3 ms·
IIRC someone crunched the numbers that even with unlimited fusion power, if you extrapolate the growth in energy use in the 20th century, we could only continue
by semi-extrinsic 7y ago
IIRC someone crunched the numbers that even with unlimited fusion power, if you extrapolate the growth in energy use in the 20th century, we could only continue for ~200 years before significantly increasing global temperature due to waste heat.
An innocent-seeming 5% growth turns in to four orders of magnitude if it continues for two centuries.
- eloff 7y agoFascinating. Of course any exponential growth tends to come to an end long before the impossible predictions, but it still highlights what a unique time we live in where we take growth of the population and the economy for granted. It has to slow down in the "near" future. Near being probably fifty years or more.