Hacker News Reader

I find the tone of your comment quite harsh in its choice of words. Just as you call the author a "doctrinaire doomer" for not showing huge optimism about the future of our way of life and civilization, you could be labeled an "infantile dreamer" and "deluded denialist" of the very real and concerning findings about the climate change and planetary limits we will be faced with, and already are. But is such pointed labeling really justified? And more importantly, what good does that kind of barbed language do in a conversation.

The blog post author seems to be concerned about the time and attention spent on something that is not likely (i.e. as his post states is off by several orders of magnitude at least) to realistically help with alleviating the urgent problems of planetary climate change and resource exhaustion. I agree with that concern.

Faced with finite resources and a time limit, prioritization is essential to ensure the best chance of success. Technologies like fusion detract from finding and implementing more realistic approaches that could help with long-term civilizational sustainability.

Might have been too harsh, but I've come to see doom and gloom or even just lots of pessimism as the other side of the climate change denial coin. It discourages us from actually trying to do anything, since it promotes the idea that the whole thing is just impossible and we should just live it up before we hit the Malthusian die-off. This point of view is extremely common in scientific and technical circles and it doesn't need to be promoted any more.

I also really dislike back-to-hunter-gatherer primitivism. It's an ideology of extremely privileged people who have never actually lived "close to nature" a.k.a. poor. It's a reactionary fantasy of a lost golden age that never existed and belongs in the same category as American right-wingers glorifying the 1950s or neo-medievalists glorifying the 1500s.

It's a brutally tough problem and it's likely that we already have dialed in a certain amount of climate change we will have to deal with, but it's not futile unless of course we just give up.

> since it promotes the idea that the whole thing is just impossible and we should just live it up before we hit the Malthusian die-off.

I haven't seen the author you criticize ever promoted either that or that he suggests that humanity as the whole should revert to "hunter-gatherer primitivism."

I see now you are summarizing his writing just as "just lots of pessimism". But the numbers don't lie. Unless you directly depend some specific miracle (and you should state which that is supposed to be) the numbers, if extrapolated assuming continuous growth, result in resource exhaustion. Continuous growth is provably impossible without some miracle involved.

And I guess the above observation you translate to "the whole thing is just impossible"? Would you define your "whole thing" as the "infinite growth and scientists will give us a miracle allowing that"? If not, what are you talking about then?

In the words of Tom Murphy, from the article:

"The physical reality is that we are living in an ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid ecological degradation and global disruption to the biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-termination of this whacky mode called modernity."

Book (PDF)

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

2021 Murphy, Thomas W, Jr

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

https://doi.org/10.21221/S2978-0-578-86717-5

> This guy is a ... "doomer" ...

Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable pastime, which society could certainly use more of.

> Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical reason why ...

True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested enough...

Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with massively negative ROI's.

Solar power is highly volatile and can't be stored in large quantities. It's not cheap when it is infinitely expensive at night. A better alternative to fusion would be fission. It works, is stable, and will likely remain far cheaper than fusion even when fusion becomes technically possible.

> can't be stored in large quantities.

"We don't have an energy problem. We have an energy storage problem."

We don't even have much of a storage problem, fission works and doesn't need energy storage. Our problem is rather that coal power is cheaper than fission. Coal plants are responsible for the majority of anthropogenic CO2.

Coal and fissile fuels are stored energy. My point is that if we can store energy at scale we can just grab the free energy that falls from the sky.

We can't store the energy in coal. Only in batteries at high cost and low capacity.

The claim that we can only store energy in batteries is a lie. In fact, storing energy in "e-fuels" is likely to be essential for a 100% renewable economy, as they are much better suited to long duration storage use cases.

The point isn't that fusion isn't worth doing but that NIF isn't actually about power generation and it's disappointing that it always gets into the news as if it was.

> This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies.

Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is "Do the Math" and his arguments are based on the math. If you can contribute a single example where his math is wrong, I'd be more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to ignore your future comments.

> Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."

I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote anything like that.

Sure. But the NIF approach IS doomed. Even if they succeed by reducing fuel costs by 5 orders of magnitude AND manage to capture 100% of the energy AND manage to increase firing rate 6 orders of magnitude it's STILL not even close to competitive with solar power.

That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.)

We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.

NIF is pretty universally panned as an approach to commercial fusion. It's more about doing basic science on plasmas and fusion and of course researching thermonuclear weapons without actually doing real (dirty) nuclear tests.

That being said, sometimes technology can do surprising things. If some other line of research somewhere yields, say, lasers that are multiple orders of magnitude more efficient then suddenly things might change and ICF would become a viable path. The massive inefficiency of lasers is the largest single problem.

The main reason magnetic containment is so much better than ICF is that huge electromagnets are more efficient than lasers plus inertia at confining the plasma.

Note that there are a bunch of ICF approaches that don't use lasers and potentially have much higher conversion efficiencies, though they are all pretty experimental and I wouldn't bet on any of them in particular.

From the article it doesn't seem like even a 100% efficient laser will do much to the economics...

Ha ha I read his earlier article about whether we could survive going back to foraging etc. and I think he is too optimistic! I think we have created enough pollution and wrecked ecosystems that 8bn people cannot go walkabout and survive simultaneously. Let alone people’s skill. Food will be the last concern: human predators and acess to water would be! But that is my take.

That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to hunter gatherer en mass.

The guy is by no means a "doomer" and nowhere does he say everything is futile, give up now. That is the opposite of his point: he wants us all to reflect on our trajectory, subject it to serious critique, and try to turn it into something more likely to carry us through civilizational adolescence[0].

He does have qualms about whether "effectively infinite clean energy" would do us any good right now. Look at what we've done with a temporary surfeit of very cheap (but not clean) energy. We are kicking out the legs of the stool we're sitting on. Human beings perch precariously at the apex of a massive biological edifice, the foundation of which is fundamental to human life, but we have the unfortunate habit of thinking all we need is technology and ingenuity. Far more than new technology, we need the wisdom to apply our tools for the long term flourishing of earth-borne life, of which humanity is a part.

[0]: https://youtu.be/6-1oUMNX64Y

> I view myself as intrinsically optimistic, so I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future—such worrying is not consistent with who I am.

From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.