11:25 is where the truth-telling about fossil fuel interests and climate denial really kicks into high gear. “Among the biggest donors to Trump’s campaign.”
Elon Musk called Space Solar Power “the stupidest thing ever.” The reason Musk hates Space Solar Power is because he cannot own it. In a 2012 interview: One thing we learned today: While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there’s one thing he hates: space solar power. “You’d have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What’s the conversion rate?” he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. “Stab that bloody thing in the heart!”
His vision is a million people on Mars in a libertarian paradise. He will own that and wants no distractions from how he will pay for this; his starlink megaconstellation of 42,000 pieces of space junk in LEO…which he owns.
Gerard K. O’Neill was the true prophet of space colonization and in 1976 popularized space colonization with his book “The High Frontier.” The military and fossil fuel interests and political parties with their own agendas wanted nothing to do with it. It would be an immense multi-national multi-trillion-dollar state-sponsored energy project. That does not appeal to entrepreneurs looking to emulate the richest narcissist on Earth. Who this should appeal to is Climate Change activists seeking a permanent solution to the greatest threat civilization faces in the coming century. O’Neill mentioned Space Solar as preventing industrial activity from “overheating” Earth in 1976.
The concept is to build orbital Space Solar Power stations using lunar material. Effectively relocating the entire energy industry off-world into space. Hydrogen burning super-rockets causing the least damage to the atmosphere would send the factory tooling Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO). When the stations are in place in Geostationary Earth Orbit, essentially hovering above receiver antennae fields on Earth, they would power civilization. The entire world. This solves the feedback loop of trying to provide a western standard of living to a peak population of 10 billion. The industrial activity necessary to provide the renewable energy is self-defeating. Unless it never happens on Earth and instead in space. Nobody wants Space Solar to happen, and it is not discussed. Why is that?
Ice on the Moon 