From: Secret Squirrel <nobody@secret.squirrel.owl.de>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 04:31:33 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: NSA cracker - how many TW
Message-ID: <19970728193101.4574.qmail@squirrel.owl.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




iang@cs.berkeley.edu
>  seems also unlikely.  (Actually, for all I know, terawatt power sources
>  may exist; that's out of my field.  Please let me know if this is the case.
>  I just know that at my rates, 7.12 TW for 33 minutes (at about $.10/kWh)

I've extracted some figures from an industry publication
and arrive at a worldwide electricity generation capacity
of 1.6 TW.  Assuming that 1% of that power is smuggled into
the deep space cracker we're not even close to 33 minutes,
and it doesn't matter whether we're looking at a one-off
every so often rather than a continuous 40 a day.

And that's still on optimistic assumptions including

1)  testing keys for free

2a) running on earth at 3 K rather than 300 K

or

2b) no bother transmitting power & signals into space
    (Like if the cracker had been secretly installed on Voyager 2
    that'd be your 33 mins gone waiting for the radio.)

IBM have published a communications scheme that claims to recover
energy normally lost - it was on their website a few months ago.
I skipped reading it at the time because it sounded dotty.