What's "Three Gorges Dam In Space"?
Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.
The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed "another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth."
The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world's largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth's days by 0.06 microseconds. Source
However this news is all over internet for the past 6 or 7 days, it's nothing new. I've found a very same article on The Economics Times from 2015 which suggested the idea first floated in 1941 by fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
Another one appeared in June 2022, "China to set up first solar power plant in space by 2028"
These articles made me look into Asimov's works and life a little more deeply. To my surprise, I found that Asimov was already very famous at the age of twenty one. He was writing Sci-fi stories for various magazines by that time and "The Nightfall" should be the story that is well in line with the idea of humanity running into darkness and how it could be saved. The story was so remarkable that in 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written.1
I think most of us would accept that Isaac Asimov isn't only a fictional Sci-fi writer, he is the one whom you can trust for forecasts way beyond our imagination.
However this news about China's plans of creating a solar array in Earth's orbit, and implying that China would be the saviour of the humanity once were into an energy crisis doesn't make sense to me. Also the claims that China will build 0.6 mile strip of solar panels above earth and "the energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth"2 seems to be more than an exegarration.
I think the media is just repeating this story to harvest the human interest in Asimov rather than in China.
So, this is just my rationale on this story and what I found.
I'm ready to listen your point of view on China or the repetitive circulation of this story in media.
Do you believe China has any such plans?
Do you think China has such technology to make it happen by 2028 as is claimed in the news?