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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the goal is to keep flying as much, but to be able to fly at all.

Also electrifying entire trucking and car fleets will take decades.

This provides a means of producing an incredibly densely stored source of energy from abundant inputs, that is the same price as oil.

It can solve for the problem of net zero production and transportation of equipment used in renewable energy production, for example, using present day transportation technology.

There are no silver bullets, but all of these innovations add together in order to create a combined solution to the worlds energy problems.

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> There are no silver bullets, but all of these innovations add together in order to create a combined solution to the worlds energy problems.

i worked all my professional carrer in science and innovation, if you have a reference for that statement i'd be glad you share it. maybe i missed something.

Do you mean that there is a silver bullet,or that innovations don't add together to provide solutions?

there's none. and (unfortunately for me) the best solutions often involve less technology rather than more.

If fuel from air can be made efficient, then combined with highly economical fusion, I could see it being viable. I'm not sure it will ever be cost competitive with long tail oil and gas, though. And that's at least 30 years out.

> then combined with highly economical fusion

If we had some ham, we could make ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

"Highly economical fusion" is probably an oxymoron.

There are multiple companies closing in on highly economical fusion. Enough so that they're receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from very savy private investors. My money is on Helion getting there first.

Are you aware that tritium like hydrogen is very hard to contain as it's as small as hydrogen and very nasty as it's highly radioactive. That alone prevents this technology to become cheap any time soon (assuming they get Q>1).

None of the DT approaches are going to be highly economical, for fundamental reasons. I do agree that Helion is the least dubious contender.

Solar and wind will be effectively free in the next decade compared to any other energy source with realistic projections as low as $10/MWh in high production areas and lots of promising battery technologies that may be able to timeshift energy for a similar cost by hours or days.

As we reign in the gratuitous subsidies to the fossil fuel sector, the question then becomes can we provide the plant and operational costs to store electricity chemically for $30/MWh (or as fossil fuels get more difficult to extract, $60 or $100).

Given that it's a brand new industry and you can do it right now with hydrogen for $200, energy included, then we only need to price in a fraction of the externalities right now and airline operators are going to be looking pretty hard at various green fuel options.

I think the goal should be to be able to fly as much and more.

Why is commercial aviation as a form of transport a useful goal? There are alternatives that have realistic energy efficiencies and use available technologies, like rail and nuclear shipping.

yes! rail is amazing in term of efficiency, a common high speed train has around a credit card worth of contact area with the rail for the whole train! it's also quite relaxing and socially interesting.

the problem is that rail is "boring" and rarely get sufficient funding.

It also allows for much more productivity while travelling, which is important for business travellers.

Rail is quite a lot less flexible than air travel. If you have a plane you can pretty much go anywhere that has a strip of asfalt of the right length. With rail you need to lay out the track between the two points with all the difficulties involved in that.

It's wired vs wireless ethernet. Which do you have in your home?

Energy efficiency will become radically less important as energy cost continues on down.

Then other things become more important, and drive choices.

There are no useful alternatives to airplanes for crossing a continent, or an ocean.

I agree we should do more trains, but they are limited to around 1500km per trip before flying is enough better that you look like a fool for suggesting it.

It would be slower, yes, but you could still get from London to Beijing in a few days, which seems reasonable when you look at historical travel patterns and the sheer inefficiency of the alternatives.

This is not 1290 when Marco Polo was traveling around. This is 2022 when people have seen much faster and nicer alternatives. Nobody is going to put up with days of travel when they can fly anymore.

I'm not convinced trains are more efficient than planes at that distance either - I don't' know how to analyses it, but planes see much less wind resistance because of altitude.

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