4 ms·

Absolutely! We can keep going until the waste heat from our energy liberation melts the polar ice caps/melts lead/melts the earth's crust/is hotter than the sun

• lsc 14y ago
  >This isn't about knowledge. We simply cannot indefinitely grow our economy/energy usage. And no, we're not going to find a workaround for the laws of thermodynamics. They are the most certain knowledge we have. Well, in the long term, sure, you are right. (in the long term, we are all dead.) But that's a long way off. In the short term? it is about knowledge, partly, but more about what technologies we use. Do we power our cities with hydrocarbons? or with nuclear power? Realistically, that's the choice. The thing is? we already are involved in resource wars over oil. We are already suffering due to not having as much energy as we'd like, and apparently we're altering the composition of our atmosphere with our waste gases. This is a problem right now, not a billion years from now. Fission isn't perfect; it has problems, it kills people sometimes, yeah, but it kills fewer people, it has fewer problems than coal, which is the only realistic medium-term alternative. I do think, in the medium term, it is reasonable to expect that science can bring us plenty to the point where we don't have resource wars.