Living on Mars?

[Bucky]

While we're on the topic of superconstruction pipe-dreams, what if we generated power by building a massive coil around a rapidly spinning magnetar (turning it into a gigantic dynamo) and running a long wire of superconducting YBCO from it back to our own solar system. Once the decades required for the electricity to travel the lightyears of distance had passed we would have a nearly unlimited supply of power.

The amount of current we can get through the wire without superconductivity breaking down is proportional to the cross-section of the wire.

Multiply that cross-section by the several thousand lightyears to the closest magnetar and you have a LOT of wire.

That means you need a lot of energy to position it. Simply dropping it off from a moving rocket isn't good enough, the wire needs to be stationary.

In fact, it's probably more energy than you could ever hope to transfer even in millions of years of operation.

Once you have the wire in place, you still need to worry about things like galactic drift, objects passing through the space occupied by the wire etc. so it's unlikely you could actually keep the wire in place for millions of years without needing to re-string it.

Oh, and the dynamo might not work as well as you want it to because superconductivity also breaks down in intense magnetic fields.