I would expect most of the loss to take place in the collection stage, but short of antimatter, a perfect energy-mass conversion technique doesn’t seem to be available, so there are probably plenty of waste particles when it’s converted to energy as well.
(The parent was at −4 when I found it. When I expanded the comment to read it, I was extremely confused, because it did not fall into my “LW users will downvote this heavily” pattern. ??? )
I didn’t downvote it because it was a plausible-sounding suggestion which led to a clarifying discussion, but my guess is that some downvoted it for giving a somewhat irrelevant/misleading answer. As Adele_L explains, heat loss pertains to the Second Law, while the proposed setup has the more fundamental problem of violating the First Law and even assuming away heat loss does not work because of gravitational redshift, as Plasmon explains.
I would expect most of the loss to take place in the collection stage, but short of antimatter, a perfect energy-mass conversion technique doesn’t seem to be available, so there are probably plenty of waste particles when it’s converted to energy as well.
(The parent was at −4 when I found it. When I expanded the comment to read it, I was extremely confused, because it did not fall into my “LW users will downvote this heavily” pattern. ??? )
I didn’t downvote it because it was a plausible-sounding suggestion which led to a clarifying discussion, but my guess is that some downvoted it for giving a somewhat irrelevant/misleading answer. As Adele_L explains, heat loss pertains to the Second Law, while the proposed setup has the more fundamental problem of violating the First Law and even assuming away heat loss does not work because of gravitational redshift, as Plasmon explains.