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One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I don’t believe we need a plan for the next
by 542458 5y ago
One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I don’t believe we need a plan for the next 1000 years - think of what our understanding of power generation and transmission was a millennium ago. Assuming that we will still be using the same technologies in 1000 years seems a bit pessimistic to me.
- cbmuser 5y agoPhysics won’t change in a thousand years and it’s very unlikely we’ll find anything more powerful and energy-dense beyond nuclear fission and fusion.
- ben_w 5y agoOn that timescale I expect us to engineer antimatter-based energy storage. Or do something literally incomprehensible — a thousand years ago we didn’t have the language to describe the language to describe relativity.
- dredmorbius 5y agoAntimatter might conceivably be viable as a form of energy storage. But as with hydrogen or other synfuels, it would never be a primary energy source, and the losses in production of antimatter are likely to remain large. Ultimately, antimatter is a battery or fuel, not an energy source. And if it ever were a viable energy source ... well, we'd likely have bigger problems.
- gnramires 5y agoIt doesn't quite work like that. 1000 years ago Europeans (you may say) only traveled routinely within 1 continent. Today, they travel routinely to all 7 continents. You can't say in another 1000 years anyone will travel to 14 continents -- there's only so much Earth to discover :) We can know Earth in better detail, but it's inherently limited. In the same vein, there's no guarantee we will continue to discover revolutionary engineering strategies, and certainly no guarantee of discovering (or not discovering) new physics. In fact, physics has seen a slower pace of discoveries since mid-20th century. This kind of (not necessarily justifiable) optimism is in fact quite a risk when evaluating some technologies on sustainability.
- ben_w 5y agoI get the point, I just don’t think we can justify that level of confidence. We might be just about to reach a grand unified theory of everything and then science just becomes collecting butterflies or whatever that quote was; or it might turn out that uncovering dark energy reveals 10^80 new kinds of fundamental particles and a way to construct pocket universes we can engineer to extract Big Bang energy levels or dump equivalent levels of entropy. I wouldn’t want to put money on which; and I say that as someone hopeful for life extension tech that would allow me to wait and find out.
- gnramires 5y agoThe thing is, we can't avoid putting money somewhere -- we are forced to make bets all the time (do nothing is also a bet). I would put the likelihood of pocket universes at something like 0.00000001% chance. Not zero, but really low.
- ben_w 5y agoSure, but I wouldn’t make a 1000 year bet, nor accept that not making one in this particular case is itself a bet as the infrastructure we make today isn’t likely to still be around in even a third of that time. All the stuff that I am currently in favour of for global energy supply and environment are mainly focused on the 50-100 year horizon for capability. I only care about longer timescales than that for damage on the grounds that kicking cans down the road seems both unfair and, given both how governments and civilisations fall, likely to make rebuilding unnecessarily difficult. (I believe, but do not know, that this will change if we get radical life extension)
- chess_buster 5y agoNearly 100% effective power generation from matter via hawking radiation from a nano-sized black hole that was grown from one formed in the upper atmosphere via ultra-energetic cosmic rays.
- smaddox 5y agoWhat could possibly go wrong :-D
- SamBam 5y agoSure, but fusion wasn't a part of that calculus, and in 1000 years it absolutely may be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kergonath 5y ago> One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. Not really. Uranium and thorium are insanely energy dense and whilst it’s obviously impossible to predict energy use a millenium from now, it could handle more than a couple of centuries of exponential growth of energy consumption. Then there are things like fuels made of natural isotopes (so no enrichment needed) and breeder reactors that can run off fission products (aka “waste”), which are not used much today, but are closer to readiness than things like carbon capture.
- ben_w 5y ago> it could handle more than a couple of centuries of exponential growth of energy consumption. That rather depends on the exponent and the time period. The minimum for “a couple of centuries” is 200 years: 1%/year for 200 years? Sure; 1%/year for 1000 years or 5%/year for 200 years? 2-2.5 times global solar irradiance. I think that’s enough to raise the temperature to boiling, and I don’t think there’s enough nuclear fuel to do that (but I could be wrong about both).