Quantum Energy for Space [Point of View]

Clean renewable energy passes continuously as sunlight through near Earth space and is lost to us forever. This energy is lost at a rate a million times the total rate of energy use on Earth. Our point of view is that accessing and effectively using this otherwise lost energy is a demanding, but currently achievable, engineering task. This may seem counterintuitive since the relevant physical processess have their origin in nanometer dimension atomic states while the applications occur on a multimegameter scale. This opportunity however occurs because: 1) stimulated emission enables population of the required superposition states of lowest order Gaussian modes of the optical field by large numbers of quanta of the optical field; and 2) the vacuum of space enables propagation of these superposition states over the multimegameter distances of interest with minimal disruption of the original superposition states.