Turning a Solar Probe into a Big Energy business

The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built and is currently bathing in enough solar energy to train ChatGPT for free.

Today, I’ll share how parking technologies at (a few million kilometers from) the sun and not just solar probes might be a good business idea.

The Nerds

There are a lot of nerds out there who would totally get on board with this. Be they gamers, sci-fi world builders, or even climate change scientists who prefer to tackle the source of ballooning temperatures itself – sunlight.

For example, Beff Jezos and his team of thermodynamic hackers at Extropic.ai hope to use their insights into the thermodynamics of quantum computers to improve the GPUs that train Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT.

Would a solar probe that is also a quantum computer be a good idea for research investment? Yes. It would be able to cool a warehouse-sized quantum computer with ten thousand plus logical qubits to near absolute zero and quite easily. All quantum-computing scientists would line up to get some jobs done on that monster.

Another set of nerds are Bitcoin maximalists. These earnestly believe in the power of 21 million immutable pieces of code called bitcoins to change the world economy for the better, for all. Nothing has yet proven this claim, not even the ETF. We are still stuck with mathematical theories of how scarcity and halvings will eventually drive toward more global cooperation. Though, these have a more solid footing in real-world applications than the quantum nerds.

Would a solar probe turned bitcoin miner be a good idea to invest in? No. It would be terrible for mining, no thanks to a hash horizon spanning upwards of 16 minutes to and fro Earth. However, as a Bitcoin node, it would still be a good redundancy for Bitcoin experimentalists to play with. All that energy could count for something.

A better use case would be to mine a new cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Call it Solcoin (do not confuse it with an inflationary altcoin called “Solarcoin”). This would take at least 1 hour to mine a block that confirms the transaction. With such a long time frame, I would not call it a currency. But an asset, yes.

Techno-utopians who believe in the Kardashev scale would be intrigued by this Solcoin. Would people in real estate, which takes days to officiate deals, be okay with a Solcoin as their value peg? Maybe.

How about nerds in High Energy Physics, such as the chaps at the Large Hadron Collider? Do you think they would want to have more energy to smash particles and lasers with? - Yes.

AIs, quantum computers, high-energy colliders, and proof-of-work cryptocurrencies all have one thing in common. They are energy-guzzling beasts.

Parking them at the sun could be big business.

Why we might need this idea

As a civilization, our data needs are ballooning. But as data needs balloon, so do the energy needs.

It is like with a child. They grow bigger brains during their teenage years, and their appetite shoots through the roof.

Data consumes energy to turn into information. Hence, Information is energy. If you have been following my posts, you have heard of Landauer.  We need information on how to build better AI, to build a better Bitcoin economy, to build a greener world, to build better skyscrapers, to build skyhooks, and to go to Mars.

Training AI consumes a lot of energy, mining Bitcoins consumes a lot of energy, carbon capture consumes gargantuan amounts of energy, all building works consume a lot of energy, and rockets? You know the answer.

A solar parked business is an idea to take some of this data processing, raw material first stage processing work, away from us humans. And away from our planet.

If we engineer it right, up goes raw materials, and down comes finished products. This is the (far) future of big business for big energy infrastructure. Like Superman drenches up in sunlight to come make the world a better place, a solar-parked business is our Superman.

A Solar-Parked business

So, the idea is not to probe the sun. That is all good if you just want to build solar probes that move fast and measure the temperature of the sun’s surface, et cetera. You want to park at the sun, like in the name – Parker Solar Probe.

The business, whatever it is, makes profits while your system is as close to the sun as possible. But before that, some tens to hundreds of billions of dollars are needed to launch all the parts toward the sun, and then more money via rocket fuel is needed to steer everything into place. By all means, this is not the kind of venture a fractured world economy with low time preference, such as ours, can handle. This is not like launching a start-up in your garage to profit from quick user aggregation in the next ten months.

This needs big planning by big multinational corporations supported by multiple governments. The level of dedication would be as big as with the ITER nuclear fusion project. And the risk would be just as big. With ITER, we risk ending up with running costs of billions of dollars that only return millions of dollars worth of energy profit. With a solar parking business, the energy is worth trillions of dollars, alright, but it may fry your investment to Kingdom come if you do not navigate well the treachery that is being in outer space while so close to the sun.

Forget building a Dyson Sphere; this is it.

I am certain that a solar-parked business is how we hack our way up the ladder of the Kardashev scale. The idea that we have to first consume all the solar energy falling on earth before we move to the energy output by the sun, is a big step idea that will not happen.

More viable is a mix: Some small-time but profitable solar parked business, coupled with better management of our planetary solar energy, coupled with some investments on the moon and on other planets like Mars, Venus, and Mercury.

What can I say? I am speculating here. Take my ideas with a grain of salt, and enjoy them as a form of hard science fiction. Sorry, I didn’t put characters and a good chase scene.

Till the next one.

Adios.