Highly engineered materials that limit its emission spectrum to the "space window" the presenter mentions.
This might be the real problem. What are the energy inputs and other environmental costs to producing these materials. This is something I've been wondering about with solar power, but haven't looked into. It's all very well during the operating life of the panels, but there are costs in building the things as well as decommissioning them, do they wipe out the benefits?
Highly engineered materials that limit its emission spectrum to the "space window" the presenter mentions.
This might be the real problem. What are the energy inputs and other environmental costs to producing these materials. This is something I've been wondering about with solar power, but haven't looked into. It's all very well during the operati ...[text shortened]... ere are costs in building the things as well as decommissioning them, do they wipe out the benefits?
Manufacturing technology is incrementally improving all the time and I see nothing in the laws of physic or any insurmountable physical barriers to the manufacturing technology eventually improving to the point where ANY material we want manufactured, even if it requires every atom or molecules of it being placed in EXACTLY the right place, can be manufactured with an energy efficiently that is arbitrarily 'close' to its theoretical maximum. When that day comes, which would be just a matter of when and not if, the energy required to manufacture this (or just about any other) material would be minimal and thus the energy required to make even the most difficult materials to make that are for saving/generating energy would still be very cost effective because the energy they save/help-generate will generally be many times that used to manufacture them.