How much energy per person?

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
They're going to put giant rockets on the Moon and fly it down to Earth to transfer the energy once a month.

Now that sounds like a workable solution, at least for one transfer.

Originally posted by jebry
Now that sounds like a workable solution, at least for one transfer.

Actually, if you had some kind of supersized aircraft carrier shaped satellite in earth orbit equipped with a magnetic railgun, and something similar on the moon, you can get essentially free energy by using solar energy to sling a mass from the moon to the earth. When it is captured by the earth orbit rail gun, the object, say 1000 Kg or so, turns its kinetic energy into elecrical energy. It gives a net plus of energy because it gets a free boost in kinetic energy from the fact that the moon's gravity is 1/6 of earth so it doesn't take that much to get it flying to earth, also helped by having no atmosphere to deal with on the moon. So a rail gun launches it at the orbiting rail gun, it slows down the incoming mass which by that time is going about earth escape velocity, ~11km/sec and since the orbiter is going about 8 Km/sec to stay in orbit, the mass alone gives up the kinetic equivalent of about 3 Km/sec in the deal. The mass can be used to further build up the orbiting rail gun station, which will store the energy in any number of ways, heat, more current in a superconducting loop, something like that. Pretty slick, eh! I read about it in a magazine a few years ago, a proposal that would work if they wanted to spend the money.