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What's interesting to me is that the real tipping point is when we are able to produce energy easily and cheaply in a virtually unlimited fashion, without relyi
by pknight 13y ago
What's interesting to me is that the real tipping point is when we are able to produce energy easily and cheaply in a virtually unlimited fashion, without relying on scarce resources.
It will accelerate our means to produce virtually anything locally, making the whole chain of production much less vulnerable to disaster. You could build vertical farms driven by technology (eliminating the need for pesticides, or huge land resources) and optimize food production. We'll be able to produce enough of what we need 10x over and with a small ecological foot print.
It's really interesting the things that become possible and economically viable once you have virtually unlimited energy. If there is one reason to keep living and be excited it is to see that day. It will be monumental. It will be bigger than the printing press or the electrical grid and maybe even the advent of the computer.
With unlimited, cheap energy, just imagine what we'll be able to do. Just imagine what the human race has been able to do in the 19th and 20th century with the advent of factories and machines. We built amazing tunnels, skyscrapers and road networks.
Imagine what we could in a different context, with different objectives. What if cleaning up the environment and creating beautiful buildings, parks and infrastructure again became the equivalent of what used to spur the economy on in the 19th and 20th century.
The cool thing is it could potentially happen in the next 30 years. There are so many different promising energy production technologies being worked on right now. It is only a matter of time.
- jabits 13y agoThis is so true. With cheap energy we could re-use/recycle resources down to the Molecular level.
- ams6110 13y agoI what dream world will this happen?
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoUS spends a whopping 8.3% of GDP on energy. Cheap(er) abundant(er) energy would be great but not transformative.
- Guvante 13y agoWe don't pay a lot for electricity we use, but industrial places do pay a lot for electricity they might use.
- voidlogic 13y agoMaybe not transformative if you are talking about just replacing the cost of what is used now, but if energy is extremely cheap we will actually use more of it. For example: Tired of landfills? Recycle everything! Tired of plowing your driveway, heat it! Tired of polluted air? Break water down into pure air for your house! etc
- HCIdivision17 13y agoJust a number check: eight percent of the US GDP is well over a trillion dollars. That is, over $1e12, or more easily understood as over $1,000,000,000,000. I think the trick here is a lot of energy is consumed by heavy industry. An single line in a plant can consume megawatts of power, and refining processes are flat out extravagant in consumption. If this energy was conserved or near free, we would see those savings passed onto lowered cost of goods or in process improvements/expansions. I think that's likely qualitatively different from just the Fed pumping cash into the system, and the impact would be impressive.
- pknight 13y agoI think you're vastly underestimating what it means to have (virtually) unlimited energy. Things that we are not doing now because it's not economically viable, become viable. Water filtration for drinkable water is huge and also happens to be one of the main problems in the world. That problem becomes more approachable when you have an excess of energy at your disposal. Recycling materials is also heavily constrained by energy costs. With so much energy available you can employ recycling techniques that are not viable right now and/or do it at a larger scale. There are also huge reductions possible when you have abundant energy. Take out costs associated with driving your car, or the cost of cleaning up ongoing pollution, or the costs of extracting energy from scarce resources. Those could all be dramatically reduced once abundant energy becomes a reality. It will be impactful for people who are not rich (99% of the planet), not having to pay huge chunks of income for energy. After rent costs, the biggest part of my living costs come from energy production (elec, gas, water etc). Abundant energy also makes a more distributed form of general production more viable. The more communities become self reliant, the less vulnerable the world becomes to localized disasters (political and environmental) and the stronger our ability to help out communities that are suffering. All the costs we are making (money & environmental) for the purpose of transporting goods and resources around the world can be scaled back. Think about this for a minute, if you have access to cheap abundant energy, you have some source of water and the technology to filter it than you have all the basic necessities to supply basic survival needs to a community. That is huge.
- ctdonath 13y agoComplementing cheap energy is efficient use thereof. A smartphone today can practically be run off solar energy, where such computing power used to darn near require its own major power plant. "3D printed buildings" will construct architecture with much less energy than current building techniques, which in turn are made with much less energy than past all-human-powered construction. There's a baseline of how much energy we each need (lifting building elements into place, caloric food needs, BTUs for thermal comfort in a given enclosed space), with a baseline of what energy is available (1KW/hr per m^2, plus whatever stored energy is available in wood & fossil & nuclear fuels); while there are upper and lower limits, we can use what's available to more efficiently transition one to the other.