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A comment on Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab. Parent comment

Re:Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes mi... by ori_b on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @11:10AM (#6928304)
The problem is that algae is biomass. Thanks to conservation of mass, whatever amount of biomass you bring down from space needs to come from somewhere, and space is famously devoid of mass, let alone anything for algae to consume. That means that the problem of algae farms in space becomes one putting algae food into orbit.

I'm not sure how effective launching literally tons of material into space will be.

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Re:Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes mi... by scarmig on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @03:06PM (#6930244)
Tons is an understatement.

You're forgetting the one plausible energy source, however: the gravitational energy that the biomass has in outerspace. If you could figure out how to capture the energy of millions of tons of material moving from orbit to the Earth's surface, that might be able to provide the large majority of the energy needed to bring it up there in the first place.

I wonder how efficient we could make space elevators.

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