/sci/ - Science & Math

>>1859004
So we need about 1.7 x 10^14 square inches of high quality solar paneling, and INTERNET says a 65.59x42.24 sheet runs about 1500 US monies.

So a quick number crunch says we're looking at a piece of hardware that costs 9.39955 x 10^13 US dollars. To put that in perspective, that's 14.24 times more money than the current worth of all the world's gold combined. Since gold is an internationally recognized standard of currency backing, you could say that just the solar panels alone for this kind of device would costs 14.24 times more money than the world has.

While we can handwave funding, what we can't handwave are the resources necessary to produce solar paneling of this magnitude, nor the maintainance costs and the practical issues of getting the damn thing in the sky in the first place.