Without wanting to start a fight, which half do you disagree with? The Moore’s law or the nuclear estimate? I’m personally more confident about the first than the second.
Regardless of OP’s objection, there’s a strong counter to the assertion of solar power following a Moore’s Law trajectory. Solar irradiance at ground level has a fairly hard limit of < 1200 watts/m^2. Even in the upper atmosphere it’s not much more.
So solar cells may get more efficient, but their output isn’t going to get exponentially greater over time. They may also become considerably cheaper, but the price of land isn’t going down, and will remain a non-reducing term when calculating implementation costs.
It could be that you’re referring to some other feature of Moore’s Law I’m not considering, but in the intuitive sense of “my phone has more computing power than the whole of the 1960s”, gains of that magnitude are simply not possible.
Without wanting to start a fight, which half do you disagree with? The Moore’s law or the nuclear estimate? I’m personally more confident about the first than the second.
Regardless of OP’s objection, there’s a strong counter to the assertion of solar power following a Moore’s Law trajectory. Solar irradiance at ground level has a fairly hard limit of < 1200 watts/m^2. Even in the upper atmosphere it’s not much more.
So solar cells may get more efficient, but their output isn’t going to get exponentially greater over time. They may also become considerably cheaper, but the price of land isn’t going down, and will remain a non-reducing term when calculating implementation costs.
It could be that you’re referring to some other feature of Moore’s Law I’m not considering, but in the intuitive sense of “my phone has more computing power than the whole of the 1960s”, gains of that magnitude are simply not possible.
The Moore’s law seem to be in cost, not in efficiency (though efficiency is also improving): http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/
And if we get to the point where land is the bottleneck, well, I’d say we’d be doing fantastically well at that point :-)