Detroit plans on a big move into battery-operated cars and pickups, with Chrysler committing to go all battery all the time by 1928.

Aside from the enormous pollution, environmental damage, and carbon footprint of so-called electric cars, there are practical, driving-oriented considerations.

GM says its Silverado EV pickup will be able to go 400 miles on a charge, Rivian is claiming 314 miles for its R1T pickup, and Ford is claiming 300 miles for its F-150 Lightning pickup. Chrysler claims that one of its automobile models will have a range of some 400 miles before needing a recharge.

Those ranges are (finally) compatible with my Fusion’s 300+ mile range on a tankful of gasoline. But I can fill my gasoline tank from nearly empty to full—and those 300+ miles—in about five minutes.

What’s the time to go from nearly discharged to fully charged—and those 300-400 miles—for the battery cars and trucks? So far, that time is measured in hours.

Also, there’s a gasoline station every time I turn around in the populated parts of the US, and they’re easily common and accessible in the wide open spaces of the Midwest and the arid west and southwest. Where are all the recharging stations, even the time-consuming ones?

And this: when the weather turns hot or cold, my gasoline burns just fine. Those batteries, though—well, good luck. They lose power in hot weather, and they lose it even faster in cold weather, even just sitting at the curb with the motor turned off.

Finally, this: when I’m on the road, I have more important things to do than sitting around in a roadside convenience store sucking coffee while my batteries (slowly) charge up. I’m driving to get from here to there, or to sightsee something more interesting than those roadside charging stations.

Oh, yeah: my gasoline tank doesn’t wear out. Those batteries can only be cycled (again, so far) for one or two hundred thousand miles—and then they have to be disposed of, expensively, as hazardous waste.

Update: 2028, not 1928. [sigh]

No, but something related to it. A Dyson sphere is a structure built around a star (our sun, for instance) that captures the star’s energy output for the use of the civilization that built the sphere.

Elon Musk, and his SpaceX company, are building a constellation of satellites—some 42,000 of them by the end game—in Earth orbit for the purpose of producing a global Internet, and one that’s separate from the terrestrial net.

Which brings me to my speculation.

Imagine a similar-sized collection of satellites in higher orbit, say just above geosync, so as to avoid interfering with the satellites already there and which have their own critical purposes. Of course, at those altitudes, there’d be room for a much larger constellation of satellites.

These satellites, though, would be solar collectors, whose purpose would be to…capture our sun’s energy output for our use. It’s straightforward and well-established technology to convert the sun’s output to electricity or to microwave energy or to energy of any wavelength we might find useful; although, it’s always useful to increase the efficiency of the conversion.

It is too early to know we can safely beam all that energy to Earth’s surface for terrestrial uses (even neglecting atmospheric- and weather-related losses). We don’t yet have a good handle on the effects of pumping all that energy through the atmosphere on that atmosphere, much less on what it does to animal or plant life that happen to be in or pass through the transmission beams. We also haven’t assessed the effects of those energy transmissions as they pass through orbiting satellites.

However.

We’re returning to the moon, and that body has lots of industrial potential, which will have lots of energy needs. Might it be cheaper to build such a constellation and beam the energy to the moon’s environs than to build collectors on the moon’s surface or in orbit around the moon?

The concept works for Mars, too, only we’d want the constellations in orbit around Mars.

And the asteroid built….