2040: Diary of an interesting year | Hacker News Reader

2040: Diary of an interesting year

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32 pointsakkartik25 comments

God am I sick of tedious gloomy post-apocalyptic stories. I had them in school when they were about nukes. Now they're about the environment but they're the same boring gloomy defeatist stuff. Between those two dates, of course, we had tens of millions of Chinese and Indian people being lifted out of poverty, the fall of apartheid and the Soviet Union, democracy in Eastern Europe, the Internet...

The future is the Jetsons, baby, not this shit.

I owe you a nickel each time I use "The future is the Jetsons, baby, not this shit" - awesome!

March 5, 2040.

Ate Astro today. It was either him or Elroy, and frankly the boy is more tolerable these days since we can no longer find refined sugar to feed him.

Whether or not you deem it a realistic scenario does not detract from the artistic quality of it. What about 1984? Brave New World? Dr. Strangelove? All of them gloomy and dystopian, and all of them damned good!

Nuclear warfare was (and still is) a very serious threat. Just because we've been lucky enough to skirt such a conflict doesn't mean it's not a viable threat. And depending on who you ask, ecological collapse is a very serious issue as well. I like these types of stories because they serve as a grim reminder of what could be. And maybe, just maybe, they effect enough change to steer us clear from it.

I'm not even an optimist. I'm not necessarily a pessimist either but I know that the technological Genie is not going back into the bottle no matter what else.

Even if the future is going to be grim, it will be grim in a complex technological fashion, not this simplistic shit. Already the homeless have mobile phones.

I am not sure an economic collapse (although we more or less dodged that bullet last year the shooting continues) would not drag a big part of mankind into abject poverty.

We are seriously looking into a billion people having to move because of lack of water, and a huge disruption on coastal communities - and a huge people displacement because of that. We also have to contemplate a diminishing energy budget per person. And all that in the next 90 years.

The future is a dangerous place, even if some pockets of it may look like The Jetsons.

Why would the world have a lower energy budget?

Solar cells are getting cheaper about as fast as Moore's law. Nuclear power (and if we're really lucky, fusion) can solve most problems.

As usual, the probably real danger for people is... other people.

The real danger is that most of the world will become unsuitable for agriculture, e.g. the Sahara expanding to Southern Europe, the Mid-West becoming one great dust bowl.

You're joking right? The majority of agriculture in the western world is produced directly because of the Gulf Streams warming effect, look at any agricultural output maps and you'll see North American and European production is squarely centred around where the gulf stream contacts the continent and increases local temperatures. As the global temperature increases vast amounts of land will be moved into the range of arable crops, specifically the two largest countries in the world (Canada and Russia) have very low percentages of arable land due to the vast amount of taiga, as temperatures increase the arable land will increase exponentially. These two countries could easily feed the world at present production densities. [Edit: Canada currently has less than 5% arable land, and presently only uses ~0.6% of all land for agriculture. Russia has about 7% arable land, but only uses ~0.1%. The prairies account for ~80% of Canada's agriculture land, and these very prairies are expected to grow exponentially as temperatures increase]

Incidentally your claim that the Sahara is expanding is quite frankly laughable, when all current evidence has been showing it is presently shrinking due to increased rainfall. Expectations are that if this trend continues it will turn into the 'Green Sahara' of 12,000 years ago. This would turn the Sahara into the biggest pasture land in the entire world . . . that's if you believe the global warming models being used.

I don't disagree with any of the above, but there is a small problem.

During the state transfer, the climate might change fast (there is some evidence for that happening before), which will (over a few years' time) make farming ... well, problematic.

It might be good for the world/humanity, but it sucks to get caught in the middle.

I agree, the climate can potentially change fast (it could potentially change very slowly, we're guessing at a process we haven't been around for before) which is why the burden will be on governments to monitor changes in arable land and provide incentives for farmers to grow crops in the areas opening up rather than waiting for our existing farmland to become useless.

With proper care and planning we should be able to ride out even the fastest change of climate that nature can throw at us, however I started this sentence 'with proper care' which is certainly not a synonym for the government handling of industry.

It would be, if the warming were even. Remember - as we increase the energy of the system, the _average_ temperature increases, but so does the range it's in. Cold will be colder, hot will be hotter, rainy will be rainier and windy will be windier.

It's not all roses.

The worse case is dire.:

"We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive." http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maxim...

Solar cells are promising, but they cannot solve this problem - at the very least, they can't generate power at night - we would have to rely on either an integrated planetary grid or a huge amount of batteries.

Nuclear has only that much fuel to use. Uranium is non-renewable.

And fusion is yet to prove it can provide enough energy. We need better reactors.

I originally argued against the statement that we will have a "lower energy budget" in 90 years.

In short, I am arguing about developments that will come home to roost in less than a decade -- and disprove your statements. Even if these developments take five times as long, you are still vertigo-inducing wrong...

You are arguing like some sort of inverse Kurzweil. :-)

>>Solar cells are promising

They will never help much where I live. But not many live here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8386460.stm

People in the highly populated parts of Europe will literally need a reason to not put them on the house -- in just a few years. Then add 80 more years of tech development...

Consider how much energy you'll get from solar cells in a city's total roof area. 1 square meter under the equator is 1 kW. If every person have 10 square meters of solar cells, it should be enough for all energy use (below the polar circle).

(The same goes for energy storage, developed over 90 years.)

>>Uranium is non-renewable.

Check up on Thorium reactors (and also on more modern versions of normal reactors, which burns a larger fraction of the fuel).

Then add 90 more years of development...

There is lots of Uranium in the ground. Raise the prices and it will come up.

>>And fusion is yet to prove it can provide enough energy.

We will know about e.g. General Fusion, Polywell and TriAlpha in just a few years.

Realistically, I'd not give that large chance for the individual projects (10%? 20%?). But I'd be surprised if nothing like that comes along in 90 years. Just consider space based solar, with the next-next-next-next generation of super cheap launch systems.

I originally argued against the statement that we will have a "lower energy budget" in 90 years.

Given increasing population, how much more energy do you expect to be able to use? While true we may be able to increase our energy usage, I doubt most of mankind will be able to use as much as we do.

Also, do you realize how much effort (and energy expenditure) would it be to manufacture 10 square meters for every human being alive? Count 10 billion people - that's 100 billion square meters, not counting replacing damaged solar cells.

Nuclear fission is also a point that could be much improved, but it is pretty much a dead end unless we discover some new laws of physics. Nuclear facilities are horrendously expensive to build and to safely manage. There are safer designs, but how much safe is safe in a world you have to guard nuclear fuel (and waste) and keep if from people who are willing to blow themselves up?

As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not. Also, giving them even a 10% chance of success is very optimistic.

There is no reason to panic, but there is reason to proceed carefully and think through what we are doing and what we are going to do.

>>Also, do you realize how much effort (and energy expenditure) would it be to manufacture 10 square meters for every human being alive?

Please think before writing.

Even today, much less energy is used making solar cells than they create... For material, the latest thin film is not a heavy weight per square meter... (also a hint, we're not running out of silicon for glass...).

In fact, this would take very little resources compared to what a person need to live.

If you want to make a coherent point, you'd note that my "energy budget" didn't include transportation or industry.

We can apply all the clean energy sources we will have in twenty years, for that.

Note that I'm just arguing known sources in one-two decades, assuming the remaining decades are without developments! And you can't answer even that.

Let us assume space based solar in twenty years... 90? I can't even guess.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215313...

Did you have any counter arguments against Thorium reactors? Or you're silent because you lack arguments?

>>100 billion square meters [is a lot of area, sic]

You must be unique on this site to never have thought about how many square meters go into a square km. :-)

10 km X 10 km == 100 million square meters. Enough to give 10 square meter to 10 million people, a BIG city. Go check a map, that area is less than the area of the roofs of such a city...

(Most people will live in cities, it seems.)

Enough of the pre-high school math lesson...

>>As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not.

I don't think you know what you're talking about.

Please explain how a known success/failure of one of the three projects I mentioned would influence the likelihood of the others? I can honestly not see how you could argue that.

I am sorry, but I wonder if you're a troll. I can't be bothered with the rest.

Thorium produced in breeder reactors are object of research for many decades, but very few (if any) commercial examples exist. I remember something out of India, but I am not quite sure. There has been some movement around them in China lately, IIRC, but it must be something on a tech demonstration level or we would all be hearing a lot about it. I believe that when someone pull this off, they will brag about it all over the media.

The General Fusion, TriAlpha and Polywell are all a bit far-fetched. GF's thingie has a couple practical problems, like, for instance, extracting tritium from their liquid lead-lithium mix. There are a lot of problems with liquid-metal heat exchange itself, specially on a scale like the one they propose. Radioactive liquid alkali metal exchangers elevate the NIMBY complains to a whole new level. I would give them a 1%. The TriAlpha approach requires higher temperatures than Hydrogen-Deuterium fusion. I would give it about 0.5% chance of success in the next 100 years. If the conditions the GF machine are to operate can be called extreme, I lack superlatives to name what happens inside a Tri Alpha device. As for Polywell... I am an optimist. I would give them a 5% chance. There are some issues on the geometry of the fields (they had some leaks in the "corners") but I expect them to improve steadily enough for sustained operation.

But we are not aiming at technology demonstrators running sustainable reactions. We are aiming at commercial production on megawatt-scale generators. It's not just rescaling your AutoCAD model, even if you don't consider your whole supply chain.

As for solar, you seriously propose replacing the roofs of every home in the planet with solar panels. I live in an apartment, on a 50's building that's not very tall. There are 40 people living in the same building that has about 200 m2 of roof. That's 4 square meters per person on a not very dense arrangement. It's one of the least dense blocks in my region. Most of my friends live on 1 square-meter of roof per person or less zones (taller, newer buildings). This math will hardly work out. As it is, we have a pretty green energy matrix - mostly hydro. Even our cars run on sugarcane ethanol, but, still, ethanol production takes up a lot of land that could be used to grow food and that may be needed for that if the climate goes south and agriculture takes a hit.

You are more optimistic than I am. Things change, but they change slowly. Unless there is a huge political drive behind this, I don't believe we will see much of it before it's too late.

We need politicians who can focus on periods longer than their terms. I am not sure where to find them.

You claimed: "As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not."

1. I asked for support: "Please explain how a known success/failure of one of the three projects I mentioned would influence the likelihood of the others? I can honestly not see how you could argue that."

A basic presentation about the projects is NOT supporting that...

You back away from that, now that you have read up on the basics. Is that your standard method when you have guessed about something you don't know anything about?

2. The only "real" thing we know about TriAlpha is that they got large investments from people that presumably got more info. (They claim to publish more in 2010.) There is data on a previous project and IIRC, they talked about FRCs.

So on what do you base your claim about probabilites for TriAlpha?!

Note: AFAIK, to breed tritium is quite common for all fusion DT plans.

3. I haven't looked into the subject about extracting hydrogen from the lead/litium -- why do you claim it to be hard?

>>But we are not aiming at technology demonstrators running sustainable reactions

AGAIN: You made a claim 90 years in the future. These will be built (if one works) inside 20. And deployed inside 30. So your comment was totally irrelevant for my thesis. But you knew that.

>>As for solar, you seriously propose replacing the roofs of every home in the planet with solar panels.

Sigh, do I have to quote the BBC reference I gave:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8386460.stm

A key goal for solar is what is known as grid parity. That is the point when it is as cheap for someone to generate power on their homes as it is to buy it from the grid.

It varies from country to country depending on electricity prices, but the institute estimates that Italy - which has a combination of sunny weather and relatively high electricity prices - should reach grid parity next year. Half of Europe should be enjoying grid parity by 2020, it estimates.

So in ONE decade, half of Europe are expected to start plastering everything with solar cells -- there would need to be a reason NOT to put solar cells on a roof (or south facing side of a house).

I already explained about pre-high scool math. But AGAIN:

10 x 10 km of solar cells is enough for ten million people. That is nothing, considering that you can take unwanted land 50-100 km from the city, if you really need more.

Are you trolling?

That will happen in 10-20 years. Consider how much cheaper/better solar cells will be in 30 years...

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24240/

Now go up to 90...

>>Unless there is a huge political drive behind this,

AGAIN: See BBC reference. Solar cells will generate energy cheaper than today's normal price for many countries -- already in less than 1-2 decades. And they seem to keep falling in price.

Why would politicians be involved -- except wanting to tax solar cells?

>> [Thorium]

Active research subject today, India is building a prototype. Not totally trivial, but there is afaik no known show stoppers for deployment inside 90 years(!). Do you know of any?

>>[About General Fusion] Radioactive liquid alkali metal exchangers

The last time I checked the periodic system, lead was NOT an alkali metal. Lithium? Hell, they talk about using sodium in newer nuclear power plants... (and have some going since long.)

[Edit: I googled for you. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... ]

[Edit: Some discussion about sodium and lead in nuclear reactors. Lithium is hardly worse than sodium. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf32.html ]

(FYI, the main criticism of GF I've seen has been about the mechanical building of the pistons.)

I recently finished "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan, he's most famous for his SF works, but this one is a near-future thriller where capitalism has gone slightly too far, the roads are mostly abandoned since most people cannot afford to drive anymore du to oil scarcity, so the roads are mostly used by the executives of various corporations for car-duels about business contracts. Our protagonist works for a "Conflict Investment" division, that essentially funds small wars and revolutions around the world, and they win their contracts by killing the representatives of the competing corporations on the road.

Ironically, he's driving a SAAB, which due to market forces probably won't be around for much longer. :-)

I want to point out that the above plot seems really silly. When I read the synopsis on Amazon, I didn't want to read it. A friend, who is also into Richard Morgan, read it and highly recommended it. So, I gave it a shot. It was a very good book. I was pleasantly surprised.

...and someone, far away in a remote part of the Rocky Mountains, puts his hand in the air and makes the sign of the dollar.

...returns to the real world, and finds it's hard to find a welcome when you insist on looking at people like they're rodents.

Seriously, guys? We're still pretending like Rand wasn't batshit?

Isn't this just Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'?

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