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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I doubt we've hit peak, but there are important things to consider.

If we run out of energy before we exit our gravity well, that's one instance of the great filter. Resource conflicts might also trigger war that could destabilize society and prevent us from advancing.

The world needs energy, yet many of us pay far less attention than we should.

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We’re nowhere close to running out of energy. There’s thousands of years’ worth just in proven uranium reserves, never mind seawater and unproven reserves.

We’re just going to have to get over our fear of nuclear power.

I guess people need to experience a full blown blackout to get over their fear of nuclear power.

Doesn't work, see the CA experience.

And then wait twenty years after the blackout while we construct nuclear power plants at high cost...

Also I'm told there's a giant nuclear reactor in the sky we might learn how to tap someday. Once we get done with the much easier nuclear buildout, of course.

As long as the sun shines, we won't run out of energy.

We have to be able to harness that energy in a way that meets current and future demands. We've got a long way to go to rely only on solar, wind, etc.

We got really lucky that our planet accumulated vast stored energy reserves that were easy to extract and use.

As long as the knowledge is not lost it's not terribly hard to bootstrap solar power generation.

Frank Drake (Drake equation author) at SETI argues that aliens stick to their solar systems because their sun will provide all the energy they will ever need and space is just not worth traversing. At any rate, whether we exit our gravity well en masse or not, the sun will still be shining.

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