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Galactic-Scale Energy
- sseefried 15y agoSimilar to something I wrote a few years back: http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/a81e39350086cbd6d78c9a2b1a7bc5fd-6.html http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/a81e39350086cbd6d78c9a2b1...
- hartror 15y agoI fun thought experiment but before anyone does a nude run down main street screaming "we are all doomed" think about this. Our energy use is driven not only by technology requirements, but also population growth, which is likely to be far more limited in the future due constraints of land and food.
- tomjen3 15y agoDon't forget that richer humans tend to get fewer kids too (this is only natural as the better life you get, the less improvement to your standard of living a child is until it dibs to negative when you move of the farm and into the city).
- chime 15y agoThe author didn't mention it but there is a scale for measuring the level of technological advancement called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale that takes the energy consumption of the civilization into account. According to the linked article, we will be Type III in 2500 years.
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- nknight 15y agoI think the real implication is that we would have to be a Type III to survive at that point. I suspect this is a practical impossibility. Certainly the speed of light presents significant challenges.
- arethuza 15y agoIf we did produce a Type III civilisation I don't think it would be based on anything remotely like a collection of biological humans. Probably more like the god like entity playing with humanity in Missile Gap by Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/04/missile_gap.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/04/missile_...
- sidman 15y agoIf im not mistaken i remember Michio Kaku saying that we will reach type three in about 1 million years from now where humans can build dyson spheres and harness the energy from galaxies, where we would be able to send robots to search other galaxies and then create gateways for the actual type 3 civilization to travel through to them. We are currently as he states it at 0.7 and our greatest challenge is to break past the type 1 where it is the most violent, like a child moving into their teenage years. Looking at the state of the world today we are kind of doing so, where type 1 allows humans to harness and completly understand the power of the planet (solar, wind, kinetic) we are developing systems to help us harness it however we just need to ensure we dont obliterate ourselves before we get there.
- ars 15y agoI would love to see a graph of energy usage per capita.
- ars 15y agoAssuming I didn't mess up: http://imgur.com/To9LA http://imgur.com/To9LA Interestingly the energy per capita did not change starting at around 1970. Wonder if it's related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis I also wonder what happened between 1740 and 1875.
- LogicX 15y agoAnd the other side of the equation: 1973: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Roe_vs_wade https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Roe_vs_wade See Also: Crime charts.
- gjm11 15y agoYou think the legality of abortion in the USA made a big difference to worldwide energy consumption per capita? Why?
- dredmorbius 15y agoSomething like this, perhaps? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=national+energy+consumption+%2F+population http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=national+energy+consump... (I'm still getting the hang of Wolfram|Alpha, but it's excellent for questions such as this).
- ck2 15y agoSometimes I wonder if there was a device for nearly endless, nearly free energy (that was safe) if we'd have fewer wars or more wars (because war would be cheaper from the material side).
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- w1ntermute 15y agoIf we had a Dyson sphere, people would no doubt be fighting over control of it. One example of the preliminary stages of this is the fighting that takes place over the orbital elevator systems in Mobile Suit Gundam 00.
- joshu 15y agoWhat.
- bjelkeman-again 15y agoI think he is referring to the anime series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00
- w1ntermute 15y agoYeah, the orbital elevators are multipurpose (i.e., to provide a more convenient launching point for spacecraft), but one of their primary goals is to provide electricity. And thus they are closely guarded by the 3 main power blocs (the Union, AEU, and Jinkakuren). Without energy, they are nothing, as can be seen from the countries that aren't a part of one of them and thus live in great poverty.
- Devilboy 15y agoI hope we do
- cafebabe 15y agoIn doubt mankind will survive another 2500 years.
- espeed 15y agoThe earth will run out of space before that happens. "If the current [population growth rate] of 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years" (http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio..., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&list=PL63DAFCD223C29352 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&list=PL63DAFC...).
- ckuehne 15y agoOr maybe not: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/a-galaxy-on-earth.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/a-galaxy-on-earth.html. Who knows.
- erikstarck 15y agoImagine this article being written 2000 years ago. The energy demands of today would seem equally "impossible".
- microarchitect 15y agoThe population of the US in 1650 was 50k. Now it's 309 million. No surprise that energy consumption increased by a factor of about 10^5. Also, the increase in world population isn't going to go on forever. Birth rates are decreasing in most countries - including third world countries. In fact, the population of many states in India is increasing not because of birth rates but due to increasing life expectancy. I can't find a cite now, but I remember an article which expects world population to stabilize at something less than 10B. If even that number seems worrying, remember that vast swaths of land in Central Asia, Siberia, Canada, Alaska, Australia and Antartica are virtually uninhabited: we don't even need to go the moon or Mars or something to find space for humans. We do need to get our act together but our real problems are effective policy-making and governance. Not finding endless sources of energy.
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- ordinary 15y agoSmall nitpick: using both k and M in the same sentence is a little confusing. [edit]Thanks!
- sampsonjs 15y ago"remember that vast swaths of land in Central Asia, Siberia, Canada, Alaska, Australia and Antartica are virtually uninhabited: we don't even need to go the moon or Mars or something to find space for humans." Uninhabited for a very good reason, with the exception of Canada and Asia, maybe. Seriously, Antartica?
- nknight 15y agoBetter to shove people into well-built structures in Antarctica and use more temperate land for food and energy generation than fill up every inch of what is traditionally considered "habitable" space and promptly starve.
- ordinary 15y agoIt's that time again: "The greatest shortcoming in the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" -Albert Bartlett
- iuguy 15y agoA couple of years ago I went to a Joint European Torus (JET) reactor tour, the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in the world and the closest (current working) thing to a working fusion reactor. The temperature inside the plasma on these things reaches 10s of millions of degrees Kelvin, but on the beryllium plated walls it's fairly cool (it'd have to be otherwise the tiles would be destroyed). They also had a smaller spherical tokamak called MAST that was quite interesting. We got to go into certain areas that are normally closed off (as they're normally shut down). If you want to see what a fusion reactor looks like, there's some pictures I took from the trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/z3r0kl3w/sets/72157623979315835/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/z3r0kl3w/sets/72157623979315835... - I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
- bemmu 15y agoIf we start thinking in the scale of thousands of years, I could very well imagine using this much energy, if we get some nice automated self-sustaining expansion going. Robots that build solar panels (and more robots) from raw materials they gather, powered by energy they themselves are helping to create. It would be like sending a virus out, no need for any intervention once you get the process going. They would go out and convert everything into whatever we need. In 2500 years they could even reach other stars.
- j1o1h1n 15y agoThe timeline starts at 1650, the height of the Renaissance, and projects forwards 2500 years. It would be more interesting to start at 500 B.C. While the author is making the point that 2% growth is silly, he is missing that there (if past history is to be gone by) will probably be a Big Reset followed by 1000 years of darkness, as before.
- dredmorbius 15y agoIf you haven't previously seen Dr. Barrett's "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", I strongly recommend it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY It doesn't address quite the same scale, but is very sobering.