Travis Beals

speaker

103 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Travis Beals’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

There's two reasons behind that.

The first reason is that

The speed of light through vacuum is faster than through glass.

And the second reason is you can use more optical bandwidth, right?

So I mentioned that when you're sending light through an optical fiber, you do it in the infrared.

And that's because outside of these narrow ranges, the impurities in glass will absorb the light.

So you're limited in how much optical bandwidth you have through vacuum.

optical fiber.

If you want to send light through space, you could in principle use the entire infrared and visible spectrum.

And that's about 30 times more spectrum.

So there's hard engineering problems here.

But if you solve those in principle, sending data through space can be even better than sending it through glass on Earth.

The idea of doing space-based solar power has been around for a long time.

The earliest mention I could find of this was an Isaac Asimov short story.

I think it was from the 40s.

It is an interesting idea, and maybe someday we see people doing that.

But you have this challenge.

You've got to send that power, and it's a lot of power we're talking about for this to be worthwhile, down to Earth and somehow safely receive it there.

And that power transmission and reception problem is a really hard problem.

So in some sense, the insight behind something like Suncatcher is like, hey, space is a great place to do solar power.

Showing 41–60 of 103 · page 3 of 6