Ask HN: Live in the Future--How would you increase your energy consumption 100x? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Live in the Future--How would you increase your energy consumption 100x?

4 pointsobeone6 comments

History teaches that for some things (like artificial light [ancient oil candles->LED]) as the price decreases linearly, consumption increases geometrically.

Imagine a breakthrough in energy generation tomorrow, (i.e. fusion, automatic robotic placement of solar cells, etc.) where the world has access to vastly more usable energy/electricity than it has ever had.

Living in this imagined future, in what ways would you personally would consume 10x or 100x the amount of electricity (or energy) you consume today?

View on HN

I'd say it's important to distinguish between "ways I could use lots more energy" and "ways I might actually use lots more energy".

The former is easy. I could decide to let my house's insulation just rot and heat it with electricity. But even that probably won't even get me to 10x. I could suddenly decide I want lots more "stuff" that takes lots of energy to manufacture. But I honestly can't tell you what stuff that would be, especially since "stuff" is actually trending down for a lot of us, replaced by bits. I could want a bigger house in general, but even the relatively wealthy people I know are not generally upgrading to houses that take 100 times the energy to build and maintain as mine. That would literally be somehow stuffing a decent-sized subdivision into a single residence.

Ways I'm actually going to use 10x the energy are, IMHO, in short supply. And 100x is just mind-boggling.

The assumption about how the future is going to use more energy are generally based either on the idea that we're going to continue exploding in population (increasingly poorly supported by the evidence), or possibly in some post-Rapture-of-the-Nerds civilization start burning energy doing some sort of calculations the likes of which we mostly can't imagine. I say we can't imagine the calculations because merely "fully simulating a human and their environment" is probably already less energy that you use now in this environment; someday our great-great-to-the-X grandchildren may be horrified by the way we pumped gas into our gas tanks not because of the environmental damage for an environment they don't really care about, but because each tank of gas could have provided enough energy for 10 or 100 or whoknows how many human-equivalent life simulations.

At the moment, I just don't see very many reasons why an HN reader is likely to use 10x the power that they do now.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. My own original thinking was along these lines as well.

However, some thoughts that did occur to me along the lines of cleaning the air and water that we each consume, as well as carbon sequestration. Much in the same spirit that someone launches other local public goods (tor node, public wifi, etc.), perhaps a generous neighbor/employer decides to undo all of the carbon or water pollution, or air pollution that they've ever created--thereby creating a "blast radius" of positive effects around their cleaning apparatus. Such technologies currently exist, but are energy intensive.

This is exactly what Michio Kaku writes about in "The Physics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations": http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...

He argues that a civilization's progress should be measured by the amount of energy at its disposal. According to this, a civilization that can command all its planet's energy (Type I) would be able to modify the weather, alter the course of earthquakes, volcanoes, and build cities on their oceans.

Very carefully -- not to heat up my environment. In dense cities heat output is already about 1% of solar input.

We could use the energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Legion of robotic minions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com