Deep Space - Hidden Terror (The Stasis Stories #6) Page 2

  This last got a chuckle from the group, but Gunnar ignored it. He was studying the hands on the suit. “How are you making the glove that small and still getting your fingers into it?”

  “Ah, it’s not a glove. It’s a mechanical hand I move through a cable system by moving my fingers inside a fitting in the end of the sleeve. My fingers end about here.” Norm used his left hand to point to a quite bulbous wrist on the right arm. “That lets my fingers stay nice and warm in the end of the sleeve. And, I can pull out of the fitting to push switches inside the end of the sleeve and control other stuff.”

  Gunnar studied the dome, “Why does the dome have the Stade cover with the cameras on it?”

  “Radiation,” Kaem said. “Radiation’s high in space. In low Earth orbit, it’s about fifty times what it is here on the ground. And out in interplanetary space, it’s double the levels at LEO. Stade’s ability to block all radiation’s going to protect us completely out there, but you wouldn’t be able to see out. If you’ve got your head in a glass bubble, you’ll be able to see but you’re going to be getting radiated. Therefore, a Stade shield that protects your head while cameras send binocular vision to a 3D headset. Hopefully, you only pull the shield back when you absolutely have to be able to see something with your own eyeballs.”

  Gunnar suddenly noticed that the goggles Norm was wearing looked like the kind you might wear for 3D virtual reality. He turned to Kaem, “If you’re going to be completely enclosed in a Stade box, it seems like you’d just as well control a robot remotely, using the same kind of virtual reality setup.”

  Kaem sighed, “Yeah, I think that’s the way most things are going to get done. Norm’s working on a version of the suit filled with batteries, motors, and computers instead of an astronaut and life-support. But there’re always going to be those who want to actually be out there. There might even be some things you can do better in person than you can with a robot.”

  Gunnar waved scornfully, “The people who think they have to be out there are idiots. I’d be happy controlling a space robot from a safe, comfortable seat right here in this room. Then I could go out for lunch when I got hungry.”

  Kaem frowned and pointed upward, “That’d work okay when your robot was passing overhead in its orbit. Then you could transmit directly from here to the robot with a time delay measured in thousandths of a second. But when the robot’s orbit puts it on the other side of the earth, your signal to it would have to bounce around the world via satellite. The delay for that could be half a second each way, long enough to make you clumsy. If you need good control, the person running the robot needs to be in orbit nearby.”

  Grinning, Gunnar rolled his eyes and said, “You always gotta be crushing my great ideas with irritating little facts, don’t you?”

  Kaem blinked as if in surprise, “Great ideas?”

  Dez said, “You’d better be careful or Gunnar’ll Stade-weld your shoes together.”

  Kaem laughed, “You’re right. Gunnar’s Stade welding wasn’t a great idea. It was an awesome one! Who’s got the next idea or update?”

  Diffidently, Teri Nunsen raised her hand a little.

  Kaem focused on her and smiled, “Don’t be shy, Teri. Tell us what you’re thinking.”

  “I’ve, uh, been thinking a lot about global warming. Even though our decreased dependence on fossil fuels has started lowering CO2 levels, temperatures aren’t dropping as fast as people had hoped. I’ve been reading some papers by people who think it’s not just the greenhouse effect of heat-trapping gases, but that some of the blame rests on our increased use of energy and thus the production of a great deal of waste heat. Now that less of our energy comes from petrochemicals, people feel less guilty about using power. We’ve improved the efficiency of power use by going from internal combustion engines that waste about eighty percent of their fuel’s energy as heat, to electric motors that only waste thirty to forty percent, but there’s still a lot of heat energy being liberated into our environment.”

  Gunnar snorted, “Are you thinking that you can build a more efficient engine out of Stade?”

  Teri narrowed her eyes at him. “That might be possible, but it’s not my area of expertise. Being an aerospace engineer, I’ve been thinking about how we might block some of the sunlight that’s hitting the earth. Decrease incoming heat to compensate for the increase in locally produced heat.”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes, “Please don’t tell me you want to build some kind of huge freaking reflector out at L1.”

  Someone asked, “L1?”

  “Lagrange 1. The region between the sun and the earth that’s gravitationally stable because the Sun’s gravity balances Earth’s.” Gunnar said grumpily. He turned back to Teri, shaking his head, “You may think that you can park something there and it’ll stay without stationkeeping, but L1’s not stable like L4 and 5. Besides, to do any good it’d have to be ginormous.”

  Teri stared at Gunnar for a moment, then said, “I was thinking of something here in the atmosphere. If it were made of Stade it would reflect all the energy impinging on it back out into space.”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes and opened his mouth, but Kaem calmly interrupted him before he could speak. “Gunnar, we don’t want to pooh-pooh people’s ideas before they’ve fully articulated them or they’ll never express another one.” He turned to Teri, “Are you thinking of something like the blimps?”

  She took her eyes off Gunnar and turned to Kaem. “Yeah, though maybe flattened top to bottom so they’d cover more area. I started thinking about it when I was reading about urban heat islands…” She paused, evidently realizing that some of her audience hadn’t heard of heat islands. “That refers to the way cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside because of all their concrete and glass. Some people think it’s also because of the increased energy use by all the people in such urban areas. I had this idea that we could tether blimps above cities so they’d provide shade. That could be our experiment and if it went well, we could expand to placing them in other areas as well.”

  Unable to restrain himself, Gunnar burst out, “The Earth’s freaking huge, Teri. A blimp may seem big to you but—”

  Kaem put his hand up, interrupting Gunnar’s tirade. He said, “Let’s use some real numbers instead of terms like ‘freaking huge.’ I know the Earth’s radius is about 4,000 miles, so that means its surface area’s about 200 million square miles, give or take. I agree, that’s huge. However, half of that’s on the dark side so we’re only talking about a hundred million square miles.”

  Gunnar snorted, “That only makes a difference if you’re going to constantly fly those blimps around the world so they stay on the sunny side. You’d be better off putting it out at L1.”

  “Hah!” Kaem laughed, a huge smile on his face. “You’re right, that was stupid on my part. Still, I’ll bet if we stopped one percent of the sun’s energy it’d make a significant difference.”

  Gunnar gave him a wide-eyed look. “So, you’re thinking we should put up one percent or two million square miles of blimps?! Are we gonna be doing anything else?”

  “No, I’m saying I want to hear more about Teri’s idea. Mr. X wants this company to be a force for good in this world and so we need to listen and help people decide whether their ideas are worth pursuing.” He arched an eyebrow at Gunnar, “Perhaps we could even offer suggestions that’d make them effective.” He looked at Teri again, “Tell us more.”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I, uh, had the idea about shading heat islands a while ago,” she glanced at Gunnar, “but couldn’t get up the courage to present it. Then I saw an article about how solar farms are having trouble finding locations. When they started, they put a lot of them up on undesirable land. Over parking lots, on top of buildings, on landfills, where the land was toxic and out in some deserts. Then they moved on to farms for crops that grow better in the shade. They’ve kept expanding onto the roofs of homes and businesses but a lot of the homes that don’t have them yet are
in areas where trees shade the roofs. Cutting down trees to put solar on the roof seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. So, anyway, I got to thinking about how we might be able to put solar farms on top of the shade blimps. Then the blimps might partly or fully pay for themselves. Shading cities to reduce air-conditioning demand in the summer would lower energy demand too.”

  Kaem grinned at Gunnar, “See Schmidt, you could’ve suppressed that idea with all your pooh-poohing!”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes again, “I’m not done pooh-poohing. What about the cold half of the year, when people want that sunny heat?”

  Teri blinked, “Um, tether them somewhere else?”

  “And how are we getting the power from your airborne solar farms down to the grid?”

  “Down the tether.”

  “So, they have to be tethered to some grid connection?” Gunnar asked. “And you’ve gotta have someone driving the tether from place to place, then hooking it up at the new location? What does the guy that’s moving the tether do when he comes to bridges or powerlines across the road?”

  Looking frustrated, Teri said, “Look, I haven’t worked out all the details yet. It just seemed like a good idea to bring to the group.”

  “Well—” Gunnar began.

  “Teri,” Kaem said, cutting Gunnar off again, “you’ve gotta understand that Gunnar’s a genius about technical stuff but an idiot about civility and courtesy.” He smiled, “It’s a good thing he’s got those handicaps; if he didn’t, he’d have taken over the world by now.” Kaem frowned, “But he does have some good points. Ideally, you’d spend a lot of time trying to poke holes in your own idea before bringing it to the group. Not that you have to solve all the problems, that’s a big part of what this group’s for.” Kaem looked around the group, “But, now that we’ve heard about it, let’s talk about the problems. The first one I think we should address is that it’d take a huge number of blimps to cover a significant area. That’s also tied into the fact that with a round blimp, even light hitting above the equator of the blimp, essentially light hitting below forty-five degrees above the blimp’s equator, is on average going to get reflected but still hit the Earth rather than bouncing back into space.”

  “Wait,” Mahesh Prakant said, “if we’re covering it with solar cells, they’re going to absorb the light, not reflect it, right?”

  Kaem looked at Teri for a moment, as if expecting her to answer, but she had a deer-in-the-headlights look. Gunnar didn’t think she knew the answer. Kaem turned back to Prakant and said, “Even the most modern solar cells aren’t very efficient. The best of them only convert about forty percent of the light energy that hits them into electricity. For them to work at all, solar cells have to be pretty transparent so light can pass through them and the light’s photons can knock electrons loose from the material, thus creating electricity. Photons that go all the way through the photovoltaic without making power get absorbed by the material behind the cell. The cells make power best with the visible frequencies, though some of the visible light frequencies aren’t as effective as others. The original solar cells pretty much didn’t work at all in the infrared or ultraviolet frequencies because infrared photons didn’t have enough energy to knock electrons loose and UV photons knocked the electrons all the way out of the cell, again not generating usable electricity. Later cells have been able to produce some electricity from infrared which has made them more efficient. The problem is that lower-energy infrared photons still don’t dislodge electrons as often as visible light photons do. So, making one pass through the cell, they produce some electricity from IR, but not as much as you’d like. But if Teri’s blimp’s Stade reflected the light back up through the cell after it went downward the first time, it’d have another chance to knock out some electrons and, in theory, could markedly increase the power you usually get from the IR light. We might get pretty close to that theoretical doubling of IR conversion efficiency with Stade’s perfect reflectance sending all the light back through.” He shrugged, “And, the reflected infrared light—which we perceive as heat—that doesn’t get converted to electricity, will be on its way back out into space.”

  Gunnar cleared his throat irritatedly, “You were going on about how light hitting the sides of the balloon was still going to be reflected down to the ground.”

  “Um, yeah,” Kaem said. He looked around at the others. “Ideas? Teri?”

  Though they looked thoughtful, no one spoke up. Kaem said, “There’s also the issue that it’ll be easier to mount solar cells on a flat surface than the rounded top of a blimp.”

  Teri suddenly brightened, “Back to my idea that they don’t have to be round cigar shapes like a blimp! I was thinking somewhat flattened, but we could just cast huge football-field-sized, millimeter-thick, flat Stades at a density that’ll make them float at the altitude we choose.”

  “And, when you put a solar farm on top of a millimeter-thick Stade,” Gunnar said, “it’s promptly gonna flip upside down.”

  This time Teri rolled her eyes at Gunnar, “So, thicker than a millimeter then. We’re just spit-balling here, right? Not fully engineering every idea before we put it up for discussion?”

  Lee said, “Sounds like a huge kite. You’re gonna need a Stade chain in your tether and a hell of an anchor or a good wind’s gonna rip it loose.”

  “Another issue,” Kaem said, “is the need to keep the top surface pointed at the sun so the solar cells will be efficient. That’s at odds with letting it blow whichever way the wind wants to point it.”

  “A long tether and a hefty wind would put it off to one side of the city you’re trying to shade.”

  “Okay, okay,” Teri said disgustedly, throwing her hands up. “I give. I admit it was a stupid idea.”

  Kaem said, “Wait…” He was leaning back in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.

  Teri said, “Really, I’m sorry. I—”

  Gunnar touched Teri’s arm. He whispered, “Kaem’s thinking. It’s best to wait when he looks like this.”

  Teri shot a surprised look at the man who’d been so critical of her idea.

  Gunnar could tell she was wondering why he was helping after he’d been such a pain in the ass. He felt a little embarrassed, but he’d never been able to curb his biting tongue.

  They all sat and stared at the young man. Gunnar could tell some of the newer people were getting impatient. Suddenly Kaem sat back up and looked at Teri. “So, I’ve got some ideas on how to solve some of the objections that’ve been raised. You’ll need to put in a lot of effort into shooting down my harebrained notions before we even meet about them again, much less try to build them, okay?”

  She said, “Okaay?” looking puzzled.

  Kaem glanced at the others, “So, here are the issues. One, lots of problems with tethers, especially with the wind. Two, we need to cover a huge area to even affect a local urban climate. Three, we need to tilt the solar cells toward the sun. Four, we need to move the blimps somewhere else in the winter when people want the sunshine. Five, we need to be above the clouds if we want to generate power… or we need to move the farms to areas without clouds.”

  At this litany, Teri started shaking her head. “Yeah, I get it. It was dumb. You don’t have to keep hammering it.”

  When she interrupted, Kaem raised an eyebrow at her. When she ran down, he took his eyes off her and looked around at the others, “How about this? Our solar farm floats at twenty thousand meters of altitude where, if my recollection is correct, there are no clouds and there isn’t very much wind. Each farm is huge. Like a square mile instead of a football field in size. The central part’s thicker to provide more buoyancy. In the central section, we mount three pairs of big flywheels in a cube conformation on gimbals. They allow gyro control of the attitude of the solar farm so we can tilt it in any direction we want. Facing the sun. Edge on to the wind. Whatever’s needed at the moment. There aren’t any tethers; the power from the solar farm’s stored in the flywheel
s. Ducted fans around the periphery provide mobility.

  “If we imagine doing this for New York City, the farm moves to the east of the city overnight, then tilts toward the sun so it can start storing power and stop sunlight hitting the city first thing in the morning. During the day it keeps moving west with the sun, shifting around to shade different parts of the city so each area gets some cooling and some sunshine. After sunset, by which time it’ll be way west of the city, it hooks up to a twenty-kilometer-tall tower and sends power down a superconductor. Once it’s drained most of the energy out of its flywheels, it starts moving east to do it all again the next day. In the winter it can spend all of its time out over the Atlantic harvesting energy and only coming in at night to deliver power or… it could head down to South America where they’d probably like some cooling during the southern hemisphere’s summer.”

  Kaem lifted his eyebrows interrogatively. “Thoughts?”

  Gunnar scoffed and raised his hand.

  Kaem grinned, “What’d I miss?”

  “A twenty-kilometer-high aircraft hazard?!”

  Kaem shrugged, “The farm could just pull up to the side of New York’s orbital launch facility.”

  “What?! There’s an orbital launch facility just down in Virginia! Why would we build another in New York?!”

  Kaem shook his head, “Not space launch, Gunnar. Orbital launch. If there’s any place in the world that’s going to have the kind of people who want to travel by space plane so they can land in Singapore an hour later, it’s going to be New York.”

  Gunnar felt offended by that kind of consumerism but decided not to make a big deal out of it. Instead, he said, “If that aerial solar farm is going to carry around the weight of a bunch of massive energy storage flywheels, it’s gonna consume a lot of the energy it farms just powering the fans that move the beast from place to place.”