Hacker News Reader

Comment by ph4 | Hacker News Reader

So is the goal just to fuel our current patterns of consumption and development with fusion, or nuclear, or whatever?

If cheap commercial fusion became a reality, no.

We would use far more energy.

A lot of stuff becomes feasible with free unlimited energy. For instance, carbon air capture (could even become a protein source) and green hydrogen (for applications like production of iron via direct reduction, so we can finally get rid of blast furnaces).

Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy? With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly requires 0 fuel.

I can't help feeling we'll find new ways to soak up that energy.

Ad tech will start segmenting right down to the individual customer, burning thousands of watts to work out how to entice then to spend $20.

Perhaps raw heat, rather than the indirect heat effects of global warming will be our next challenge.

Our current Bitcoin mining facilities will seem like child’s play.

Assuming anything else would happen is ignoring human nature.

The only way to get significant reduction of consumption is via catastrophe. There's a good chance that'll happen, but there's no feasible different way that I can see. Take away large levels of comfort from large amounts of people, and you will inevitably see bloodshed. (Yes, I know that unsustainable consumption will also lead to catastrophe. Welcome to the 21st century, where the path forward is narrow and uncertain, while the stakes are higher than ever)

Would more cheap (in all ways) energy be a bad thing? I don't think so, people pay money for that sort of thing.

Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to cook ourselves.

Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.

Hm, interesting. I was initially unconvinced that this could be a problem, but some back-of-the-envelope math says it's at least conceivable:

The sun deposits enormous amounts of energy onto earth every single day: Around 340 W/m² (averaged over the whole earth), or a total of 43 x 10^15 Watts. Essentially all of it is radiated back into space (mostly as infrared). We have a temperature equilibrium because energy intake is largely constant (surface/cloud albedo notwithstanding) while radiation back into space grows with fourth power of (surface/atmospheric) temperature.

Current global energy consumption is on the order of 2 x 10^12 Watts, over four orders of magnitude lower. If we somehow increase energy production by ~two orders of magnitude, to the point of ourselves emitting 1% of the solar energy intake on top, the surface temperature would need to rise by about 0.75 °C to maintain equilibrium. An order of magnitude more (i.e. three orders of magnitude above current consumption, roughly 10% of solar intake) would correspond to a 7.2 °C rise.

(Point of reference: Global power consumption has barely doubled in the past 40 years. No telling what "free" energy would cause though.)

Presumably we'd have geo-engineered a solution by that point, but it's surprisingly not too early to start thinking about the problem!

That's assuming the anthropomorphic heat is spread evenly over the earth, rather than concentrated and creating a heat island effect.

You probably can drop an order and a half of magnitude off of that number just based on concentration. And if you don't think 'free' fusion will cause us to use several times more power than we currently use, then I don't know what to tell you.

It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray" would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it enters our gravity well or deorbits). Anyone have any ideas?

I’m… cautious but optimistic. They have actual installations so it must not be complete bullshit.

Absorption and emission bands matter. They are in fact made of exotic materials (rare earths IIRC) so it’s at least plausible.

The cold side is what your heat ray hits, the idea is that would be the CMWB.

I'm guessing any possible energy generated by manmade fusion plants would be miniscule compared to that hitting the earth from the sun every day.

That's not how homeostasis works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com