this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Why don't we just pipe our water all the way out to the sun and pipe the steam back to earth.
That's silly.
Clouds would knock the pipes down.
I was thinking you could put giant fans on it to blow the clouds away, but then the moon would also knock it down once you got up that high.
What if… hear me out… we pipe straight up into space, and then use a 90° bend to angle the remaining pipe to the sun. Shouldn’t Be too difficult, but I bet those plumbers would charge an expensive ass trip fee.
~We’ll need a shit ton of that purple PVC glue though.~
Then we have to wait until the purple PVC glue goes on sale
And we'd need to negotiate with that damn plumbers union
A few trillion dollars under the table should work
Nope, because you can't use PVC for piping steam. You're going to need to use metal pipe. Iron pipe is the cheapest bet but it's such a pain to work with. Personally I'd run copper. I think that's to code for low pressure steam anyways.
Wait, if it's going into space then whos building codes are we using?
Psh. Codes are for wussies.
pump ammonia! Can evaporate at PVC compatible temperature.
A very minor problem with this scheme is the mile thickness insulation needed to not lose much of the sun's heat to space, on the trip back. A 2nd minor problem is the actual pipe section close to the sun.
A couple more 90° bends and you'll have boiling water in no time. (or one 100° bend)
A 100 degree bend would only work if it was a Celsius bend, otherwise it would take at least two.
I GOT IT! I FIGURED IT OUT!!!
We make a single straight pipe the diameter of earth's orbit, and just slightly offset it to go near the surface of the sun.
We pipe water at one end and send it off while earth continues it's orbit. We wait six months and we'll meet the other end of the pipe which will have nice hot steam arriving from the sun. We use the hot steam for six months until it condenses back to liquid water, then restart the process when we meet the other end of pipe again.
Then we have to get rid of the clouds
How long is that gonna take? A few decades?
-Sam Altman, when he hears about this
Couple of years maybe ... maybe longer
I know one person who will answer "two weeks".
Don't worry, once we set it up we'll have a consistent supply.
By next year
~ Elom musk
Because it would cool down on the way back.
We just have to pipe it faster
Oh yeah! I did that for my house. We have free heat and power. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to build the pipeline that far out and it took me many more hours than expected, but, the system toots along just fine.
I'm curious if it would even be thermodynamically possible. If we could magically run a pipe that far, would the heat from the water radiate into space before it reached earth to do anything useful?
Someone get XKCD to do a video short on this.
i imagine filling any decent sized pipes (! plural because heat exchange has to loop) to 1au would use most of the water on earth.
What if instead of a pipe to return the steam we use a freaking laser beam!
So we generate energy with boiling water next to the sun, and we send the energy back to earth as a laser beam.
Guess how we turn the laser beam back into energy.
What a stupid suggestion...
Let's instead move the earth closer to the sun and boil the oceans directly.......
building a pipe all the way to space would mean the pipe would have to sustain its own weight, which is the same problem as a space elevator. that doesn't work either because there's no material on earth strong enough to support its own weight over that distance.