NSA cracker - how many TW

iang@cs.berkeley.edu
>  seems also unlikely.  (Actually, for all I know, terawatt power sources
>  may exist; that's out of my field.  Please let me know if this is the case.
>  I just know that at my rates, 7.12 TW for 33 minutes (at about $.10/kWh)

I've extracted some figures from an industry publication
and arrive at a worldwide electricity generation capacity
of 1.6 TW.  Assuming that 1% of that power is smuggled into
the deep space cracker we're not even close to 33 minutes,
and it doesn't matter whether we're looking at a one-off
every so often rather than a continuous 40 a day.

And that's still on optimistic assumptions including

1)  testing keys for free

2a) running on earth at 3 K rather than 300 K

or

2b) no bother transmitting power & signals into space
    (Like if the cracker had been secretly installed on Voyager 2
    that'd be your 33 mins gone waiting for the radio.)

IBM have published a communications scheme that claims to recover
energy normally lost - it was on their website a few months ago.
I skipped reading it at the time because it sounded dotty.

On Mon, Jul 28, 1997 at 07:31:01PM -0000, Secret Squirrel wrote:

> IBM have published a communications scheme that claims to recover
> energy normally lost - it was on their website a few months ago.
> I skipped reading it at the time because it sounded dotty.

A few years ago an engineer at one of the weapons labs found
a new solution to Maxwells equations.  This was briefly
reported in the general press, and seemed to imply that the
solutions found allowed for soliton-like wave packets. 

Some time later there were experiments reported using water
tanks with specially shaped wave generators that were trying
to create a water-wave analog.  The article describing these
experiments speculated, if I remember correctly, that
special antenna geometry and manipulation of the input
signal might be used to generate a electromagnetic wave
equivalent.  There was also brief speculation about uses for
such a device -- beamed energy packets, for communications,
or, at high power, for energy transfer.  Or weapons. 

Anyone else remember this?