8 ms·

I think this is the key insight. Top of my head, I can point to a couple of real productivity things from even cheaper energy: * Vertical farming (Energy must

I think this is the key insight. Top of my head, I can point to a couple of real productivity things from even cheaper energy: * Vertical farming (Energy must be cheaper than the sun) * Space travel * AI * Cheaper everything as the value chain becomes cheaper However, to enable this we also need to get rid of energy-conservatism which is prevalent now and, this is the important one, find energy sources with less negative externalities.

anthonypasq 4y ago
correct, pretty much every single issue plaguing humans at the moment could be trivially solved with infinite free energy. obviously that isnt coming soon, but as we reach that target things get easier and easier. and we have some significant tools that would get us there (more nuclear in general, potentially a breakthrough in fusion, and of course actually catching a non-trivial amount of energy the sun is giving off). for example, would we ever have water problems again if we could de-salinate the oceans essentially for free?
bryanlarsen 4y ago
I really hope that cheap energy enables a farming breakthrough. Right now we essentially use approximately all arable land for food production. People see this and think we are on the edge of disaster, that if we had more people or land got less productive we wouldn't be able to feed everybody. But the reason we use all the land is because that's the cheapest way to make food. Less intensive farming is cheaper. If we had more land we'd use it for growing food and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd use more fertilizer etc and food would be more expensive. If we had a lot less land we'd use a lot of greenhouses which can produce about 1000x as many calories/acre as a dryland wheat farm, and food would be ridiculously expensive. But what if using more land wasn't the cheapest way to make more food? I don't think the answer is vertical farming, but it could be. More likely is precision fermentation IMO: https://www.rebootfood.org/ https://www.rebootfood.org/
- madsbuch 4y ago
  This is really exiting! Thanks for the link! I completely agree. For me it is not so much about vertical farming either, more than it is the next industrialisation step in food production. Currently there is a plethora of candidate technologies that all need to be assessed and tried out! Precision fermentation is, however, a new term for me.

anthonypasq 4y ago

correct, pretty much every single issue plaguing humans at the moment could be trivially solved with infinite free energy. obviously that isnt coming soon, but as we reach that target things get easier and easier. and we have some significant tools that would get us there (more nuclear in general, potentially a breakthrough in fusion, and of course actually catching a non-trivial amount of energy the sun is giving off). for example, would we ever have water problems again if we could de-salinate the oceans essentially for free?

bryanlarsen 4y ago

I really hope that cheap energy enables a farming breakthrough. Right now we essentially use approximately all arable land for food production. People see this and think we are on the edge of disaster, that if we had more people or land got less productive we wouldn't be able to feed everybody. But the reason we use all the land is because that's the cheapest way to make food. Less intensive farming is cheaper. If we had more land we'd use it for growing food and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd use more fertilizer etc and food would be more expensive. If we had a lot less land we'd use a lot of greenhouses which can produce about 1000x as many calories/acre as a dryland wheat farm, and food would be ridiculously expensive. But what if using more land wasn't the cheapest way to make more food? I don't think the answer is vertical farming, but it could be. More likely is precision fermentation IMO: https://www.rebootfood.org/ https://www.rebootfood.org/

madsbuch 4y ago
This is really exiting! Thanks for the link! I completely agree. For me it is not so much about vertical farming either, more than it is the next industrialisation step in food production. Currently there is a plethora of candidate technologies that all need to be assessed and tried out! Precision fermentation is, however, a new term for me.