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Is it really limitless if both generating and consuming energy produces heat? Or is that too small of an effect even despite the heat inefficiency of fusion?
by clusterfish 5y ago
Is it really limitless if both generating and consuming energy produces heat? Or is that too small of an effect even despite the heat inefficiency of fusion?
- xyzzyz 5y agoEarth gets multiple orders of magnitude more heat from the Sun than humans can ever hope to generate. In concrete terms, Earths gets 153 PW of energy in terms of solar radiation. It also radiates as much. In comparison, humanity uses something like 20 TW in total (that includes not only electricity, but also transportation etc). So, we could increase our energy use 100 times, and still be only around 1% of what we get from the Sun.
- kongin 5y agoSo that's between 150 and 250 years with the 2.5% energy consumption grows, then that much again for us to produce more energy than the sun shines on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
- xyzzyz 5y agoYes, and with 2.5% energy consumption growth, in only 2500 years, we'll consume entire power output Milky Way galaxy. Extrapolating exponential growth over long timescales leads to silly results.
- baq 5y agonothing silly about it if the purpose is to make a point in a discussion with an economist. some of them just don't get it that energy consumption is correlated with economic growth and you can't just grow yourself out of every problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]