Yes, I meant plummeting "within reason" (like x10) not plummeting to extremely low values that, as you correctly said, are not possible given the energy cost.
I am not really sure about that. There is not only a huge money cost but also a huge energy cost when sending something into orbit, would the panels even make back the fuel spent to send them? Even if the rocket hardware is reused 100% with no serious maintenance costs (reusing costs more fuel) would the panel even make back that fuel energy alone? I did not do the math but maybe not even that. If we could put them in orbit with a space elevator almost for free the tune would be way different though.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg. https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/74082/ICES_2018_81.pdf
Given an average solar silicon price of around $9 US per kilogram in 2020 https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/solar-silicon-price-hike/#:~:text=Compared%20to%20the%20average%20solar,%2434%20Australian%20dollars%20per%20panel.
This would increase costs 2720 / 9 = 302 times.
The cost of a solar electric system is measured in dollars per watt. The average cost for a residential system is currently $3-5 per watt. That means the average 5-kW residential system will cost $15,000-$25,000, prior to tax credits or incentives. https://sites.energycenter.org/solar/homeowners/cost#:~:text=The%20cost%20of%20a%20solar,to%20tax%20credits%20or%20incentives.
So this system would cost about 4*302 = 1208$ per watt.
This calculation is extremely approximate, but no, it will never work, even if the cost of sending a kg to orbit plummets.
Thanks, added the comment in the correct place now.
Let's have fun with recursion!
A checkerboard where each square is itself a checkerboard.
A cube with mirrors on both sides, the mirrors show multiple reflections of the cube.
A person wearing a shirt with an image of that person wearing that shirt.
Let's have fun with recursion!
A checkerboard where each square is itself a checkerboard.
A cube with mirrors on both sides, the mirrors show multiple reflections of the cube.
A person wearing a shirt with an image of that person wearing that shirt.
Immune erosion is used to make people understand that immune escape is only partial and not total
Thanks for your feedback, in fact correlation is not causation and we must be very careful about self-selection effects. This is not a self-selection effect but still a correlation/causation enigma that I found interesting in recent times: high vitamin D levels were found to be heavily anticorrelated with severe COVID in observational studies, but people of old age are both sensible to severe COVID and have lower vitamin D than average, not only that but people with a healthy lifestyle of many outdoor walks also have higher vitamin D! Is this causation, correlation or both? There is a very interesting article about this on Astral Codex 10 (COVID/Vitamin D, Much More Than You Wanted To Know)
Extremely cool evolution experiment where E. coli bacteria evolve to eat citrate along with many other interesting happenings.