Why send Earth's energy to Mercury?
So, I was watching an Astrum video, talking about technologies we need for manned space exploration. Anyway, a couple of thoughts occurred to me that seemed counterintuitive. Ish.
First off, discussing energy, Dyson spheres and planetary engineering, the topic of converting Mercury into an array of Solar collectors. Nothing particularly unreasonable in the logic, it's in a good location, it's got a convenient mass and is constructed of the right materials. Of course, we have to have a counter argument.
Why, exactly, would we use solar collectors on Earth to accrue energy, only to send that energy (somehow) to Mercury, to power the construction and orbital positioning of these collectors?
Why, having waited for that energy to travel a whole AU from Sol to Earth, then send it 0.55 to 1.45 AU back in system, to be used on Mercury, a planet only around 0.4 AU from Sol to start with.
Sol's energy density is far higher at Mercury's orbit than it is at Earth's (approximately 7 times greater). I don't know how you'd do it anyway, but it feels like sending it back to Mercury would lose another 6/7ths of that energy. A much more favourable (and simple) scenario would be to just gather that energy on Mercury.
Mercury's smaller size would require fewer collectors to cover the whole planet, but not only that, we'd need fewer still due to the increased energy density that close to Sol, and then we can halve that number again, because Mercury's Solar day is 176 Earth days long!
Don't follow? It's simple. That ridiculously long Solar day means Mercury's rotational velocity in relation to Sol is a leisurely 3.6-and-a-bit kilometres per hour. For those of you at the back, that's:
Three-Point-Six-And-A-Bit kph
At that speed, you can build your collectors on tank tracks, rail tracks, or wheels, and the entire network of collectors can dawdle across the planet, using the tiniest amount of energy they collect to power their mobility. They'd never not be able to point directly at Sol, giving you a stupendous quantity of energy with a relatively consistent supply (+/- the variance in energy density due to Mercury's orbital eccentricity).
Honestly, why that didn't occur to anyone before the original video was published, is utterly perplexing to me. The fact that Astrum claims their inspiration and a lot of the information came from a educational course they'd taken, an educational course that included this erroneous and moronic point is even more incomprehensible.
Okay, this is my personal opinion, and based on the flawed logic of a Layman, what with the extreme lack of expertise I possess in mathematics and the dynamics of solar system engineering, so YMMV, but if you can think of a reason why this wouldn't all occur to a society with the technological ability to completely dismantle a planet (even over astronomical timelines) and use its mass to construct a Dyson Swarm, please let me know.
And so, this is a long enough post on its own, so I'm breaking my essay in two, especially as the next topic of discussion is very different, even if it is an associated subject.
