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Comment by gsatic | Hacker News Reader

We will hit energy limits soon. We are so used to building a new data center every 2 minutes to handle ever increasing number of 'how to boil an egg' videos, our cat pics, "free" email, "free" msging, "free" broadcast streams that its taken for granted the free stuff will stay free and tech innovation will never stop growing.

It's very similar to 2008 where ppl believed housing prices would never fall. But the day is coming where we can't afford that next data center. It's better to be prepared for that more than the singularity.

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What exactly are these energy limits, why are you expecting us to hit them soon, and what is "soon"? As an ignoramus on this, it sounds to me like all those predictions that we'll soon run out of oil [0].

[0] "Petroleum has been used for less than 50 years, and it is estimated that the supply will last about 25 or 30 years longer. If production is curtailed and waste stopped it may last till the end of the century. The most important effects of its disappearance will be in the lack of illuminants. Animal and vegetable oils will not begin to supply its place. This being the case, the reckless exploitation of oil fields and the consumption of oil for fuel should be checked." July 19, 1909 Titusville Herald

You might find this textbook interesting https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions

Thank you, that looks like a great book, and I'm impressed that they made it open access.

I'll try to find the time to go over it in more detail later, but from brief skimming now, I failed to find the "bottom line", saying how long we have until we run out of energy sources, and it seems to be advocating that by moving to renewable sources, we are good to go forever, at least unless population growth continues exponentially.

So with population growth declining across the world, and the gradually accelerating shift to renewables (and continuously improving tech), I don't quite see a big cause for concern. While of course it's true that there is some limit to how many GPUs we can run on Earth, I don't think we're anywhere close to that limit, and I don't see a particular argument against the option of seeding the rest of the universe with compute infrastructure too (other than that we should stop to think whether we should).

Why did the housing market crash?

Cause it reached a point where ppl couldn't pay.

Same story with energy. Google gives us free stuff cause someone pays. And the moment the ad industry stops paying the bill the next data center becomes unaffordable. The story is never about how much energy is available in the universe. The story is about Ameobas over eating and blowing up.

Oh boy, you opened yourself up to the usual slew of "peak oil is a hoax", "renewables will save us" "uhm have you ever heard of this thing called nuclear?" You are a brave soul indeed.

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