It looks like the base of the buildings in The Jetsons... sounds to me like we will soon be selling real estate at the top of these towers... all the power for the building will be supplied by its own structure...
I can't wait to live at the exhaust port of power plant where I'm continually blasted by hot air in an already scorching hot neighborhood in the middle of nowhere where I also get to add a massive vertical component to my daily commute!
The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.
At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?
-1 parent. The exhaust air at the top of the tower is going to keep rising because it will still be hotter than the ambient air. The cold air that falls to offset the rising mass is called the atmosphere. It's big, it's going to be moving slower than the air you just used to spin a turbine, and it's not cost effective to try to make electricity from it until it enters the greenhouse, gets heated, and funnels into the turbines that are already in the design (the one place where air is moving fast in the whole design.
Claim: 3% of users consume 40% of bandwidth.
Uh... should this statistic be shocking? At any given point in time, if you isolate out the top 3% of users, how much of the bandwidth SHOULD they be using? Should it be closer to 3%? That would mean everybody is using the exact same amount of data. All this statistic says is that data usage is not evenly distributed, but we're talking about a packet switched network. At no point in time does a packet switched network EXPECT equal usage of bandwidth. If they expected bandwidth to be used evenly across all users at all times, they would have built a circuit switched network. At any given point in time, most connections are just idling. Why don't they just release a statistic that reads "99% of network bandwidth is consumed by active connections." How about a billing plan where you pay for unlimited data, but if you don't use it, they'll refund your money?
Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.
I choose to believe that this new model will be the basis of the Subspace Communicator from Star Trek. Such is my approach to science. Don't judge me.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood