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Comment by graderjs | Hacker News Reader

Cheap power enables a lot of things, like synthesis of fertilizers or the ability to cheaply desalinate water.

It won’t fix these crisis directly, but it would reduce or remove a lot of the contributing factors.

Sure, it's complex interaction. But where should our focus priorities be, what task should we do first...what should we publish most about??? Maybe my priorities are wrong...what are you saying?

It's possible to do 2 things at once.

Of course, more focus on food security tho. Using the rising tide of promotion of fusion to draw attention to this more important goal is a good.

> produce enough food to feed everyone? The soil crisis and the phosphorus crisis....

Are all ultimately problems of energy being too scarce (and therefore too expensive).

I don't think so. You can be doing the wrong (unsustainable thing), even if you could afford to do the right thing.

Humans usually do the cheap thing. Historically making the right thing the cheap option has been much much more effective than trying to nag the invisible hand, which basically never works.

It's not the point, having cheaper energy is not going to magically reverse priorities. Focus on what's important. Anyway, you work it out. I'm not gonna waste my time having a discussion here.

Who cares what the priorities are as long as the right result happens? If cheap energy makes incentives align so the right outcome happens, why does it matter the wrong priority caused that outcome.

You choose: no electricity for 1 month, or no food for one month? Do your priorities matter now? It matters what we get to first. Unlimited energy won't matter if everyone starved. We have multiply redundant energy, but food is vulnerable. We can't grow our food with soil that's broken and without the right fertilizer (if you don't think it's a risk look into it more).

If we could afford doing the sustainable thing, but are doing the unsustainable thing anyway... that usually means we actually can't afford the right thing, or just can't do it.

Note: you have to account for costs of coordination and taking on risk - then you realize a lot of the "if only everyone would ${trivial thing}..." aren't done because they actually are prohibitively expensive or downright impossible.

I think you need to look at history more. The world is not driven by rational moral actors...We could have been farming sustainably, but haven't been. It's even cheaper to rotate crops in the right way, that preserves soil, but it wasn't done. There are engine designs that are more efficient, use less gas, but gas companies held them back. There are treatments that are better, save more lives, but pharma companies would lose out if there were less chronically sick people. "Can't afford" is a dirty word. Depends on perspective, encodes morals/values. Who can't afford? The greater good? Or the greedy? Who can't afford? The present generation? Or 3 clicks down the line when everything's dead because of choices made now?

The blocker to a better world is not some engineering impossibility, or market-rational overprice...not always. Often it's because someone with some power would lose out if we changed the way we did stuff, and they don't want that.

Human fucking nature. Can't cure that. Small bore example: Your engineering org would be better without the power-mad meeting-coordinator kahuna middle manager who holds hours long meetings for no purpose than to lord over proceedings and justify their own pretense of importance. The greater good would be served by demolishing said meetings, and removing kahuna from org. Does it happen? Often, no. Why? Because the world is not driven my moral, rational actors.

Suggesting that energy should remain too expensive for billions of people until other problems are solved seems a bit mean.

Strawman. Not what I'm suggesting. Next!

Energy is the ability to transform matter from one state to another.

Food is a particular form of matter.

Therefore...

Brilliant! YOur semantics have solved the wolrd food crisis. Advance to next stagel

You don't think having a cheap way to power artificial light sources might be relavent to the food crisis in places not suitable to growing food the natural way?

Think about it. I don't think "those places" are going to be getting first dibs on fusion anyway, not de point. It's not that it ain't relevant. Of course interacts, but focus on food first.

Look everyone this is fun and all but I’m not going to waste my time going back and forth on this. Sort it out amongst yourselves. You can pretend you’ve won and everything, I’m cool with that.

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