Public Discussion Opened on Space Solar Power 195
eldavojohn writes "The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD, has taken a novel approach to a study they are doing on space based solar power. They've opened a public forum for it and are interested in anyone and everyone's expertise, experience and ideas on the best means to harvest energy in space. I suppose this is similar to the DoD's $1 million for an energy pack just without the award. Still, if you want to have an influence on the US's plans in space, this would be an easy armchair place to start. Space.com also has more on the details."
Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilization? (Score:5, Interesting)
The proximate cause was that despite there being an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that could have been followed through to space industrialization -- the launch service industry did not enjoy the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed [presageinc.com]:
It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years [geocities.com], that similar legislation got passed for launch services.
The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't precisely follow the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" model [majorityrights.com] doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
The cost of getting silicon into space from the lunar surface would be orders of magnitude less than launching from earth due not only to the much shallower gravity well but also due to the absence of atmosphere.
No beanstalk needed.
At worst a Dyneema Rotovator [slashdot.org] might be needed but probably not even that.
First, the bulk of the materials are manufactured in space from lunar raw material transported to orbital facilities so you don't need to land those facilities on the lunar surface, and you don't have to worry about g-loading the raw materials you are sending to the orbital facilities.
Second, you don't manufacture everything in space -- only bulky materials like solar cells, reflectors, structural members and perhaps klystrons. Only residual materials (raw and manufactured) are of terrestria
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http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-altcomments.cgi
Re:Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilizati (Score:2)
Honestly - I don't know if the idea is feasible.
Maybe it's technically possible, but I don't think human beings can operate and maintain such an infrastructure without individual interest trumping group interest.
Any one of a zillion things could prevent it (individual-interest-wise):
- incomplete fu
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The solution to free market whack jobs -- really just private sector rent-seekers -- isn't public choice rent-seeking; it is to collect and then redistribute all economic rent -- that cannot be allocated to their true source as positive externalities (PE's like public domain technologies) -- equally to all segments of society. Anything else c
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Well, that was the mindset of the politicians who were conned into supporting and funding the programs at the time. But not of many of the fine people who did the engineering that got us there.
Yeah - sometimes I'm afraid that we, as a nation, peaked sometime back in 1973, and are gradually sliding backwards into "Banana Republic" status. A Banana Republic with nukes. But if our politicians can be conned into
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As we are all aware, the whole global warming problem presented by rising levels of CO2 is that more energy is trapped here on Earth. So how is trapping more energy from the sun and sending more energy to Earth going to help the problem? Maybe the solar collector will be directly between the Sun and Earth, thus removing as much incoming solar energy as it is beaming down to our power station. But
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The idea of blocking the sun to maintain the status quo on a climatic system we really don't understand yet, is stupid.
Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers!
Re:Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkVlkSnoGNM [youtube.com]
-Brandon
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- the radiation spreading over an area instead of hitting just the receiver
Place the receivers in, oh... North Dakota; RF spread control can already be feasibly done enough to keep spill-over to a dead-minimum (and the receivers should be large enough to catch that anyway). That, and IMHO, anybody who does air travel is likely already getting hammered with almost as much RF/cm2 thundering out of the ground and local ATC dishes than they'd likely get by standing betwixt power satellite and receiver panel... (that is, the panel is likely going to be rather big). Frequency diffs m
Not really (Score:2)
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I believe that was called the Star Wars Missile Defense System... but on the serious side, that's a pretty good idea, as long as you can solve some basic problems like accurate aiming, beam attenuation through an atmosphere, etc.
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That's all well and good from a governmental standpoint (the DoD would like nothing better than to be able to deliver large amounts of energy to specific points on the Earth, some of it even to power remote bases), but the organizations that are going to make this sort of thing plausible are energy companies. Look at all the wind farms being constructed. Who's doing it? Energy companies have
Different ways of thinking about it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ok, this is going to sound crazy (but when has that ever stopped me?), but who needs to beam the energy anywhere? Introducing: space wires. Hey , if someone can come up with the seemingly hare-brained idea of the space elevator to haul things up out of the gravity well, then how about lines running down from space to transmission points on the ground? Yes, I know... feasibility is an issue, but hey that's part of the fun!
You are halfway there ... (Score:2)
Dropping them down to the ground has the problem of needing to self-suspend. IE, a geostationary satellite has to suspend 35,768km of copper wire. That's why the space tether people are constructing from carbon fibre...
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Uninformed: Microwaves (Score:4, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellit
Unlimited Solar Power, a burgeoning Space Program, and free cooked poultry falling from the sky! What more could you ask for?
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I think we should have a gigantic kinetic-energy capturing device in the middle of a desert. Something akin to a bicycle pedal that turns a wheel. Then, you chuck massive rocks at it from space.
You can even turn it into a international sport. If you hit, the wheel spins, and your country gets the generated energy and another toss. If you miss, you cause a mucking huge "explosion", make a crater, and give the launcher up to the next team.
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Re:Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes, silly. In all seriousness, yes, you can build hydrogen all the way up to Uranium. Happens all the time in supernovae. Well . . . some of the time. But that generates an awful lot of "waste heat" you aren't capturing, you have to ship the mass of the uranium out of the gravity well of a star, slow it down to catch it when it gets here (which will take tens or tens of thousands of years depending on how fast you throw it and which star you're using). I figure, if you can build a dyson sphere around a distant star, you can probably build a tightly focused high energy and high efficiency laser emitter and receiver/collector that'll recover a useful amount of power to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. Tho if you're that advanced, you might as well just go to that star and live there.
This Is Beautiful! (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Average people might make suggestions, but too often, won't understand why it's not feasible.
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Of course for a completed real world working device on something this scale I wouldn't want to build it by the seat of my pants th
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Really? You must never have gone to a (public) university library. Plenty of science there for one to scrutinize. One just has to get off one
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Link, please?
Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Funny)
please do our homework for us.
Sincerely,
The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD
P.S. we won't use your ideas to kill or oppress people*
*actually, we will.
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Another idea (Score:2)
I would imagine it would be cheaper than trying to hoist an entire solar power station into space, easier to upgrade as more efficient solar power methodology is developed and not suffer from trying to find the RF bandwidth to beam the energy back.
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One word... ants.
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Light beams (Score:2)
Double normal intensity or less would still produce significantly more power, and not instantly fry an inadvertent target.
P.S. -- Ironically, the captcha word for this post is "disaster"
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For some reason this reminds me of an old two-dimensional simulation package from high school called Interactive Physics:
Warning - Forces are large! [Stop] [Continue]
Continue!
Warning - Accelerations are large! [Stop] [Continue].
Continue!
*Stuff flies every-which-way*
Beam focus and receiver size (Score:2)
If you need a lower-powered beam, spread out the antenna farm into so
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If you don't align with the ground station in any case, the power will simply be wasted.
Fascinating subject (Score:5, Interesting)
Three basic problematic areas:
1. Return Delivery for energy. A beam would be the most obvious approach, as no conventional matter would be easilly sustained without something like a space elevator bringing enriched material up and down constantly. An exception would be antimatter, though that would be horribly dangerous on a scale that would make any concentrated beam mishap look like nothing.
2. Energy effects on the earth. Increased energy use, in any form, is going to have various effects on our ecosystem. We'll have to devote a percentage of our global energy use to offset this in some way, hopefully without a tragedy of the commons effect leftover.
3. Upkeep: Materials break down when they transfer the kinds of energy under consideration here. This won't just be a simple solar-panel install job in space. The materials involved will have to be self-repairing in some way if they're going to get closer and closer to the sun. Perhaps they'll function by 'flowing' with the solar winds, then reforming at the front. This promises to be a fascinating task for engineers and scientists looking to harvest such enormous resources safely and (relatively) efficiently.
Every aspect of this subject bristles with the various concerns of humanity - it'll be interesting to say the least what this group can go over.
Ryan Fenton
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This would help to solve the scare of a huge beam missing and the worry of maintaining equipment that focuses excessive amounts of power through one p
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If you want a reasonable return on the energy and material investment, I'd think that a concentrated return kind of has to be part of the process - which brings up the problem of what materials you can possibly
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Space is big. 30-40% of huge is still huge.
Secondly, we are probably not going to get a lot of efficiency by beaming the power down to Earth. I would guess we only get like 10-20%.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna [wikipedia.org] 85% conversion is currently possible.
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I can see what you are getting at, but I would assume that a solar panel would be almost as efficient as having a whole lot of energy diffused over a large area.
random idea #2453 (Score:3, Funny)
Impossible? (Score:3, Interesting)
If these figures are accurate, then this is a pointless endeavor.
To replace, yes (Score:2)
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This means that either we need to build better launch vehicles so as to send up more cargo on a single launch or start building them in space.
The second one ought to work out quite well, considering that most metal refinery plants are build in close proximity to power plants for a good reason...
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There's some pretty strong assumptions though going into the "10,000 years" figure. The first is that it would need to replace -all- our energy use. If space solar power only replaced a few percent of our energy usage, but at an economical price, it would
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Oh, don't be a wimp. How about this puppy [nuclearspace.com] which can lift 1,000 tons to orbit, is fully reusable, and has totally non-polluting exhaust! (Unless you're allergic to helium or something...)
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Neat, but politically impossible. I mean, our government won't even allow breeder reactors.
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silly idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Use nuclear power to get there (Score:2)
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Critical reactors just don't do it for me. They are hard to turn off. But sub critical reactors sound like the ticket. Need to do some R&D to get the accelerators up to spec. But then they can even burn nuclear waste.
"Novel approach" (Score:2)
Dear Mr. Chairman: (Score:5, Funny)
ps: I suggest building these microwave power stations far away from cities, as they occasionally explode. They're also frequent targets of large, mechanical alien spider robots.
Re:Dear Mr. Chairman: (Score:4, Funny)
What about using them against shadowy quasi-nationstates led by men with mullets? That's really the more immediate need for me right now.
Cart before the horse??? (Score:2)
The Space Frontier Foundation believes there are energy and environmental benefits that could come from space-based solar power - collecting solar power in space and transmitting it back to Earth
Oh, yeah, that minor detail of "transmitting it back to Earth" might be a bit of a hitch. Given that we have yet to find a way to reliably, efficiently, and safely "transmit" energy (particularly in these magnitudes) over any significant distance, I'd say this discussion is a little premature at best.
Been figured out since the '60s. (Score:2)
That detail was figured out almost half a century ago:
- Use radio waves with wavelengths of about a millimeter. These penetrate the atmosphere well and are not strongly absorbed by water (i.e. no major losses in clouds or cooked birds falling from the sky at design power densities.)
- Use synthetic-aperture techniques to form a beam centered on the ground-based rectenna and pilot-carrier transmitter. L
Microwave Transfer? (Score:2, Interesting)
However, once there is a space elevator, there is no need for using dangerous microwaves, when you already have a direct wire going from earth to space. Just send the electricity down the wire like any terrestrial power line.
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Running a massive current through the tether, even if possible, would cause all sorts of havoc. Reduction in strength (of a material already pushing the limits of material strength). Side-forces from interactions with the earth's magnetic field (and shaking from magnetic storms varying that field) could cause all sorts of havoc.
Then there's the issue that a transmission line doesn't carry any power inside the wire. The power is carri
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Which means the tether has to support, not just its own weight and the elevators, but also the conductors and the insulators.
You're talking perhaps several times as much power down one tether as is currently generated in the entire continental US. Power is current times voltage.
So you're talking both some horrendous currents (i.e. HEAVY wires) and horrendous voltages (i.e. big, heav
Still has bad environmental effects (Score:3, Insightful)
Power needs to go somewhere as some form of energy. It might do some work, but usually ends up mostly lost as heat. All lights, stoves, heaters, etc would essentially mean nearly all of the solar energy collected was as if the sun were simply shining brighter on the earth. Imagine if they were researching how to make more sunlight hit the planet just to harness it with solar cells -- this is almost exactly the same thing.
Space energy is energy being brought into the system that wouldn't have normally entered. I don't see this as a viable form of energy. It will potentially lower greenhouse gasses, but will still screw up the ecosystem.
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Romans would make ice by keeping the ground in a pit cool during the day and allowing the heat energy from buckets of water in the pit to radiate into the cold night sky. As long as humidity was low enough, they made ice!
So the issue isn't generating heat, it's greenhouse gases trapping the heat.
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And note that burning fossil fuels or nuclear power also adds heat (that 13TW is almost entirely nonrenewable) and the conversion to electricity on the planet is only 35-40% efficient, so 60% of that energy is waste heat that we don't even use. With space solar po
India is serious about this too (Score:2)
Not so long ago India announced that it is serious [treehugger.com] about the space solar option. I'm glad there's enough good sense in Washington to do likewise. We should get Europe and China on board, because unlike the ISS, this is the real deal and more significant to our future than going to the
First things first (Score:2)
Now that Keith Henson is safely in jail... (Score:2)
Wouldn't this just heat up the earth even more? (Score:2)
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Lower hanging fruit (Score:2)
If we could put solar cells into orbit at zero cost, then a SPS system could be cheaper than current tech.
One way to do that might be to manufacture them in space in the first place, say by using raw materials from a LEO asteroid.
But making SPS for power on earth isn't the low hanging fruit of space.
The first thing we should make is generic satellites.
Imagine a standard body satellite with a solar ar
Why in space? (Score:3)
If anyone can generate their own electricity, it makes for a system which is much more robust from infrastructure failure. People can be independent and recover better from disasters, becoming more
Furthermore, they foster dependency among energy consumers, making them vulnerable to abuse by monopolies in the energy industry. Enron, Dick Cheney, California... you get the idea. Of course, if you happen to BE one of these industrial monopolists, the idea of centralized production is exactly what you want - a "good thing" - for
Let's get solar (and perhaps wind, which shares these properties) working on Earth first.
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U-S-A #1! U-S-A #1! U-S-A #1!
Actually, the US would probably be pretty isolationist now if energy wasn't a concern.
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if the rest of the world wants to shut us up and keep them out of their hair they should just give us plans for an easy never ending supply of renewable energy.
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Here you go. [wikipedia.org] Of course, that's not exactly "renewable" or "never ending" but it'll do for the next several hundred million years (depending on which fuel you pick). Billions if you can figure out commercially viable fusion.
This whole "energy crisis" nonsense isn't actually an energy problem, it's an infrastructure problem. What I really want are some more breakthroughs in energy storage. Batteries suck. I want somet
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I was referring mainly to safety in a collision.
A gasoline fire is nothing to sneeze at but it has to be mixed with air to explode. Batteries and capacitors can go off like bombs.
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I suspect that we will see lots of new ways to make Batteries and Capacitors be safe. In particular, small groups of them rather than 1 monster unit, like tesla (though that most likely will not help in case of fire).
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We will put every one of our troops on our border and shoot anyone trying to get in. Anyone that want's out is free to leave. Once you leave, you cannot come back in.
We will give ZERO food and money to ANY nation. We will simply take c
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Only a Sith sees things in terms of black and white. And we've certainly "helped out" in Iraq.
"No one makes us give away billions upon billions of dollars a year."
Too bad that the vast majority of the billions we give away are to Boeing and McDonald-Douglas and Northrop Grumman and Haliburton.
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Did I or did I not say we have done and do some fucked up things? I'm fairly certain I did. I admit that we do wrong things sometimes...but you cannot sit there and say that America doesn't support millions of people with food, clothing, and water.
You know what? I could be wrong in
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Just because Babe Ruth struck out sometimes doesn't mean he was a shitty baseball player.
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No but if he decides for one season to start running around throwing his bat at the other players, setting the stands on fire and pissing on the umpires, I think we'd have a right to be angry at him for it.
Re:I've got great ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
The average American voter, when asked, guesses that about 15% of our budget goes to non-military foreign aid, and thinks it should be closer to 5%. In reality, it's 0.01% percent. Just, y'know, to put things in perspective.
Re:I've got great ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. The US has historically done and presently does great and positive things for the rest of the world. That's what is so disappointing about the choices made in the last few years.
It's nice to think that the US would help because it "wants to", out of its generosity, but the reality is that much of the food supplied to the rest of the world is dumped there to keep prices up domestically and to justify massive farm subsidies. It feeds the poor, but dumping that much food at low prices can undercut a country's attempts to build agriculture and an export trade in food (subsidies depress global prices, though many other countries are just as bad), and that can keep people poor. Anyway, to change this the US agricultural business and government policy would have to change drastically. They currently *need* to send grain and other foods elsewhere. So, is this generosity or merely necessity?
It would also be quite difficult for the US to survive without energy and mineral resources drawn from the rest of the world, especially oil, what with >50% of oil imported. Historically, the US had a strong isolationist attitude, but that's long over, because the US simply could not survive for 6 months without the rest of the world's resources. At least, not with its current industrial structure. It's obvious that many military and economic choices have been made not out of some enlightened vision of helping the rest of the world, but primarily out of economic self-interest to keep the oil or (insert commodity here) flowing.
A fairly clear example is Iraq. It's hard to explain the choice to go in there as anything other than getting access to oil. Iraq has about 25% of the known conventional oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia. All the original reasons for going in there have evaporated (and they were flimsy beforehand). WMDs? Ha. And everybody now knows the only terrorists in Iraq are the ones that moved in or people who decided to change professions AFTER Saddam was gone. Afganistan made sense at the initiation of the "war on terror", but it's only major resource is opium. It was an expensive operation on solid and globally-supported principles, but taking over that country doesn't pay the bills or feed the resource demands like taking over a country like Iraq. It's obvious the "war on terror" was an excuse in Iraq, and it was hoped it would be easy (decapitation strike indeed!). But if Iraq didn't have oil or threaten other country's oil, I doubt the US would care much.
Yes, the US has and continues to do great and positive things, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is mainly out of generosity or even democratic principles. If it was, then the US would not have such a long and colorful history of propping up dictators and monarchs (e.g., in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Chile, etc.). It has shown that it is quite willing to make shady deals with countries that just happen to have major natural resources needing development. And, look, here's a number of US-headquartered multinational corporations only too willing to lend a generous, helping hand!
I'm sorry to be skeptical. I have great respect for the United States and its principles. Unfortunately I don't see much correlation between where and how the "help" is distributed in the rest of the world and those principles.
The one exception is indeed during natural disasters, where the US has a good and fairly consistent record of offering and effecting aid regardless of who needs it. For that, the generosity of the US is immense and truly genuine. Thanks. The rest of the "help" you can keep. Unfortunately, I doubt the US could survive for long if it did what you suggest.
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This is actually the exact opposite of what you say. By designing something in an open, public forum, where all can see the process, we ensure that it CAN'T be patent hi-jacked...or at least, if a patent is granted, it can very easily be contested.
The whole intent of patents was to reduce the amount of secrecy out there to allow ideas to grow into new and better ideas instead of being locked away in some back room.
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You're thinking of a "first-to-invent" system. Here's the difference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_fir st_to_invent [wikipedia.org]
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First to file is a very good idea since it means that the bickering going back and forth of who 'conceived' of an invention first (not to me