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Comment by akelly | Hacker News Reader

If fusion creates clean power for significantly cheaper than fossil fuels, causing power usage to accelerate, so what?

As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.

There has got to be a nice graph that correlates power usage with these things, but I have yet to find it.

> As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.

These are all the things which allow us to live in a modern society with a high quality of life. More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.

I'm not sure I agree with that because it assumes quality of life is improving.

> More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.

Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago.

Do you really intend to argue that the quality of life in just about anytime before the 1960's is better than it is now? Quite a lot of people were still stuck on the subsistence farming treadmill.

>Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago

So no credit for feeding the billions who eat on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production?

> on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production

One of the very things destroying the environment and negatively affecting public health?

> So no credit for feeding the billions

This isn't school and human lives and people are not statistics. The question to ask is "at what cost?". Does feeding those billions suddenly do anything to help the 800 million or so starving in a world that has enough to feed them? What about the illions of animals and plants humans have destroyed over the past few hundred years? Again, at what cost?

A related aside: when humans originally started to utilize agriculture in the beginning of human history, the overall affect was a net negative in health, life expectancy, and efficiency (i.e., time spent working).

One of the absurd things about longtermism is that they assume that no matter how high the quantity of humans is and no matter how contrived the method of increasing the quantity is, they assume their proposed system will result in people living lives worth living so simply increasing the number of people is a net good, when it is entirely plausible that they also create unimaginably high numbers of unhappy people but their complete earth surveillance program simply eliminates them before they can cause a rebellion and destroy the wet dream of 10^58 people living in a tiny room with a permanently attached matrix like VR setup.

I think there’s a straw man somewhere here. It’s not like utility monsters/demons and the “mere addition paradox” (AKA the repugnant conclusion) aren’t already a well known issue from the philosophy studies of utilitarianism.

The number of people in extreme poverty today — defined as less than $1/day income adjusting for inflation relative to 1996 — was about 733 million in 2015 vs. 965 million in 1820. Likewise, the estimated number of people globally who are systematically going hungry is between 720 and 820 million.

The world population in 1820 was about 1093 million.

We live in a closed system with limited resources. More power means more quick resource consumption and faster pollution. In other words the quality of our environment will degrade faster. During the last few hundred years humanity has reaped the benefits of indiscriminate resource consumption giving little thought to the consequences, in practice borrowing QOL from future generations and from the environment. Imho it's not a long-term sustainable practice though.

More power means the ability to do things less efficiently - to pollute less. Steel, concrete, liquid fuels could all be carbon free, and what has been emitted sucked out of the atmosphere. Nearly every process that pollutes could be made to not - it 'just' takes energy.

As for everything else, we've barely even scratched the surface of this rock we're standing on - to say nothing of the rest of the dist system.

Use space-elevator. Attach heat-pipe. Radiate away.

That’s possible. However there are also a huge number of things that would be great for the environment like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap.

> like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap

Do you have any resources on those topics? I'd like to learn more about that how cheap electrical energy enables those.

I think the YouTuber Isaac Arthur has a video (or possibly many videos) on that, but he does so many videos and they’re so long I don’t want to risk linking to the wrong one.

Here’s his channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

The TLDR summary for your quotation is: Complete recycling — with enough energy you can break everything into atoms; Very land efficient agriculture — the cost of glass and metal for greenhouses and desalination is mostly energy, likewise most of the stuff needed to make vertical farming worth considering.

(I don’t remember Isaac Arthur mentioning ocean cleanup, but that may just be flawed memory).

Yep. With unlimited energy you don’t even need sunlight to grow crops, you can use artificial light in any quantity you want.

It's not just the usage of fossil fuels that causes damage to the environment. More energy from fusion will allow more precious resources to be mined, more wasteful stuff to be made, more trash to throw out.

I'm not against fusion at all, but it is important to remember that carbon dioxide isn't the only problem harming the planet.

I think more power usage = doing more things, and although the power was generated cleanly, it won't necessarily be spent similarly

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