This is awesome, nice work! In case it's useful, I made a Python package for calculating solar irradiance at altitude: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Takes into account lots of stuff (e.g. attenuation from air, ozone, and water vapor) with the goal of estimating solar power at any altitude/latitude/day/time.
Totally - right now it's using the USDA food nutrient database [1] which has all nutrients, so all the nutrients on the back-end are there. Calories is the most important thing to the majority of people (in my experience), so there's a balance between showing too much information vs. keeping things simple. Probably should just add a setting to show everything, though.
I got a minimum wingspan of around 8m for self-sustaining flight on the winter solstice with a small payload — pretty close to what you all built.
The biggest problem I ran into when creating this analysis was accurately estimating solar irradiance at different altitudes. Here's the module I built for estimating that, in case you find it useful: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Given that there have been multiple mass extinction events in Earth’s history, it seems reasonable to spend a small fraction of GDP on colonizing another planet. How about something roughly equivalent to the amount we spend on chapstick?
Seems feasible, never went past the analysis phase though :)