I got an idea about a month ago that can change the world. I am starting to build a community around it. It is far enough along to involve local volunteers. If things work out, this could provide thousands of jobs in the Portland area, bring internet service to the world, save gigawatts of power generation, and eventually replace most of the electric power generation on earth. A major game changer.
The idea is an enormous array of orbiting satellites that are little more than a naked solar cell with processor chips, memory chips, and radio chips hung around the edge. These "server-sats" will be about 40 cm across, thinner than a sheet of paper, and weigh perhaps 30 grams (2 grams is possible). They can be launched in stacks of 33,000 , perhaps 4 stacks to a launch, and deployed in arrays. They turn solar power into computation and communication to the ground. Transmitting as a phased array, they can communicate with multiple small regions on the ground, more like cell phones than sat-phones. As outlandish as it sounds, it appears that the system can be built and launched for less than $500 US per server-sat, and pay for itself relative to ground based server farms through electricity and backhaul savings alone - each one saves about 100W of ground based power, and lots of infrastructure. Local businesses such as SolarWorld, Intel, Triquint, Maxim, Sharp, Merix, D.W. Fritz, and others could build just about everything but the rocket and the satellite container it is deployed from (Boeing?). See http://www.server-sky.com . It's a wiki, and I'm looking for positive contributions. Mostly I am looking for folks to help with the software, simulations, animations, game design, etc. If you can handle algebra-level math, and have good "spatial" imagination, you can probably help. Heck, if you can understand server sky well enough to answer questions, you could be a big help. I can even use linguists to help name things - good names will make it easier to explain and help sell the idea to investors. Longer term, server sky can beam power to the ground, not just petabits/second of data. It and be launched by, and provide power for, systems far more thrifty and environmentally benign than rockets (see, for example, http://www.launchloop.com). The idea is still in its infancy, but it is showing signs of surviving to adulthood. Since I don't expect to "own" it, I want to crowd-source the conceptual design, and in a few months build the core team that does the real design out of the best volunteers. There are still a lot of problems to solve, but most of the things that I thought would be difficult (space radiation resistance, space junk avoidance, and phased array grating lobes, for example) have easy solutions. With enough people helping, I hope to have enough public domain solutions for all the obvious problems that the idea won't be held hostage by patent trolls. I plan to give a presentation on this to Linuxfest in late April, but I hope to have an alpha version of the presentation ready in a week or two, perhaps for a PLUG meeting, perhaps at a special event. But besides sharing this with a few dozen friends, this is the first public announcement, because the Portland open source community has the right talents and values to bring this to fruition. I am very busy, mostly getting more stuff ready for the wiki. If you have questions, please read what is on the wiki first. If you see a question on the site or on this mailing list that you can come up with an answer for, please answer it for me, and add it to the wiki. Together we can change the world with this. Perhaps even the universe. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
