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Comment by px43 | Hacker News Reader

Each hour 430 quintillion Joules (430 exajoules) of energy from the sun hits the Earth.[1]

It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so.

The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage. This gives people real incentive to build the tools we need to harness the energy on our planet.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol...

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Since we're firmly in the ridiculous arguments camp already, it may as well be pointed out that all of that energy leaving the planet is a good thing. It's why the earth isn't a barren hellscape like venus, whose atmosphere captures energy much more efficiently. Most people would actually prefer that we capture just a bit less than we currently do.

So you are saying we will capture so much energy from the sun that the entire planet will become inhospitable. Do we then just keep burning fossil fuels until earth becomes inhospitable instead? Or do we kill ourselves and stop the need for energy use entirely? Remember that humans will forever have energy needs as we advance.

The point is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Using a renewable sources has their own side effects.

Solar? It heats the atmosphere, because it captures solar heat which would bounce back.

Wind? Obviously it slows winds down, and who knows how it affects the existing ecosystem. We know how important the gulf stream is, you wouldn’t want to slow that down..

Etc..

Absolutely yes, at a sufficiently big-picture view the eventual problem is energy expenditure itself. Capturing more energy from the sun, or more realistically something like large-scale fission/fusion utilization still results in an increased amount of energy being deposited into the earth's atmosphere even aside from the greenhouse effect.

I am obviously not an expert but I looked at the magnitude of the energy itself vs the greenhouse effect and it's about 10-100x less potent than the greenhouse effect. But that means that even if we had 100% clean carbon-free energy, we can't continue increasing our energy utilization forever. And we still have a huge portion of the world that is below a first-world living standard and will eventually want automobiles and air conditioning and vacations using jet travel too.

IF we do not level off the energy consumption of the "first world" standard of living sometime within the next 50-100 years then we are on a course to cook ourselves to death even with 100% clean energy.

What I am really getting out all of this is that at some point we will hit the human population limit that earth can sustain, even with renewable energy sources.

Whether or not that limit is actually reachable and something we should actually worry about I don't know. i.e: is there enough physical space for that many people on earth where each person uses X amount of renewable energy where the sum of X is greater than the amount of energy the earth can actually capture without being negatively affected.

I've been just casually browsing this discussion, but your comment stands out as an example of the kind of mental gymnastics people are playing to try and justify something so obviously wasteful.

As was pointed out upstream, capital and resources are required to get a solar panel, and if its output is directed to something frivolous like crypto mining, those inputs are being wasted. The fact that there remains unused energy from the sun is completely orthogonal to the waste that is happening.

To be clear, I'm less passing a judgement about the efficiency of crypto than I am pointing out that crafting objectively absurd arguments about why it is not actually wasteful helps nobody.

This might be a good argument if:

A) the environmental impact of manufacturing a solar panel is 0 and carbon neutral itself (it's not),

B) there's an excess of solar panels available too (not really),

C) the bitcoin miners aren't often running on coal power during the nighttime hours (they often are), and

D) there's nowhere better for mankind to deploy the capital used in deploying miners and renewable power production than for cryptocurrency mining (dubious).

Solar panels and GPUs use rare metals of which there are a finite quantity, and are also mined through the use of slave labor in some parts of the world.

Nope, no, don't go that way. Yes, the Sun does bathe the Earth with a constant stream of energy, a stream that remains mostly unused. The point is, that it is also mostly not useful energy, energy we have technology to convert into forms we can make use of. And that is a fundamental quality of that Energy.

The infinitesimal portion we do manage to convert with the currently available technology shouldn't be pissed away in the wind so lightly.

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