Astronomer here! I would tread very carefully in thinking this is all sorted. Why? The sky area for this gravitational wave alert was over 8000 square degrees, which is like 20% of the sky! And CHIME finds like one or two FRBs a day- eventually one is gonna overlap with a gravitational wave signal!

Now, the team argues this is more likely than chance because the rough distance estimate from the FRB matches that of the gravitational wave signal. Problem there is if you look at the GW signal’s stats, it’s from 280-740 million years distant is the range you could get from this signal. That is huge! Millions of galaxies in that amount of sky at that amount of distance, in fact! If you ask me, really not convincing over just a random coincidence.

Finally, if FRBs were correlated with gravitational waves, another question pops up- why haven’t we seen this happen for other, better localized, events? Instead it’s very clear the rate of FRBs and the rate of what creates gravitational wave signals (ie neutron star mergers if you follow this paper’s argument) are super out of sync. There just plain aren’t enough mergers to explain the giant numbers or FRBs- some of which also repeat, which an explosive one off event like a merger doesn’t support.

TL;DR I remain skeptical until better evidence is shown, because correlation does not equal causation

What Hubble is designed to do and what spy satellites are designed to do are completely different.

I am not saying that the technology to resolve a clear image on Earth does not exist - just that it is not included on space telescopes designed to look at distances measures in light years.

That's not too surprising given that this was the planet around TRAPPIST-1 closest to the star and receives 4 times the solar irradiance than the Earth, which is twice what Venus gets.

It's actually the 4th planet from the star that astronomers have the highest hopes of finding an earth-like atmosphere.

That way when our species is dead and gone for a millenia and then aliens come to visit they'll see there was water on our planet!

What if our species originated from Mars, and we flew to Earth because we wrecked our environment. Then we had a massive war with each other and practically all but died out, then we started to slowly build back up and now we're looking at Mars like maybe it's something we could explore. Like it's calling back to us. Maybe that's why we can't find the exact link between us and primates? lol that would be a trip.

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Why tho was this diacovered like 60 years after we went there?

Bunch of questions here, but starting with a couple...

What's your assumption on the cost of the distributed ground based plants accepting SBSP on a $/MW basis?

What's the breakdown of percent loss from SBSP for the transmission down to ground and conversion into usable AC?

Have not heard of this CHIME detector for FRB's before. Pretty cool that its data lines up with LIGO's detected grav waves timewise for this particular incident.

If I read this right, the idea is two neutron stars smash into each other sending out the ripples in spacetime, then soon after they collapse into a black hole, creating the FRB via an instantly disappearing magnetic field. I don't really understand the physics of this but it's a heck of a thing to contemplate..

It's fine, but implying that you just found that article rather than wrote it is more than a bit disingenuous.

My personal take as an aerospace engineer is that I find it hard to believe that the benefit of better illumination outweigh the complexity and cost of a project like that.

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what was it?

So..... are we doing a good thing by locking up clean water in half-drunk water bottles buried in landfills around the world?

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I hope they had working sensors inside the thing. It would be useful to know just how bad it would have been if there were any passengers.

There is also a counter-argument to the activity of red dwarves. Most planetary systems are on the same axis as the star rotation, the axis of rotation has a lot less direct activity that would be constantly blasted at the planets and mainly happens at the poles. So there is still possibility that even active red dwarves can have habitable planets or planets that it didn't completely strip the atmo off

I wasn't trying to promote it... 😔 I've just been down a whole rabbit hole the last weeks realising that ESA, Airbus, and Co. are all over the topic and I wanted to learn everything I could. There is even a government initiative in the UK now (https://spaceenergyinitiative.org.uk/).

I've been really excited about it and wanted to discuss with some likeminded people here, just sharing the background for those who haven't heard of it.

Didn't expect to be completely overwhelmed with 100 % underwhelmed reactions though. Really making me sad right now.

Well, starship is aiming to bring launch costs down to as low as 10 $/kg.

At that price SBSP would still be slightly more expensive than solar and wind, but much cheaper than storage, backup & peak load technologies which we will be needing in a purely renewable system anyway.

SBSP has the big advantage that it can deliver power to many markets, simply by switching to another base station. Thanks to this, it can capture much higher wholesale prices for electricity than wind and solar.

Essentially, it could capture 24/7 peak power prices, putting it at a better position than ground-based wind and solar even though it has higher levelised cost of energy.

really makes you realize the absurd scale of galaxies, even being so far away andromeda can still take up a tremendous amount of space in the sky, i hope i can go someone with little to no light pollution one day to see it

Please explain. 3D space being the gap created between rest mass and c speed energies where nothing was before explains a lot and is supported by accepted science. What is incorrect about that interpretation?

Wow, that’s a really stupid crackpot theory you’ve found. Almost as bad as the angular momentum guy

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How long will it take to get the same amount of energy back to Earth from 1 tonne of solar arrays as it costs to get that 1 tonne to the relevant orbit?

If the answer is a year, then yes. If its 20 years then unlikely.

Energy cost will be your hard floor, if it takes too long to get the energy back then you are wasting your time. Above that comes the economics, how much can you get from consumers for 1 tonne on orbit vs the cost of getting it there. This is a bit more flexible as you can work on the non fuel costs.

Space does offer advantages, you can almost always be at 90^(0) to the Sun and you can have less atmosphere to get through. Its also almost always very sunny. It has disadvantages like the current insane cost to orbit and the difficulties getting energy once you move beyond the tropics and into more oblique angles.

The current answer is a very loud no with current technology. The point where no becomes yes is one of engineering and economics and an open question if you consider current costs to orbit easy to cut.

If you are promoting your own article you should probably just say so...

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