So could a fucking Dyson sphere. This article is PopMech-tier speculative trash. A flying car in every driveway, any day now since the 1960s…

Yeah I've seen that. Microwave power beaming would work in theory it's just electromagnetic radiation after all. But the vast majority of it is going to get absorbed by water molecules, because that's what microwave radiation does, that's why it cooks your food.

They're probably going to bake a lot of seagulls as well.

This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that's easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.

Countries will do everything except build nuclear power plants ig.

Ah yes now we just need a really long wire

We just need an elevator to the stars! With a really long cable

lol, what an insane idea...
A physical cable back to Earth is impossible, otherwise we'd already have space elevators.
Any other wireless transmission would have all the same weather problems and energy losses, it would be WAY cheaper to just build more solar panels on the ground.