Could wireless electricity happen with lasers?

Question

Since I have a bunch of smart people already I have another quick question

with a bunch of spread out bombs in a brown star to spread out the nucleons then have a jet collector then in having the nucleons spread out for light years from the brown star the one jet collector and compactor to make the particles ultra charged out the back to gain speed like the Carl Sagan idea

Answer 1

Certainly. A laser is basically focused light of a very narrow frequency band. You can make electricity from light using solar panels or via solar-thermal conversion - The same is true of laser light. It will suffer many of the inefficiencies of solar collection, but in time engineers and science will see improvements in this.

Presently, some other technologies appear a bit more promising. Here's an interesting one - MIT has tested wireless power transmission with a technology they call resonant induction. Very neat, and it has been tested by intel for power transmission with ~75% efficiency. See the links

Answer 2

With current technology,laser would only have a small advantage

over normal photovoltaic systems.(remember that laser is only coherent light)

I would think that microwave,or 'maser' would be a better candidate.

Answer 3

By Laser, it would not be very efficient. By magnetic wave, very feasible, and has been done. There was a news article in Yahoo News this past Thursday, or Friday about this.

Answer 4

Not really, at least not at significant powers safely.

There are two modes of transmission, purely light and using lasers to ionize the air enough that it conducts electricity like a wire does.

Using just a laser, you need a method to convert the light back into electricity at the other end. Even the best photo-voltaic cells now are terribly inefficient. To power anything more than trivial, you need an appreciably powerful laser, or very close proximity (laser light, like any light, diminishes in intensity as the square of the distance, so twice the distance, gives only 1/4 of the light).

It could be done, but is so wasteful that only relatively small amounts of electricity could be delivered this way sadly. You also have other complications of dust and other particles in the air absorbing the beam. You also need a direct line-of-sight from the laser to it's "target" photo-voltaic cells (or other producer of electricity, such as stacked Peltier devices). Try to transmit too much power and you get a dangerous beam as well of course.

Using a laser to ionize the air to make it a conductor has already been done as a novel "taser" device. This too suffers from the same drawbacks of potentially dangerous beams, diminishing intensity of the beams with distance, dust and rain, etc.

Hope this helps!