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Old 17-October-2007, 06:29 PM
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tdvance tdvance is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eburacum45 View Post
That's right.

And even if we have a hydrogen economy at some time in the future, there will be no advantage in mining hydrogen from Jupiter or even Uranus and sending it to Earth; the energy consumed in extracting it from a gas giant's gravity field and sending it across the solar system would be more than the energy obtained from the hydrogen itself, so it would be better not to bother.
Supppose it is only Jupiter's gravity that is the issue?

I'm thinking of a one-time expenditure of energy to put a big hollow rock in an orbit that regularly passes close to Earth and to Jupiter (some micro-corrections needed from time to time, perhaps). This expenditure is amortized over the lifetime of the rock (hopefully centuries or more)--and the per-load cost is that of getting the hydrogen from jupiter to the rock, and from the rock back to Earth.

Todd
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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

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