmission you get a) 4 times the power than on Earth with the same capacity b) continuous power supply throughout the year.

And if anyone is going to be allowed to build a SBSP satellite, it will include power beaming designs which are inherently safe and cannot be used for "mass destruction".

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How about using it to power the moon base or rovers first, who otherwise remain in the long cold night of the moon?

It could be overall cheaper. What you also need for solar power on the ground is storage, storage, storage, and 10x the capacity, because you won't produce enough in the winter.

SBSP could go hand in hand with ground-based systems providing the necessary dispatchable baseload or peak power, enabling a truly renewable system without expensive backup power stations.

For two reasons:

1. The inner-most planets are the easiest to observe. It will be almost impossible to observe e, f, and g in secondary eclipse, though there is a transmission spectrum that has been taken of -1g, and another group has observed -1c in secondary eclipse.

2. It is an overstatement to say that -1b (or any of the planets) would obviously be a bare rock in space. Indeed, the planning for this observation assumed a roughly Venus-like and cooler atmosphere that would have required all five secondary eclipse observations combined to detect any signal. In the event, the planet is a hot rock, and the eclipse was seen in just the first of those five observations, which was quite surprising!

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ya know, it's a start. It's just accounting for the energy required for overcoming the binding energy, and shifting the material to different orbits, in order to get a sense of the scale involved. He said in the article there would be significant engineering challenges, yet to be worked out, obviously.

This has changed a bit. More recent analyses of the TTVs in the system put all the Trappist planets right on the line for Earth/Venus-like composition. See Figure 12 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01074

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There is a small advantage for solar collectors in geosynchronous orbit in terms of time in sunlight.

There is a small disadvantage in the sense that a high power microwave transmitter in geosych orbit can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

That's not much at all for launch provider start up.

Silly. We need what 0.02% of the earth's land for enough solar for the planet??? And that excludes water. So why pay more to put it in space? Too easy to do it on land?

Makes me wonder if B has an atmosphere but it's all frozen into a giant glacier on the night side.

So the beads were formed from the heat of the impact? They said they were found around craters.

That's probably only a concern if you'd use Jupiter as resource.

I think they are plausible, but the real challenges lie more in the technology, logistics and perhaps more importantly the time-scale. Dismantling an entire planet for resources is going to take some wicked technology (mostly in space-faring and -hauling capability) but above all a really long time. The creation of the panels is probably trivial when we can dismantle a planet, but placing them where we need them is going to take a hell of a lot of time again, simply because of the vastness of space. I'd guess completion of a dyson sphere would take in the order of a few 1,000 years.

Because MOND doesn’t really explain the data. For one, it doesn’t really explain all the mass but for another, the bullet cluster is kinda a death sentence for MOND. Like good scientists, we can’t rule it out completely yet but dark matter explains all the discrepancies much better than MOND and so MOND is a fringe theory among physicists. In addition to the Bullet Cluster, MOND also poorly fits several other features which dark matter explains naturally, including much of cosmology. Less damningly, MOND requires a rather complex, random looking change to physics while dark matter is actually quite simple. We are pretty convinced there it is possible there are particles we haven’t seen yet so it’s not terribly surprising some of these could have astronomical effects. Also, I suspect you have a hard time grasping much of physics (QFT and GR for example) but QFT has been confirmed at the highest precision of any scientific theory ever. The fact laymen struggle with some physics isn’t a good reason to believe something else.

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I think this effectively dried most whistles out there. We shall see.

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Isn't Trappist 1 supposed to be an ultra-cool red dwarf tho?

I mean it still has flares more powerful than Sun, but it is relatively calm.

Some red dwarfs are known to have very turbulent flare activity, so I'm not entirely surprised (although I don't know if this is the case for TRAPPIST-1).

Not trying to be a chauvinist here, but when it comes to understanding planets, astrophysics isn't the be-all and end-all, or planetary science wouldn't exist. Planetary atmospheres are very complex, even simple (and ephemeral) ones like Mercury's, for example.

The main issue with black holes is that you can't feed them too much stuff at once unless it falls directly into them, which won't happen in a galactic environment since everything has orbital momentum.

Once a black hole has an accretion disk, the disk itself has so much energy that it will shove away extra matter trying to fall into it.

Thus, one theory on the formation of supermassive black holes is the "black hole star".

Put simply, the idea is that in the early universe in areas where there weren't any particularly big things or galaxies it would be possible for light years worth of diffuse gas to begin accelerating towards the same area, which could collapse directly into a singularity.

It would still have enormous amounts of gas falling towards it, though, and the sheer gravity of all this gas could overcome the energy emitted by the relativistic accretion disk and continue to grow the black hole at a prodigious rate.

Eventually the balance would break and it would explode, but most of the remaining gas might not reach escape velocity, this would be the "seed" of a potential galaxy.

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