7 ms·

Yes, it will be for the second half of this century, if we make it there. Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But ano

Yes, it will be for the second half of this century, if we make it there. Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But another way to see it is that without a complete change in what societies value and how they act (i.e. a cultural/philosophical/storytelling change), fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage, whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases). We do that by extracting resources nature concentrated for us for free for millions of years and dispersing them all around in our buildings, phones, playstations, fertilizers, fuel etc. As long as Black Friday is the highlight of the year, there are reasons to think fusion might be more dangerous than helpful. It’s good to have an increasing ability to transform matter, as long as you are using that ability in the right direction.

Nition 4y ago
Great point that I hadn't considered before. Like how adding more lanes to a road just creates more traffic. I hope things don't go that way but I can see it happening.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Sigh, this again. Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Induced demand is still valid economic demand That does not justify it.
  - idlehand 4y ago
    Governments sometimes demolish highways though. And a lot of the time, the marginal utility of adding another lane to a road is lower than the utility of using that space and public money somewhere else. If we scale a car-centric city to a million inhabitants we often end up with a majority of urban space devoted to roads and parking lots, which cost public money, instead of commercial and residential buildings which generate opportunities for the inhabitants and money for the municipality. Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.
  - acchow 4y ago
    > Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes. I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).
  - barneygale 4y ago
    Sane governments regularly pedestrianise roads and city centres, at least in Europe.
  - serf 4y ago
    > Sigh, this again. has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument? I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude. Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Agreed, it was a low-effort rebuttal to a low-effort post, and I feel bad for contributing to the noise floor on here by taking the bait. The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work." Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.
  - Nition 4y ago
    Whether or not that demand is economically valid doesn't really affect the point that demand will increase with more power from fusion, or more lanes for roads though does it? The economy has always been somewhat at odds with the environment.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    valid economic demand does not equal "good". increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.
  - felixmeziere 4y ago
    The point I was making was precisely regarding what is considered "valid" demand. Here, the fact that you appended "economic" after it strongly suggests to me that we don't have the same definition of it. One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place. Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)
  - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
    If the actual costs are internalized (as in, not externalized) I don't think much of this economic demand is sustainable. Economic demand is just a metric. You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.
idlehand 4y ago
Commercial fusion power probably makes it more economical to spend more energy recycling materials.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  And 100x more economical producing more and more new stuff.
- felixmeziere 4y ago
  Yes, that would be a good use for it. But: - Designing things to be durable and recyclable in the first place is probably more economical and sustainable (both can be combined though, no problem) - Recycling is not a silver bullet. Extracting and re-combining all the microscopic parts of different metals in an iPhone to get back the original metal is incredibly expensive or unfeasible, compared to just extracting that metal from nature - Unlimited energy makes it easier to go deeper and deeper extract resources from earth's crust, generating more and more garbage. What do you think we'll do, when you observe what we've done so far?
ambrozk 4y ago
I don't know what makes you so so confident about your prediction, and what you've written about fusion's relationship to waste is, I'm pretty sure, inaccurate.
- fzzzy 4y ago
  I think the point is the more useful energy we have at our disposal, the more garbage we can make easily.
- felixmeziere 4y ago
  When you observe historical data, you see that the graphs of the amount of energy we are able to master are roughly proportional to the graphs of our emissions of garbage (construction, pollution, CO2, consumer goods etc.). I'm not saying I don't want fusion, I'm saying that without getting much better at deciding collectively what to do with it then those graphs will stay coupled, taking us to a sure doom. Anyway it's likely we'll get there before fusion so it should not distract us from all other necessary transformations the system needs.
goodpoint 4y ago
> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage Thank you for saying this. Unlimited almost-free energy makes energy-saving measures moot, including building insulation. People would heat or cool even open spaces with little regard for the environment. And all the heat is eventually released into the atmosphere. Consumerism would be supercharged as well. Indeed we need a huge shift of societal priorities. (Needless to say, when I point that out HN downvoted me. Here technology is always and only good.) edit: there you go, already downvoted at -2 for saying the same thing as the parent.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  So the problem fusion is that is will be too good? Interesting take.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    No, it's not "too good".
    - lambdaba 4y ago
      So the fear is we’ll use the extra energy to literally warm the planet? Seems like a scale mismatch. Climate “engineering” like blocking out the sun seems like a much more real danger
      - slothtrop 4y ago
        Not "warm", because with fusion filling this cache, energy usage wouldn't lead to CO2 pollution. They're suggesting it would lead to increases in consumption which means waste. Notwithstanding that a) life won't necessarily get more affordable for people, and stuff costs money, b) there are innovations now, and expected in the future, which would drastically curtail waste, though some regulatory measures might be necessary to do better with this. So I'm also skeptical.
        4y ago
slothtrop 4y ago
> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest. Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. We could also create stronger incentives and regulations surrounding waste. There are lots of new biodegradable tech companies now, to replace plastics, for instance.
- felixmeziere 4y ago
  > That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery of energy, that's the one factor that enabled all the rest (abundant food, time to go to college instead of farming, developments in medicine to make your life longer, retirements, consumerism etc.). What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    > If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom. Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food. So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else. > What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first. I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.

Nition 4y ago

Great point that I hadn't considered before. Like how adding more lanes to a road just creates more traffic. I hope things don't go that way but I can see it happening.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Sigh, this again. Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > Induced demand is still valid economic demand That does not justify it.
- idlehand 4y ago
  Governments sometimes demolish highways though. And a lot of the time, the marginal utility of adding another lane to a road is lower than the utility of using that space and public money somewhere else. If we scale a car-centric city to a million inhabitants we often end up with a majority of urban space devoted to roads and parking lots, which cost public money, instead of commercial and residential buildings which generate opportunities for the inhabitants and money for the municipality. Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.
- acchow 4y ago
  > Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes. I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).
- barneygale 4y ago
  Sane governments regularly pedestrianise roads and city centres, at least in Europe.
- serf 4y ago
  > Sigh, this again. has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument? I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude. Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Agreed, it was a low-effort rebuttal to a low-effort post, and I feel bad for contributing to the noise floor on here by taking the bait. The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work." Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.
- Nition 4y ago
  Whether or not that demand is economically valid doesn't really affect the point that demand will increase with more power from fusion, or more lanes for roads though does it? The economy has always been somewhat at odds with the environment.
- notatoad 4y ago
  valid economic demand does not equal "good". increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.
- felixmeziere 4y ago
  The point I was making was precisely regarding what is considered "valid" demand. Here, the fact that you appended "economic" after it strongly suggests to me that we don't have the same definition of it. One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place. Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  If the actual costs are internalized (as in, not externalized) I don't think much of this economic demand is sustainable. Economic demand is just a metric. You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.

idlehand 4y ago

Commercial fusion power probably makes it more economical to spend more energy recycling materials.

goodpoint 4y ago
And 100x more economical producing more and more new stuff.
felixmeziere 4y ago
Yes, that would be a good use for it. But: - Designing things to be durable and recyclable in the first place is probably more economical and sustainable (both can be combined though, no problem) - Recycling is not a silver bullet. Extracting and re-combining all the microscopic parts of different metals in an iPhone to get back the original metal is incredibly expensive or unfeasible, compared to just extracting that metal from nature - Unlimited energy makes it easier to go deeper and deeper extract resources from earth's crust, generating more and more garbage. What do you think we'll do, when you observe what we've done so far?

ambrozk 4y ago

I don't know what makes you so so confident about your prediction, and what you've written about fusion's relationship to waste is, I'm pretty sure, inaccurate.

fzzzy 4y ago
I think the point is the more useful energy we have at our disposal, the more garbage we can make easily.
felixmeziere 4y ago
When you observe historical data, you see that the graphs of the amount of energy we are able to master are roughly proportional to the graphs of our emissions of garbage (construction, pollution, CO2, consumer goods etc.). I'm not saying I don't want fusion, I'm saying that without getting much better at deciding collectively what to do with it then those graphs will stay coupled, taking us to a sure doom. Anyway it's likely we'll get there before fusion so it should not distract us from all other necessary transformations the system needs.

goodpoint 4y ago

> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage Thank you for saying this. Unlimited almost-free energy makes energy-saving measures moot, including building insulation. People would heat or cool even open spaces with little regard for the environment. And all the heat is eventually released into the atmosphere. Consumerism would be supercharged as well. Indeed we need a huge shift of societal priorities. (Needless to say, when I point that out HN downvoted me. Here technology is always and only good.) edit: there you go, already downvoted at -2 for saying the same thing as the parent.

vlunkr 4y ago
So the problem fusion is that is will be too good? Interesting take.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  No, it's not "too good".
  - lambdaba 4y ago
    So the fear is we’ll use the extra energy to literally warm the planet? Seems like a scale mismatch. Climate “engineering” like blocking out the sun seems like a much more real danger
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      Not "warm", because with fusion filling this cache, energy usage wouldn't lead to CO2 pollution. They're suggesting it would lead to increases in consumption which means waste. Notwithstanding that a) life won't necessarily get more affordable for people, and stuff costs money, b) there are innovations now, and expected in the future, which would drastically curtail waste, though some regulatory measures might be necessary to do better with this. So I'm also skeptical.
      - 4y ago

slothtrop 4y ago

> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest. Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. We could also create stronger incentives and regulations surrounding waste. There are lots of new biodegradable tech companies now, to replace plastics, for instance.

felixmeziere 4y ago
> That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery of energy, that's the one factor that enabled all the rest (abundant food, time to go to college instead of farming, developments in medicine to make your life longer, retirements, consumerism etc.). What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  > If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom. Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food. So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else. > What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first. I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.