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.