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Which, to me, is why we should be focusing on new ways to produce energy. Solar and wind is nice, but we could revolutionize humanity and save the earth if we

Which, to me, is why we should be focusing on new ways to produce energy. Solar and wind is nice, but we could revolutionize humanity and save the earth if we found a way to build cheap energy sources with a density of gigawatts per cubic yard. What better way to save the earth and solve the population problem than to have the energy production capabilities to simply build e.g. ringworlds? Even that's not out of the realm of possibility with that kind of energy available.

ant6n 5y ago
I’m a little confused. Are you proposing to Save this world, or build/settle others?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Yes? If the latter is accomplished, the former becomes trivial.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    What?! Why? How will settling Mars or any planet save the biosphere? We have a few decades to not kill the planet. Settling another planet would take centuries.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      I think the idea they are suggesting is that if we can figure out how to terraform Mars and create a livable atmosphere from scratch, the tech and domain knowledge created along the way means cleaning up our atmosphere should be easy in comparison. Kind of like Olympic gymnasts lift weights and work on flexibility and they want to exceed what their performances require such that the performance is easy and not pushing them to the limits of their ability. Ie "You have to crawl before you can walk. If you learn to run, walking becomes trivial in comparison." If that makes sense.
      - runarberg 5y ago
        This analogy only makes sense if the world’s problems were that of technology. We have ample evidence that it is not. There exists technology that can transport people over short to medium distances really efficiently and without much greenhouse gas emissions. All it would take would be for policy makers to allocate some funding to build out the infrastructure required, yet they don’t. There exists technology to transport and distribute food wherever there is hunger. Even technology to grow food more efficiently and without additional greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we don’t apply that. Most countries continue to pour money into their most devastating government institutions (the military and the police) that not only cause a world of societal problems on their own, but also pollute a bunch in the meantime for everybody else. At the same time they could be using that money to build infrastructure that would allow us to live a more sustainable lives. But they don’t. If the technology existed that would take people to Proxima Centauri in 10 years, and we invented a bunch of good technology that would help us make our current world better. I bet this new technology would be used equally sparingly as our current technology.
        DoreenMichele 5y ago
        I don't actually disagree with you. But I also know that a lot of tech in use today was born of our efforts to solve problems in space exploration, so I also don't entirely disagree with the line of reasoning that space exploration requires us to meet such a high bar that inventions that grow out of it end up being essentially trivial to implement here on earth. I'm personally heavily invested in the pieces of the puzzle that tech, per se, cannot solve. My work in that regard gets little in the way of attention and people have long attacked me as a nutter, etc. I run a citizen planners forum on Reddit. I try to write about local community development at eclogiselle.com. Sometimes something I wrote gets a few thousand page views, but most of what I write gets very little traffic and that seems to be generally trending down, not up. And I have mixed feelings about that because I have actively sought to ditch traffic rooted in lurid interest in me, so that's sort of "huzzah. I win? I guess." I would like to see more focus on passive solar design. I would like to see more development of missing middle housing. I would like to see more walkable, bikable communities where Americans can actually live without a car. I would like to see social change of the sort that's needed to actually solve these problems with the currently available tech. The problem I see is that tends to require a charismatic leader of the sort that historically founded various religions and I see problems with that approach. I think it's inherently problematic to just take someone's word for it and do as you are told because they said so and you basically worship them. People need to think for themselves, not dutifully do as they were told. And I don't know how you put out good info to foster the right kind of change in the amount needed etc and do so in a way that sidesteps the tendency for leaders of any sort to dictate what others should do. So I have kept my footprint intentionally small in some sense while I figure out best practices. "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to find time to do it over?" Best.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      We can start it in a few years. And it can assist in part by just showing that we have a societal capacity to do great things. In the words of Carl Sagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA (And we don't need to and probably shouldn't spend a lot on this. What we currently spend on space exploration/settlement through agencies like NASA is sufficient for this. And we also get the spin-off technology advantages.)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      We have about a decade to start taking “saving the earth” (from CO2 in particular) seriously, not to complete the task. I’m moderately optimistic.
- generalizations 5y ago
  I'm proposing we could build other worlds, such as ring worlds, so that the population and industry of the human race can be moved off-world. That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants. Fanciful, but still possible, given such an energy breakthrough. Even if it takes a couple centuries, genetic records and some terraforming (feasible with that kind of energy available) would probably allow us to recover from the damage incurred by the Earth in the time it takes to develop the tech.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >I'm proposing we could build other worlds, such as ring worlds, so that the population and industry of the human race can be moved off-world. >That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants. That's a nice idea, however the resources required to move enough people off the Earth just to keep the population from rising, let alone moving the bulk of the population off the planet, would be astronomical and definitely impractical. Consider the data: 1. Population: ~7.75 billion. 2. Deaths per year: ~60 million 3. Births per year: ~140 million 4. Annual population growth: ~80 million Let's start with the idea of keeping the population the same, rather than moving 7 billion humans off the planet. In order to move 80 million people just into orbit, let alone have some place for them to go would require that we launch (rockets? catapults? space elevators?) about 220,000 people, along with whatever cargo is required (we'll ignore the cargo here) every. single. day. How many rockets/space elevator cars/catapult ships or whatever would we need just to move that 80 million off the planet? Let's use space elevators (SE) here since we can (theoretically at least) make space elevator platforms arbitrarily large. Let's say we use an SE car that can carry 1,000 people and can travel up the elevator at 1000 km/hour. In order to just keep the population from growing, we'd need to launch 220 SE cars a day. Unfortunately, a round trip to/from geostationary orbit[1] (yes, rockets/catapults could deliver payloads in much less time to low Earth orbit. But such payloads would likely be an order of magnitude less than a space elevator) at 1000 km/hour would take ~70 hours. Which means we'd need ~650 SE cars in service at any given moment. Loading and launching 220 SE cars a day would require enormous logistical effort: We'd need to launch ~10 cars per hour (220 per day). How can we load and launch 1000 people times 10 in an hour, every hour? I suppose we could build ten space elevators, then each site could just load and launch one an hour. Which seems doable. But where will people stay while waiting to board a car? Just expending the resources to build (and maintain) the infrastructure for such an enterprise would be enormous. And without some serious energy (commercial fusion on a massive scale), just running these elevators would quite possibly dwarf the total power output of the planet. And that's just to keep the population flat. Attempting to remove the bulk of Earth's population would require raw materials, manufacturing, construction and maintenance several orders of magnitude larger than the example above. So no. We're not going to solve any population issues, let alone removing the bulk of the population, by sending folks off-world. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths [1] https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Types_of_orbits#GEO https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
nickik 5y ago
WE already did that. Its called nuclear power. Fission energy can do almost everything fusion can do. The difference in energy density between fission and fusion is not that large compared to the energy sources we have. With all the investment in solar and wind we could easily have built a fission based economy. The French proved that in the 70/80s and had a green grid ever since. Had we done that collectively global warming would be a far lesser issue. It would also help us understand neutronics and material science so we can eventually switch to fusion. The same basic technology could also be used for space travel in the solar system and would have advanced space travel by a lot. But of course for idiotic reasons society went away from that.
- arcanon 5y ago
  I think there is one more step change theoretically possible in terms of energy output which is based on anti-quark collisions. We need to understand QCD better. Its hard to know when breakthroughs will happen. Maybe its already happened and we just havent heard about it yet! We also dont know how to model quantum gravity still. That seems pretty fundamental. Im optimistic there will be physicists who find something new and whacky that no one could predict.
  - nickik 5y ago
    Yes, fine, lets research that. However here is the thing. We figured out that fission thing in the 50s and still fail to use it.
- Nitramp 5y ago
  FWIW, fissible material that's used with current technology is actually running out, with a similar timeline to oil. Fission is not an infinite energy source, despite appearances to the contrary. It's also not an cheap as one might hope.
  - bbojan 5y ago
    But the current technology can be improved at least 100x (fast fission) to 10000x (breeders).
rmu09 5y ago
All this cheap energy eventually turns into heat. The only way to get rid of excess heat is to radiate it into space, and the only way to radiate _more_ heat into space is with an increased temperature.
- bliteben 5y ago
  I love this somewhat tangentially related article: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
  - ajuc 5y ago
    In a world with hard-capped energy use the incentives to expand into space would be enormous, I don't think it's unrealistic at that point to think the growth will continue outwards. In particular one can imagine outsourcing every high-entropy activity to space and leaving Earth for low-entropy high-value activities.
- RustyConsul 5y ago
  That might be a blessing on mars.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Unless the cheap energy isn't being burned inside the atmosphere.

ant6n 5y ago

I’m a little confused. Are you proposing to Save this world, or build/settle others?

Robotbeat 5y ago
Yes? If the latter is accomplished, the former becomes trivial.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  What?! Why? How will settling Mars or any planet save the biosphere? We have a few decades to not kill the planet. Settling another planet would take centuries.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    I think the idea they are suggesting is that if we can figure out how to terraform Mars and create a livable atmosphere from scratch, the tech and domain knowledge created along the way means cleaning up our atmosphere should be easy in comparison. Kind of like Olympic gymnasts lift weights and work on flexibility and they want to exceed what their performances require such that the performance is easy and not pushing them to the limits of their ability. Ie "You have to crawl before you can walk. If you learn to run, walking becomes trivial in comparison." If that makes sense.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      This analogy only makes sense if the world’s problems were that of technology. We have ample evidence that it is not. There exists technology that can transport people over short to medium distances really efficiently and without much greenhouse gas emissions. All it would take would be for policy makers to allocate some funding to build out the infrastructure required, yet they don’t. There exists technology to transport and distribute food wherever there is hunger. Even technology to grow food more efficiently and without additional greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we don’t apply that. Most countries continue to pour money into their most devastating government institutions (the military and the police) that not only cause a world of societal problems on their own, but also pollute a bunch in the meantime for everybody else. At the same time they could be using that money to build infrastructure that would allow us to live a more sustainable lives. But they don’t. If the technology existed that would take people to Proxima Centauri in 10 years, and we invented a bunch of good technology that would help us make our current world better. I bet this new technology would be used equally sparingly as our current technology.
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        I don't actually disagree with you. But I also know that a lot of tech in use today was born of our efforts to solve problems in space exploration, so I also don't entirely disagree with the line of reasoning that space exploration requires us to meet such a high bar that inventions that grow out of it end up being essentially trivial to implement here on earth. I'm personally heavily invested in the pieces of the puzzle that tech, per se, cannot solve. My work in that regard gets little in the way of attention and people have long attacked me as a nutter, etc. I run a citizen planners forum on Reddit. I try to write about local community development at eclogiselle.com. Sometimes something I wrote gets a few thousand page views, but most of what I write gets very little traffic and that seems to be generally trending down, not up. And I have mixed feelings about that because I have actively sought to ditch traffic rooted in lurid interest in me, so that's sort of "huzzah. I win? I guess." I would like to see more focus on passive solar design. I would like to see more development of missing middle housing. I would like to see more walkable, bikable communities where Americans can actually live without a car. I would like to see social change of the sort that's needed to actually solve these problems with the currently available tech. The problem I see is that tends to require a charismatic leader of the sort that historically founded various religions and I see problems with that approach. I think it's inherently problematic to just take someone's word for it and do as you are told because they said so and you basically worship them. People need to think for themselves, not dutifully do as they were told. And I don't know how you put out good info to foster the right kind of change in the amount needed etc and do so in a way that sidesteps the tendency for leaders of any sort to dictate what others should do. So I have kept my footprint intentionally small in some sense while I figure out best practices. "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to find time to do it over?" Best.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    We can start it in a few years. And it can assist in part by just showing that we have a societal capacity to do great things. In the words of Carl Sagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA (And we don't need to and probably shouldn't spend a lot on this. What we currently spend on space exploration/settlement through agencies like NASA is sufficient for this. And we also get the spin-off technology advantages.)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    We have about a decade to start taking “saving the earth” (from CO2 in particular) seriously, not to complete the task. I’m moderately optimistic.
generalizations 5y ago
I'm proposing we could build other worlds, such as ring worlds, so that the population and industry of the human race can be moved off-world. That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants. Fanciful, but still possible, given such an energy breakthrough. Even if it takes a couple centuries, genetic records and some terraforming (feasible with that kind of energy available) would probably allow us to recover from the damage incurred by the Earth in the time it takes to develop the tech.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I'm proposing we could build other worlds, such as ring worlds, so that the population and industry of the human race can be moved off-world. >That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants. That's a nice idea, however the resources required to move enough people off the Earth just to keep the population from rising, let alone moving the bulk of the population off the planet, would be astronomical and definitely impractical. Consider the data: 1. Population: ~7.75 billion. 2. Deaths per year: ~60 million 3. Births per year: ~140 million 4. Annual population growth: ~80 million Let's start with the idea of keeping the population the same, rather than moving 7 billion humans off the planet. In order to move 80 million people just into orbit, let alone have some place for them to go would require that we launch (rockets? catapults? space elevators?) about 220,000 people, along with whatever cargo is required (we'll ignore the cargo here) every. single. day. How many rockets/space elevator cars/catapult ships or whatever would we need just to move that 80 million off the planet? Let's use space elevators (SE) here since we can (theoretically at least) make space elevator platforms arbitrarily large. Let's say we use an SE car that can carry 1,000 people and can travel up the elevator at 1000 km/hour. In order to just keep the population from growing, we'd need to launch 220 SE cars a day. Unfortunately, a round trip to/from geostationary orbit[1] (yes, rockets/catapults could deliver payloads in much less time to low Earth orbit. But such payloads would likely be an order of magnitude less than a space elevator) at 1000 km/hour would take ~70 hours. Which means we'd need ~650 SE cars in service at any given moment. Loading and launching 220 SE cars a day would require enormous logistical effort: We'd need to launch ~10 cars per hour (220 per day). How can we load and launch 1000 people times 10 in an hour, every hour? I suppose we could build ten space elevators, then each site could just load and launch one an hour. Which seems doable. But where will people stay while waiting to board a car? Just expending the resources to build (and maintain) the infrastructure for such an enterprise would be enormous. And without some serious energy (commercial fusion on a massive scale), just running these elevators would quite possibly dwarf the total power output of the planet. And that's just to keep the population flat. Attempting to remove the bulk of Earth's population would require raw materials, manufacturing, construction and maintenance several orders of magnitude larger than the example above. So no. We're not going to solve any population issues, let alone removing the bulk of the population, by sending folks off-world. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths [1] https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Types_of_orbits#GEO https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...

nickik 5y ago

WE already did that. Its called nuclear power. Fission energy can do almost everything fusion can do. The difference in energy density between fission and fusion is not that large compared to the energy sources we have. With all the investment in solar and wind we could easily have built a fission based economy. The French proved that in the 70/80s and had a green grid ever since. Had we done that collectively global warming would be a far lesser issue. It would also help us understand neutronics and material science so we can eventually switch to fusion. The same basic technology could also be used for space travel in the solar system and would have advanced space travel by a lot. But of course for idiotic reasons society went away from that.

arcanon 5y ago
I think there is one more step change theoretically possible in terms of energy output which is based on anti-quark collisions. We need to understand QCD better. Its hard to know when breakthroughs will happen. Maybe its already happened and we just havent heard about it yet! We also dont know how to model quantum gravity still. That seems pretty fundamental. Im optimistic there will be physicists who find something new and whacky that no one could predict.
- nickik 5y ago
  Yes, fine, lets research that. However here is the thing. We figured out that fission thing in the 50s and still fail to use it.
Nitramp 5y ago
FWIW, fissible material that's used with current technology is actually running out, with a similar timeline to oil. Fission is not an infinite energy source, despite appearances to the contrary. It's also not an cheap as one might hope.
- bbojan 5y ago
  But the current technology can be improved at least 100x (fast fission) to 10000x (breeders).

rmu09 5y ago

All this cheap energy eventually turns into heat. The only way to get rid of excess heat is to radiate it into space, and the only way to radiate _more_ heat into space is with an increased temperature.

bliteben 5y ago
I love this somewhat tangentially related article: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- ajuc 5y ago
  In a world with hard-capped energy use the incentives to expand into space would be enormous, I don't think it's unrealistic at that point to think the growth will continue outwards. In particular one can imagine outsourcing every high-entropy activity to space and leaving Earth for low-entropy high-value activities.
RustyConsul 5y ago
That might be a blessing on mars.
generalizations 5y ago
Unless the cheap energy isn't being burned inside the atmosphere.