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Comment by hdivider | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. And there is so much nonlinearity left to discover even here on Earth, once we get through a number of R&D and commercialization hurdles. Such as for commercial-grade fusion power.

All that deuterium in the oceans represents extroardinarily transformative potential for society. And new pathways for technology. Once we learn how to unleash this energy, Malthusianism won't have the appeal it does today.

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This is falling into the same trap. Fusion power is not a panacea. The Earth has a heat budget, where it can only emit so much heat over time (moderated by several factors, e.g. the current crisis with greenhouse gases is that we are lowering the rate at which heat is emitted). You cannot simply build an infinite number of fusion generators to generate an infinite amount of energy without also generating an infinite amount of heat that then gets dumped into the Earth's environment, killing all life in the process.

The whole point is that eventually a planetary population must stop producing more energy. Those that don't, die. At best, you could try to colonize more planets to increase your heat budget. The open question, then, is whether or not interplanetary colonization becomes feasible before or after the point at which energy production becomes do-or-die (or rather, don't-or-die). There is no law of the universe that says it must be so.

> The whole point is that eventually a planetary population must stop producing more energy. Those that don't, die.

Haven't read him until now, to be honest, but this discussion and some other recent threads from HN make me really want to start reading Georgescu-Roegen's work [1]:

> He is best known today for his 1971 The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.

There was a HN-er who had some good comments about Georgescu-Roegen in the past, not sure if he's still active (I can't remember his username) or if he'll see this comment to add some further insights.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen

> The Earth has a heat budget, where it can only emit so much heat over time

Yes, but it's much higher than most think. We're already creating technology like paints and evaporators that downconvert and upconvert photons into a band of the infrared spectrum that passes straight through the atmosphere and into space. Read up on passive radiative cooling, fascinating stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cool...

That an interesting technology, and indeed we do have the power to exert some control over the Earth's heat budget, I'm not disputing that. However, it seems plain to me that our capacity for spending the Earth's heat budget will, if left unchecked, always naturally outstrip our capacity to raise the Earth's heat budget (the latter requires long-term thinking, whereas the former only requires greedy short-term thinking). If you have two terms that trend to infinity, as long as one term increases faster than the other, it will dominate the other infinite term.

The problem with this reasonning is that it relies on potential, on hypothetical, on hope.

But the problem is not, it's just physics, and it's comming for sure.

Not attempting to solve it with what we know right now because we might pull off something out of our sleeve at some point doesn't seem neither rational nor scientific to me.

However, if we do tackle the problem, we give ourself a margin of security that we can later on remove if we actually manage to innovate out of out petri dish.

We know how to unleash that energy. It just isn't proven to be profitable (yet).

The reality of why we haven't done more to protect our habitat is far from idyllic.

Well, we know how to unleash it in a really dangerous way. We don't yet know how to get net power from fusion in a way that doesn't involve enormous explosions, though it appears we're getting close.

I'm guessing they phrased it slightly awkwardly and meant net positivity by profitability. Since technically we can release energy via fusion but we always have to spend more energy than we get out.

It was the second paragraph that made me think they were referring to financial profit, but we could well be all in vehement agreement.

No. We know how to do it safely. It just requires a large (expensive) machine. The thing we're getting close to is making the machine small enough to make it economically viable.

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