In my alternate timeline my sci-fi stories take in, Nikola Tesla gets into electronics, successfully inventing the transistor around the year 1900, speeding up computing as we know it by half a century. But with this newfound windfall, what becomes of his dream of wireless electricity?
Often it’s dismissed as the moment Tesla jumped the shark from eccentricity into madness, but he might have been onto something: after all, wireless transmission of electricity has been demonstrated with, for example, microwave beams. They’ve even been proposed for the transmission of solar power generated in space since…the 1970s (anyone who knows their Gerard O’Neill is very familiar with this concept…). Maybe even earlier for all I know.
So maybe, especially with a general advancement in electronics and in spaceflight (the first man goes into space in 1941 in this universe), Tesla is able to make some progress on the wireless power front using real science. Radio-frequency harvesting of energy was the technique Tesla himself was working on, and it’s used today to power low-power devices like RFIDs; the chief disadvantage of these signals is that low power levels is as much as they can deliver. And in this timeline we’ll want a lot of power: this is a world where homes have forges to melt metal for recreational purposes and their own rooms full of computer server racks.
Microwave beaming is likely the earliest possibility that could be remotely workable within Tesla’s lifetime (he died in 1943), and it was demonstrated fairly early: experimentally a helicopter was powered with it as early as the 1960s. So advancing it by a few decades should be doable: even in real life the working principles were well understood by the 1930s.
Induction, similar to what’s used in charging pads today, was theorized and actually used by Tesla himself, but the technology to transmit it over long distances (its effective range is just centimeters in real life) is still highly experimental even now, in contrast to microwave beaming which was already being demonstrated over half a century ago.
So microwaves it will likely be, for any Tesla-led effort for mass wireless power transmission.
It would likely begin at the household level: while microwaves can be transmitted for miles, it’s worth noting that the primary interest in real life was long-range transmission, which is far harder than short-range transmission like, for instance, powering a computer in an alcove from the outlet without a cord. Already by 1940 in real life klystrons and magnetrons were well-developed: even the rectenna, which would only come to the fore later, was understood in terms of its working principles. So bringing it all forward and demonstrating a household-scale wireless power transmitter might have been feasible, perhaps as early as the 1930s.
The showstopper in real life might have been safety concerns, but with the attitudes in my world the power beam zones would likely just be marked off by warning signs and left at that. If you walked too close to one, metal objects in your pockets would heat up (remember: the microwave oven works by similar principles), and your hair might stand up. Get deep into one, and you would get really uncomfortable really fast and walk away with radiation burns all over you.
In fact technology that “just works” without a visible power source, only a hum and a glow, and that burns you like an invisible sun if you’re not careful, up to the point of levitating objects midair and generating eerie orbs of plasma that hover and move, defying the laws of motion, a staple of UFO lore and classic science fiction alike, answers to the description of what this wireless transmission technology can do: it may well all be microwaves and assorted electromagnetic fields that are good at transmitting electricity. The higher-power uses of this technology, to the point heavy objects (like people…) might be levitated or orbs appear in midair, would easily be lethal to a human, but if aliens use this branch of the tech tree perhaps their biology is immune to radiation (or perhaps even requires it).
Back on the homeworld, the humans using this technology could easily light neon and fluorescent lamps without wires: indeed, if you have an ambient power field, there’s no reason to use incandescent technology…or even LEDs. Just place the light source in the power beam and it’ll illuminate the space on its own: no wires or switches or moving parts required.
ChatGPT at least seems to think that “protective mesh” might be employed as enhanced shielding for living spaces such as bedrooms, bathrooms, and common areas against stray radiation from microwave power beams…which, speaking of classic science fiction, might explain why every crew quarters on the original starship Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Original Series” had mesh as a centerpiece…
This stuff is like the dark matter of golden-age sci-fi: with external power beams, the impossible suddenly becomes possible; for example, vehicles wouldn’t need fuel or batteries to propel themselves, only a power beam, meaning they could be very lightweight, potentially even lightweight enough to open up possibilities like light personal aircraft that just hover or fly without any visible energy source within them. Handheld devices would “just work”, without needing recharging or any bulky batteries. Even technology like powered exoskeletons become viable, not to mention highly functional prosthetic limbs and humanoid robots. The enormous reactors and/or batteries these technologies need to work need not be there, enabling extreme miniaturization, because the power is all generated externally and beamed in as needed.
Where this gets really fancy is when you couple this vision to spaceflight: already the rise of nuclear power makes generating the electricity in the first place trivial by the 21st century, but microwaves are limited to line-of-sight targets, meaning you’d need towers (a la our cell-phone towers) to transmit these beams. Satellites, however, would be much more efficient: their horizons are much wider, and they’re infinitely mobile. A relatively small number could provide truly global coverage, eliminating the need for a ground-based power grid completely. All you’d need is an antenna and you can collect power from the sky.
Already by 1950 there’s global high-speed satellite Internet in this universe, so perhaps constellations of satellites beaming power as well is seen as a natural extension of the same system. Nikola Tesla himself lived to 1943 in real life, so in this universe he might see the potential, and urge his successors to realize the vision of space-based wireless electricity on a global scale.
The key challenge would be the much longer range of the power beams: several hundred miles are required to transmit power from low orbit to the ground, which is beyond the effective range of the household-scale systems that might already be in common use by 1943. But microwave power transmission is scalable; certainly we can envision that by the year 2000 this might be a solved problem, and ground-based power grids and even microwave transmission towers are obsolete.
This development might even foster the rise of truly space-based power solutions: solar panels are the usual proposal in real life, but nuclear technology is advanced enough and power demands are great enough that these power satellites might all have their own on-board reactors. Power generation moves off-world, and heavy industry along with it, beginning Earth’s eventual transition back to pristine wilderness.
Reactors themselves might be manufactured in space, in order to economize: asteroids and low-mass planets tend to be surprisingly poor in fissile material, so Earth might have to be the primary supplier of that component for some time to come…until Mars takes that niche, since it has similar concentrations of uranium ore but much lower escape velocity than Earth.
Even fancier, some satellites might not rely on reactors for power at all, but rather explosives: in other words, the hydrogen bomb. It sounds insane, but X-ray lasers that used nuclear explosives as their power source (the “bomb-pumped X-ray laser”) were seriously studied as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The reasoning is that these lasers need extreme amounts of power over a short period of time, and it turns out hydrogen bombs are the best way to generate that: the working principles were well-described as part of Project Orion, where the same property was found to be useful for spacecraft propulsion.
In this timeline SDI-like webs of satellites are used for missile defense, so bomb-pumped beams (in this case weaponized) are already commonplace. The primary civilian application may well be for lifting spacecraft that use…nuclear pulse propulsion. The reasoning is that these spacecraft need to lift off by detonating nuclear explosives at ground level; despite the hype about fallout even a fleet of these vessels taking off in a given year would be very much harmless compared to all the coal sludge out there today. But the pollution does make it infeasible to launch these craft anywhere near a major population center. With the aid of beamed power to substitute these initial lift-off nuclear charges, a nuclear-pulse-propelled spacecraft could take off far closer to a city: it would only need to reach a modest altitude before a nuclear detonation is high up enough to not cause any fallout or deleterious effects (fallout is entirely from the soil being irradiated: no soil, no fallout, no sickening death).
That changes a lot. Indeed, beamed power might be so robust it could replace chemical rockets entirely as a means of space launch: craft wouldn’t need to carry any fuel to reach orbit (this is a big part of the reason beamed power is of such interest to spacecraft engineers, by the way).
By the 21st century this infrastructure could be very well-developed across the solar system, providing power on demand with merely a dish or an antenna. Which is very cool, and totally in keeping with the ethos of my science-fictional alternate universe.
Only this doesn’t seem to have actually happened in the stories I’ve told so far! It’s been the better part of a decade since I started worldbuilding and writing, and this aspect wasn’t nearly as developed as what you see here. True, the households could easily be run wirelessly, but widespread beaming networks to the point cars don’t have on-board engines isn’t a reality! Or is it? After all, there are any number of reasons why someone might want to have an independent power source in a vehicle, even if ambient electricity is generally available even in the most remote areas. And there are aspects of my stories that make a lot more sense if beamed power is an option: air taxis and delivery drones, for one (not to mention all those robots roaming around…).
There’s also the question of who exactly is running this space-based power grid, but inspired by the decentralized ethos of the Internet, why not a peer-to-peer network that’s governed by free-and-open-source protocols? Indeed, one striking aspect of my timeline is how if you want to have your own personal nuclear reactor…you can. Many people do. For vehicular power, household power…you name it.
The revision here is that with wireless transmission technology the logical place to site your personal reactor is in outer space, on board your own satellite: or, rather, statite, since solar sails would be used for stationkeeping in low orbit, avoiding the need for constellations of thousands of satellites to cover any location desired, as is the case today. If you’re at home it just beams power to your house, but when you’re on the go it would beam power to wherever you happen to be located, and it could follow you wherever you go. The network aspect means that you could draw on others’ power sources as needed, and others could draw on your own power reserves when you’re not using them, no doubt with an exchange of money being involved in the process (this would be governed very effectively by cryptocurrency, by the way).
Everything being part of one vast peer-to-peer power network would explain why there are so many independent power sources in this universe anyway. The way the Internet works, similar to our Tor network with many anonymous nodes, would be viewed as a logical principle for organizing the new power grid as well: “the network economy” would not be a buzzword, but rather a way of life.
Heady stuff if you ask me…and some juicy worldbuilding that I might incorporate into some future stories. Watch this space…