Tidal energy is not renewable
cs.stanford.edu
cs.stanford.edu
Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth.
How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at around 15 billion. But continuing at its current growth rate (an optimistic assumption I think), gets us to about 150 trillion humans in 1,000 years.
And at 2% growth rate, each of those humans will consume 20,000 times more energy than a circa 2023 human.
Now state of the art technology wastes about 80% of the energy consumed, so this is equivalent to 100,000 times more useful energy consumed per human.
So the physics in this page is a good examination of the surprisingly large compounding effects of unchecked exponential growth.
There's a 2nd big assumption:
That tidal energy extracted is additional Earth's rotational energy loss above what Earth does by itself.
According to the paper, tidal energy is dissipated through friction between ocean water & the seafloor. This dissipated energy subtracts from Earth's rotational energy. And some rotational energy is transferred to the moon (which makes the moon move further out). Ok so far.
Author's 2nd assumption is that as tidal energy is tapped, this is extra energy that subtracts from Earth's rotation.
But is it? It might also be that tidal energy extracted by humans, comes out of some fixed 'budget', and the remainder is dissipated naturally. More tidal energy extracted by humans -> less tidal energy dissipated through ocean vs. seafloor friction.
Kind of like solar influx: it's a huge but (apart from fluctuations) fixed amount. We can tap some % of that potential, but what's available doesn't increase. And what humans don't tap, gets absorbed / radiated out by other natural processes.
I won't even hazard a guess. But it would be interesting to figure out which of those applies.
Maybe I'm naive and simple minded. But that just seems insane.
If I'm doing the math right, at 2.3% growth = we produce more energy than the Sun in 4500 years.
It doesn't matter how many years it is. It's never happening.
Just look at how damn hot and inhospitable the sun is. We're not producing more energy here!
It'd be infinitely more plausible to build a Dyson sphere around the Sun, and call me naive on that, too, but I'm skeptical that's ever gonna happen either.
In a far-future where a TNG-inspired Dyson structure were somehow feasible (1AU size, habitable surface on interior, etc.), it’d be incredibly disappointing if we applied the (unrealistic) science and (unrealistic) resources towards building such a thing, rather than interstellar efforts. Buuuut maybe I’m just projecting my disappointment with our planet’s current approach to science and resource utilization.
Which would leave 4000 years or so to colonize every system with 1000 light years.
In each system collecting and engineering with low gravity material (asteroids, centaurs, smaller moons, etc.) and using that to capture solar energy will get routine.
Gas giants are basically massive hydrogen nuclear energy depots.
Earth and even our solar system don’t form any kind limit to resource growth on time scales like that.
Which is good, because Mercury is mostly metal, whereas e.g. Mars is mostly rock and thus not useful for this kind of work
Not so. The calculation of the 1031 years is equation 19 and assumes the decrease in rotational energy all goes to human purposes.
The flaw in the OP is the assumption that human consumption keeps rising at .02 per year for 1031 years: we would probably boil the oceans away because of the waste heat from using that much electrical power.
Which would slow the earth due to the change in angular momentum
Intuitively, if we extract energy from the tides, tides will be less tall and the speed of water will be smaller. Ocean currents will slow down too.
What I don't know is, less friction on the seafloor means that we would actually make Earth slow down less faster than it would do if left alone?
And currents are also affected by the rotation of the Earth, temp differences, and salinity differences so they might not change dramatically.
I keep posting this link here on HN but, once again, it seems very appropriate:
> The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Edit: The link points out that in 1,400 years we'd be using energy at the rate produced by the sun and in 2,500 years at the rate of the entire Milky Way. Even if we solved the heat radiation problem, it seems unlikely we'd be able to obtain fuel for our fusion reactors at a sufficient rate given the speed of light and the density of matter in the universe.
The sun radiates heat like a blackbody sphere with the surface area of the sun and a surface temperature of 5600K or so.
If the Earth were to have a fancy heat pump that radiated the same amount of heat into space, it would need the radiating area times the effective temperature to the fourth power equal to that of the sun. The real killer problem is that your heat pump is subject to the Carnot efficiency of pumping heat to that same temperature.
By the most straightforward Second Law calculation, entropy transferred to hot side >= entropy removed from cold side. So Q_hot / T_hot >= Q_cold / T_cold. Q_cold is the heat removed from the pleasant ~300K place where the humans are. At 5600K on the hot side, 18.6 times as much heat needs to be radiated out, so for every bit of useful work done on Earth, at least 17.6 times as much energy is consumed in cooling. If you want the radiator to be only half the surface area of the sun, multiply that by about 16.
What future humans really need is a Dyson sphere with absolutely enormous radiating area. :)
building things which receive sunlight but which emit IR at this wavelength would have a cooling effect, though I don't know to what scale.
no need to pump anything up to space, lol. just put hot stuff inside vessels which are painted with a material which radiates heat at this specific wavelength.
thanks for nitpicking; always appreciated
That sounds like a line from Dr. Strangelove by the titular character with ol' Bucky following up with "Mr. President, we should not allow a heat pump gap!".
Although the link is useful for the thermodynamic calculations, there are two major problems with the argument as presented:
1. Right up front the physicist arbitrarily bans space travel. The economist, being an agreeable man who'd probably rather be making smalltalk with a pleasant member of the opposite sex rather than defending his whole profession to a bolshie physicist, accepts this limitation, but he shouldn't have done. Nothing in economics is predicated on a space travel ban. We are already obtaining economic growth from space via satellites and that era has barely got started. None of the physics arguments work if you make the relatively small leap to putting factories, power plants etc on moons, asteroids, space stations or other planets. This doesn't require colonization assuming progress in robotics.
2. Much more seriously, the physicist doesn't understand what growth or wealth mean in an economic context. The economist tries patiently to explain this to him many times, and he just doesn't get it. This is a very common problem when talking about economics because people aren't used to the expansive definition of wealth economists use, so often conflate it with other things like money or (in this case) energy.
You can increase wealth indefinitely even with a stable population and stable energy/resource usage. This isn't controversial or weird, it's just part of how wealth is defined. The VR example is one attempt, dessert another attempt to explain this to him, but he just doesn't get it until the next day when he suddenly has an epiphany but decides it wasn't his fault because he personally distinguishes between "growth" and "development". No such distinction is recognized by actual economists for valid reasons. But you don't get to claim there's a problem with economics just because you failed to understand the lingo of the field.
When you have a capped number of humans, and every last one of them is jacked into the Matrix and has everything they could possibly want - what is there left to grow? If the growth in "wealth" doesn't actually reflect an improvement in human experience, then it's a pointless term. Sure you can have two computers trade virtual tokens at an ever-increasing rate until you saturate the network cable, but calling it "wealth" is an exercise in semantic subterfuge.
It's like saying economic growth is unbounded because you can always print more money. Eventually it has to bottom out in something real.
Wealth as used by economists just means all the goods and services that we provide to one another, sometimes with the addition of "services" like a clean environment. It's very broad and includes things like cultural wealth, and doesn't even have to involve selling something.
That's why printing money doesn't create economic growth and nobody claims otherwise. In fact in the debate they specifically agree to discount inflation to avoid it getting in the way.
The economist's position - and yours, apparently - is that "growth", whatever it is, can be sustained literally infinitely, on a finite rock amongst a finite group of hairless apes where nothing about the actual situation is infinite. So you can either have a highly abstract definition of "growth" that allows this to be true, or a definition that most people would recognize as meaningful or positive, but not both.
However photovoltaic and wind does not produce much waste heat. Arguably solar and wind cannot scale 1000x but then you could have non thermal fusion like Helion's https://www.helionenergy.com/technology/.
Btw, thermal power is already showing limits (rivers overheating in summers), we don't have to wait 400 years to see its failure.
No, it doesn't. The waste heat, at the very end of the day, is always rather close to 100%. I.e. we use all that electric energy we generate to power computer, fridges, and many other machines, all of which – sooner or later – convert that electric energy to heat. (And, well, maybe a bit of chemical binding energy, depending on the application. But then, a few decades later, those products of our work will usually fall apart and/or are being burnt or torn down.)
> you could have non thermal fusion like Helion's
No, you can't. As the author says:
> this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
Free free to have a look at his other article (the one he links in the paragraph above) for some more details -> https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
(yes yes some of it is reflected back into space as non-IR light, but you can also lose IR-emissions back into space without heating the Earth as well).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
We mostly use energy to manufacture things.
Life takes energy and lowers the entropy of the planet. Why shouldn't humans able to do the same? Any technical reason?
The technical reason is called entropy. Diffuse heat is hard to concentrate and use, much like gas outside of a container.
Reducing entropy necessarily produces waste energy + entropy elsewhere. So the technical reason this cannot be done at the planetary scale is called Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Yes, we could try to put all that excess entropy & heat into space but there are limits to that (Stefan-Boltzmann law, among other things).
Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Even apparent mavericks such as Thomas Piketty assume that growth will continue interminably (noted in Capital in the Twenty-First Century).
Rather than being a critique of Liu, you've actually written a criticism of those he himself is generally addressing.
Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems.
Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.
Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it which are founded on growth. They create development patterns (most especially of urban land use --- the most massive impact of the automobile was on city and suburban landscapes), and consumption patterns.
Once entrenched, those are all exceedingly difficult to dislodge.
I'd argue that China is wrestling with this now, and that a fair bit of the disruption of the past few years (above and beyond exogenous shocks, notably Covid-19) involve this, as the CCP attempts to wrest power back from industrial, financial, and real estate interests.
Some European countries (notably the Netherlands and Amsterdam with its bicycle- and transit-centric transport planning), Japan, and possibly others such as Costa Rica, seem to have followed a lower-growth curve. These may actually find transition more viable.
At the capital of capitalism, the United States, transition faces absolutely massive obstructions in the form of politics, politics-expressed-as-social-values, economic interests, finance, real estate, land use, transportation, building codes (residential, commercial, and industrial), and more. Those are far more significant obstructions than actual technical solutions, and the more illuminating advocates of sustainability that I follow tend to emphasize this.
(I'll list these later, though I'm still waiting for XorNot to cough up. I'll give them a few more hours.)
I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some stop to exponential growth at some point (but not only because of that). Economic power is somewhat fungible with mitary power, and lack of power in a possible future less stable system of nations could be very problematic.
In short I think the safest and most conservative path for any nation to protect it's future is to take advantage of as much growth as it safely can for as long as it lasts.
Another way to look at is that is the U.S. was to opt out of growth right now, how long would it take for us to become irrelevant on the world stage, and how long after that before we were (and our citizens) negatively impacted by trade deals because of lack of leverage (which is probably a best case scenario of negative possibilities IMO). It's the job of a government to avoid that scenario.
Transitioning is hard, but I'm not sure it's harder than the alternative, depending on how far out we are to it being forced on everyone.
That said, I'd be happy to read whatever info you have on the topic to expand my thinking.
To that extent, "rapid growth" seems largely a matter of "reaching your ultimate potential earlier". And the post-rapid-growth phase turns out to have ... interesting challenges: environment, politics, demographics, and more, many of which emerge after sheer growth alone can no longer paper over conflicts or issues which had been present all along.
There's also of course the argument that GDP doesn't measure actual net wealth or common weal, which is a criticism that dates back to the origins of GDP/GNP, and even its creator, Simon Kuznets. There are numerous alternative measures that are proposed. One aspect I've not seen much addressed is that GDP is largely a tool for managing macroeconomic monetary dynamics, that is, as total monetary exchange grows or shrinks, then the monetary base itself must be adjusted, which is the remit of central banks. Those banks can create or destroy money at will (pursuant to policy goals and prime directives), because money itself is not wealth. The knock-on effects are felt profoundly in asset markets, that is, goods or securities whose principle or significant function is to serve as an inflation-resistant store of wealth: stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, collectables (art, wine, cars, etc.), and the like. Asset value inflation is not itself economic productivity. It may reflect economic productivity (that's at least the fig leaf covering stock markets), but far more often, asset inflation simply follows national and global monetary policy, most especially rising in times of loose money or easy loans (largely equivalent terms). John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 remains an excellent post mortem of one such event. To that extent, measuring GDP growth alone provides distorted view of actual wealth growth, both at the level of individuals (say, median, bottom quintile), and of net national power and stability, though of course how distorted is the stuff of legendary disagreements.
There is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction. Instability in the Levant following the mid-2000s has been tied to loss of net-exporter status among oil producers (Syria, Egypt, Libya), as well as food scarcity through both climate-related crop shortages and reduced imports as oil revenues decline. One of the more spectacular cases is the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which underwent a birdshit apocalypse after (briefly) highlighting as the world's richest nation (per capita) after what proved to be a highly limited resource reached its limits. <https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/world/a-pacific-island-na...>
The country's recovered somewhat by entering into the hospitality business. That is, it runs internment camps for the refugees Australia would prefer to pretend don't exist and sends elsewhere: <https://devpolicy.org/nauru-riches-to-rags-to-riches-2021041...>
To the extent that contemporary economies run on the basis of extraction (petroleum, coal, natural gas, minerals, groundwater, topsoil) and sink exhaustion (the ozone layer, heavy metal contamination, greenhouse gasses, plastics and endocrine disruptors, habitat and species disruption, ...), none of which are costed into either market transactions or national wealth/income statistics ... well, we're all on busses headed toward various cliffs, some nearer, some further.
One option is to expend resources on things which presently have relatively low value but would be exceedingly useful in a post-carbon / post-collapse society. That includes basic skills, sustainable practices, sustainable infrastructure, and the social patterns which can effectively utilise these. Keep in mind that this runs directly contrary to market signalling as markets have an overwhelming present-bias in assigning values, as anyone caught holding the bag after a crash can tell you. Potential future utility simply isn't considered, and in general, non-market mechanisms seem to be required to encourage such investments.
(There are other systems which similarly fail to consider long-term value, and it's long been a favourite trope to note the immense ecological contamination and pollution which occurred in the Soviet bloc. However similar desecration was seen both earlier and simultaneously under market systems ... both are poor at delivering ecological equity. Ultimate reforms have tended to emerge through social movements, legislation, and legal recourse, none of which are market-based.)
My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. That is, equity and distribution count for far more than total gross production or consumption. Invest in infrastructure, healthcare (with a strong emphasis on basic access and preventive measures rather than heroic interventions), education, affordable housing, social safety nets, and sustainable development of transport, built infrastructure (at individual building, community, regional and national levels), resource preservation and enhancement (e.g., water, soil, forest, and wildlands cultivation), actual productivity, mitigation of undesired consequences, and the like, and ... I think you might see a path which whilst it might not register on mainstream metrics is actually preferable over the long run.
Japan also consciously entered on a relatively lower-energy path than the US, largely through energy and vehicle taxation and licencing practices, though there were others. That's not to say Japan doesn't have a large number of automobiles, or a strong automobile sector. It does.
But domestic autos tend to be smaller than those made for export elsewhere, there's a tremendous domestic transit system (famously the Shinkansen), and Japan's electronics industry (with hits and misses) was the result of a deliberate government-directed policy toward more efficient resource utilisation over simply mass consumption.
Not perfectly achieved, by any means, but a contrast to policies elsewhere.
I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructive and planet-destroying way. The sooner nations realize this, the better.
A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.
There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.
Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.
The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.
And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:
State GDP EU rank GDP/capita (WW)
----- ----------- ---------------
Albania: 40 101
Belgium: 12 18
Bulgaria: 26 73
Canada: n/a n/a
Croatia: 29 54
Czechia: 19 37
Denmark: 16 9
Estonia: 35 38
Finland: 18 15
France: 3 21
Germany: 1 16
Greece: 22 39
Hungary: 24 51
Iceland: 37 6
Italy: 4 25
Latvia: 34 50
Lithuania: 30 44
Luxembourg: 27 1
Montenegro: 46 75
the Netherlands: 7 12
North Macedonia: 42 92
Norway: 13 3
Poland: 10 49
Romania: 17 55
Slovakia: 25 45
Slovenia: 31 34
Spain: 6 29
Turkey: 8 53
United Kingdom: 2 22
United States: n/a n/a
- I've listed the North American members, but omitted their GDP as these are not European states.)
- EU rank is 1--50 inclusive.
- GDP/capita rank is 1--134 within Europe, based on global IMF rankings of 192 states worldwide.
Sources:
- GDP overall: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>
- GDP/capita: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>
Takeaway: Alliances trump GDP or per-capita income.
Cryptocurrencies are kind of going in that direction, where the "value" that is reported as economic growth doesn't correspond to any kind of real-world matter or activity, but is simply assigned to some specific group of bits.
I can kind of believe that this virtual kind of growth could continue a long time without boiling the planet, but of course that doesn't make things less absurd, as the "value" would represent nothing objectively useful and would have to be maintained artificially - either through scarcity mechanisms like PoW etc, or through locked-down devices and ecosystems.
So that kind of "growth" could go on forever without burning the planet but would probably be a step back for civilization.
There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies, which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, and hence induces greater demand). And there are instances of outsourced resource utilisation (both in terms of inputs and of waste sinks), most notably that of China which has committed tremendous domestic resources and incurred immense environmental insult in providing "cheap goods" (that is: goods lacking fully-costed externality impacts) to developed countries.
But there's nary a trace of actual empirical evidence of substantive decoupling in the real world. Much handwaving and could-be's, however.
We know the economy is decoupled from physical limits because we have built it to be that way. If you go to my bank right now, they are not going to have a physical pile of valuable objects there which is my account balance. They have a computer that stores numbers, and obviously it needs energy to operate, but it doesn’t cost 10x energy to store 10,000 instead of 1,000 in the database entry for my account balance.
But that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with decoupling the actual economy from its physical foundations. Long after Qing, China remained fundamentally dependent on rice and wheat harvests (and suffered tremendous population losses, as much as 8 million deaths) many centuries later.
The wealth-tracking representation has been decoupled from any substance with intrinsic value, but the economy has not.
Put another way: you could have a monetary system in which currency was entirely backed in precious gold and silver, and introduce huge quantities of same to your economy ... without increasing the actual wealth of the nation by Adam Smith's definition, "annual produce and labour of the nation". This was precisely the situation Spain found itself in following its conquest of the Americas and importation of vast quantities of South American gold and silver.
They never want to examine the consequences of that thought (no growth means we're into a zero-sum game) or whether they think we're even plausibly close to the limit (instead they want to have a proxy argument about environmental damage or global warming, and are very uninterested in any specific solutions to their go to examples - i.e. "we can't possibly stop emitting CO2 from power generation, we must simply use less power!").
But no.
War. War, real estate, and more pretend finance for finance sake. Either that or mass producing the tools of tyranny.
Even stars have limits to their energy. If you don't believe in limits then you aren't accepting physical reality.
Given two countries where one lints it's economic growth and the other doesn't, if they're given another few hundred years before a limit is hit, which one is in a better place to respond when that limit is hit? Does the country that minutes itself even still exist as it did, or was it taken over by a stronger one (whether economically, militarily or culturally)?
I could point to any number of examples refuting this, but really prefer you lay your cards on the table first.
I've mentioned numerous specific examples refuting that here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399144>
It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.
What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.
Money is a measure of wealth, it is not wealth itself. Much as a ruler is a measure of length, not length itself.
The ability to measure 1,000 km does not equate to the capacity to travel 1,000 km.
The ability to measure a hectare of land does not equate to the possession of a hectare of land.
The ability to measure a year's worth of labour productivity, or industrial output, does not equate to the realisation of a year's worth of productivity.
And financial units absent the goods and services that they can access ... are worthless.
As a forecast which may or may not happen? Yes.
As an actual outcome that has been decided a priori? No, not at all. Only planned economies tried to do that.
so far it has been the case with human economics across all countries/economies. yes some shareholders will be zeroed out during recession, but others will continue on the growth journey
It's common in finance and population ecology. See, e.g., lynx-hare population dynamics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
For example, the US had a fertility rate of 7.0(!) in 1800 and saw no significant population growth due to births because most of those kids died well before reaching the age of reproduction.
Historically, fertility rates have always dropped once basic standards of living have managed to get rid of excess child mortality.
We know from experience that if those places actually started to improve, then the birth rate would drop precipitously.
Are you talking about something else ?
As to 2022, China did briefly drop to a TFR of 1.09, like GP said [1]; but the moving average over several years is more like 1.3. You have to put the 2022 drop in context that their very strict lockdown went into its third year, and there were two cases of pregnant women losing their babies e.g. because the hospital denied them entry for having negative Covid tests but a few hours too old [2].
[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...
[1]: "China's fertility rate drops to record low 1.09 in 2022- state media" https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dr...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2022/01/07/china-covid-cases-miscarriage...
Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether.
China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse.
1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive
2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe)
3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms
4. Higher education decreasing fertile years.
5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment.
You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job.
China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not
Rates are normally calculated by couples. 0.85 per person is a decline.
1. Easter island -- we, humans, deforested the island, that degraded and depleted human population significantly even before the first european ships discovered the island. From what I've heard, "Rapa Nui" movie is unusually historically correct on the events.
2. St. Matthew Island -- 29 introduced reindeer rapidly overpopulated the island and ate all the available food there, so the whole population died.
Same thing can happen on planet Earth.
More recent research shows that this is probably not true - there's evidence that the population was growing right up until the arrival of Europeans[1].
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.h...
It is almost like humans are not mindless animals who solely reproduce because of biological urges or something.
I suppose spacefaring humans might use that kind of power but if they are living in space they are no longer part of the biosphere of Earth.
Sure, why not?
It's absurd today for the average person, but it's the kind of thing rich people get to do already, and looking at the rich today is a decent (though imperfect because inflation and invention don't work like that) hint for what normal people can afford in a richer future.
Cheapest flight I've ever taken was 9.99 from Berlin to London — not sure if pounds or euros, but does it matter when either way it is less than I used to spend on a week of school lunches nearly 20 years earlier?
The comparison was conceptual thing to similar thing. Only the rich own and operate private planes, that hasn't changed. The fact that other, more sophisticated planes exist doesn't undermine the point.
There are also diminishing returns. And past leaps in lifestyles aren't guaranteed to continue the same trends, and can reverse.
The earth has seen several major extinction events. Arguably humans are the cause of the latest one. Doubtful we can sustain billions of us without an ecological system to produce our bare necessities, certainly not enough for a full life.
That's literally the billionaire lifestyle.
Meanwhile cryptocurrency is seeing decades of power efficiency undone as miners bring old power plants online and want to burn tyres to power their scams.
In the future, we might use a lot of energy for the we cannot imagine today.
In the future, we might stop using every the way we do today.
In the future, we may produce and consume substantial energy in places other than earth's surface.
In the future, the concept of energy itself might be different, much like people couldn't imagine the type of energy involved in nuclear fission.
In reality we're already certain to hit a population maximum in just two+ decades, and not only that but the world is very likely to be on a negative population growth curve after that for some time. And we're going to need some new tech revolution to drive energy demand in developed countries up much more than it is, and the developing world's per-capita demand will not likely exceed the developed world's once fully developed.
I.e., we're not growing forever, the end of population growth is around the corner, and the end of energy demand growth is not much further.
I realize the big issue is settled here but just to scope this detail: the total land area of earth is coincidentally approximately 150 million km^2
At 150 trillion humans each human would get just about a square meter. Many of those square meters are uninhabitable.
I highly recommend that you find a copy of this (in)famous book about it: << City of Darkness>> (https://cityofdarkness.co.uk).
Similarly solar isn't renewable because at some point the Sun is going to run out of hydrogen, and if you made a dyson sphere to capture all of the Sun's energy you would wipe out life on earth.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
[2] https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-...
For that to happen we need almost complete automation, which would provide cheap food, cheap housing, cheap healthcare, and lack of worry about the immediate future.
Even if you can sustain 1% increase in population per year, 1000 years of prosperity will result in
(8 billion)*(1.01^1000) = 167673 billion = 167 trillion people
(1% is roughly the current population growth, but it's slowing down)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The total energy received by the earth from the sun during a year is about 5 million exajoules, a fraction of which reaches the surface. 5 million is much more than 474. But at a seemingly modest 2% per year growth rate (as it was between 1980 and 2006), our energy consumption will match those 5 million exajoules in less than 500 years!
Think about that: if energy consumption growth continues at the current pace, then in 500 years we'll either be using ALL solar energy received by the earth (leaving none for the biosphere), or we'll have figured out some magic technology to produce 5 million exajoules of energy per year. Assuming the magic technology, where are we going to get rid of all that extra heat? It would effectively be like having a second sun on earth, cooking us in place.
edit: I copied the numbers above from a post I wrote in 2010, so it may be a bit out of date. But Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a video where she talked about a similar timescale, i.e. boiling oceans in 400 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
Maybe a few hundred years from now, Internet archaeologists will find your comment as one of the first harbingers of the coming World Energy Crisis, much as we see the 1912 Rodney & Otamatea Times "Coal Consumption Affecting Climate" snippet today.[0]
Then they'll find this comment...
----
[0] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/rodney-and-otam...
A computer today costs roughly the same as a computer in the 1980s, and it also consumes roughly the same amount of energy as a computer from that era. We got faster computers because we got better at making transistors.
If we look at laptops, a device which consumes 200W already gets hot enough that it is uncomfortable to actually place on your lap. A 1kW desktop computer is pretty much impossible to cool.
At our current population, those 5 million exajoules a year is a constant power consumption of roughly 16 megawatt per person. For comparison, that's about the same magnitude of energy you'd need for every human to launch a Falcon 9 to eat lunch in the ISS. Once figures get this big, you simply run out of things to do.
It's been well known since at least The limits to growth[1], 51 years ago.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....
Maybe in 1950 people would have argued that soldering all those vacuum tubes would be too difficult, and they'd have been correct, but transistors and CAD changed the entire reference frame.
If only collective intelligence could rise above it all we might be well on the way to enjoying the creation of a more efficient, less wasteful, and more worthwhile future. . . but that too mentally taxing to engage with. . .so it goes
Or the only thing achievable is travel at some fraction of the speed of light. Say, a few %. At which point the nearest stars are a few-centuries away (one way trip), making interstellar travel feasible at least in theory.
But say, 99% or 99.99% of lightspeed? That's what's done with a few particles in huge projects like the LHC. So ehm.. no. Not unless (see above).
Then to send that equipment requires sub light speed - say 0.1C
Once the equipment is on the other planet, then sending information is 1C.
I think the assumption that we need to send humans to other planets is not true.
Once we figure out how to build better space faring beings that we can stream our consciousness at light speed, that seems more feasible for space travel.
Humans are squishy meat bags that need to eat multiple times a day, pee, poop, sleep, stable temperature and many other needs to survive.
There’s a reason why humans have only made it to moon which is about 400,000km but for all other planets only rovers have touched down.
I highly doubt Elon/SpaceX will have living humans on Mars in our lifetime, it’s much more likely they’ll have their Optimus robot or a descendant of it on mars receiving instructions from Earth.
Human intelligence and consciousness isn’t that special. Just an algorithm running on biological hardware.
[0] no a Casimir cavity won't do that: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/can-a-casim...
The world population is predicted to peak about 30% above where it is now and then fall back -- maybe to 7 billion people sustained. We seem to need about 200 GJ per person to be really happy [1], so let's assume 300 GJ per person.
We should be able to get by, happily, on 2000 EJ per year sustained. By your figures, that's less than 1% of what the sun provides.
[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...
Then at that rate we'd have 100,000 years of Tidal energy available even if we used it for the totality of our energy needs (and 10,000,000 years if we use it for 1% of our needs as taken in the paper). And that was basically the point of the person you're responding to: it's not so much that tidal energy is non-renewable, the problem is that the paper assume exponential consumption growth, and exponential growth is unsustainable no matter what.
If my maths is right, that's about 40,000 kcal per person per day, or about 15 times the energy consumption of an average adult.
I'm trying to figure out if that's a lot or not. On the one hand, not: this ratio is not strictly bounded in any way, and the human energy consumption is an arbitrary denominator. Still, a very rough interpretation is to say, we consume daily, on average, the fruit of work of 15 people.
Of course, that is very skewed. I wonder what the ratio looks like for an average American or European - must be much more.
It goes to show what a gilded life we live (on average!!!). Before industrial revolution, all energy basically was muscle power, and it's like for every 1 person alive, we have 15 servants turning the generator for us. I suppose some of this number is literal service providers, fed by food produced by powered agriculture.
Is there a logical upper bound to this number? Is there some energy amount we can't use given sufficient supply? Ultimately, all energy we produce is spent on humans so our energy consumption is a yardstick for human energy needs.
But that's not quite right either; a lot of energy is wasted. I wonder how much of this number is clothes that go straight from factory to landfill, AC left overnight, inefficient engines and energy storage.
I don't really have a point, other than I think this is an interesting fraction to look at.
I got some numbers form a random result in google: http://www.ejolt.org/2012/12/human-energy-use-endosomatic-ex...
Endosomatic energy (i.e. food): 3.5GJ/year/person
Exosomatically energy (i.e. firewood, electricity, solar, fossil fuel, whatever):
hunter-gatherers: 20 GJ/year/person (i.e. x6)
agriculturalists using animals: 60 GJ/year/person (i.e. x17)
industrial society: 200–300 GJ/year/person (i.e. x57-x86)
As someone with a physics background... well... it's within an order of magnitude or two, so that sounds close enough to be probably accurate.
http://insideenergy.org/wp-content/uploads//2017/01/historic...
from:
This doesn't account for all the “imported energy” that comes when you outsource your industrial production abroad. Granted even then the energy consumption doesn't increase exponentially anymore, but it's not flat either.
What is also interesting is that China's "energy intensity" - energy used per unit of GDP is pretty flat, if wealthier nations were exporting energy demand via imports I would expect that number to be climbing. I am at a bit of a loss as to how to determine exactly what is going on TBH.
> if wealthier nations were exporting energy demand via imports I would expect that number to be climbing
Why? These exports from China generates GDP in China so it just grow the energy consumption as well as the Chinese GDP, making the ratio flat.
I don't know, if your basis for your opinion is that you googled it and you got some very wide ranging and contradictory results then that seems like a poor foundation to start with.
> Why? These exports from China generates GDP in China so it just grow the energy consumption as well as the Chinese GDP, making the ratio flat.
If the ratio is flat then there isn't really much of an export of energy effect in my view. If you are exports were dominated specifically by the use of energy (over say human capital or laxer pollution standards) that intensity would rise because it would be the source of the economic advantage. I.e. if domestic consumption trade 1 unit of energy for one unit of growth but exports trades 2 units of energy for one unit of growth intensity will rise if exports dominate the energy mix. That does not seem to be the case.
A huge proportion of US imports seem to be based on "assembly" from what I can tell, the dominant categories from China are electrical/electronic goods and industrial machines - most of the stuff is the assembling of US & EU (and Taiwan for semiconductor reasons) made parts.. the energy mix of the import-export dynamic seems like it needs a lot of analysis - I would like something authoritative that shows an attempt at an analysis, I can't seem to find it.
They didn't need to build massive lines of analog telecommunications, they just jumped right to cellular and satellite technology. They can jump right to solar and other renewables as they electrify. They can skip incandescent lighting and go right to LEDs.
More specifically: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita
The implausibly is staggering, we'd run out of resources to build extractors way before causing any meaningful shift in the rotation: if the monstrous land barriers of the continents take millions of years to drain a small percentage of the energy, we have zero hope of achieving much more with the solid mass available to us on Earth, short of a Dyson sphere-level breakthrough in "moving mass around", oh, and by the way it has to happen deep underwater as well, and we need to channel all the energy somewhere useful! Way harder than just making a ginormous but thin solar array in space, which is almost certainly what we'd do instead from a "energy cost to arrange matter" optimization POV.
Earth's mass is 10^24 kg.
E_earth = mc^2 = 9 * 10^40 J
E_current * 1.02^x = E_earth
474 * 10^18 * 1.02^x = 9 * 10^40
x = 2357.91 years
At a modest 2% growth we would be using up the entire Earth's mass in energy per year in only 2358 years.
So this is a bit of much ado about nothing. We're not going to exceed low single digits percentage points of the energy reaching the planet from the Sun.
Heat dissipation is relatively easy if we use 1% equivalent of Solar energy on Earth: the water cycle can speed up in response to positive forcings and slow down in response to negative forcings. This is why the planet's climate has been so stable in the sense of being a random walk centered on an optimum that supports the sort of life that we have on the planet. Similar observations explain Mars' and Venus' inhospitability: there's not enough atmosphere, much less liquid water on Mars to drive a similar thermostatic system, while Venus' climate is pegged at a maximum, with albedo as high as it can reasonably go, and it can't cool itself significantly with anything like a water cycle.
Imagine the sphere of a civilization expanding in space at some speed, in all directions. The volume of this sphere would equal time cubed (t^3) times some constant.
Now suppose this civilization has a magical power source that allows them to keep growing power consumption exponentially. So power consumption would equal 2^t (where time unit = one doubling time, 35 years in the case of 2% growth) times some constant.
2^t will always overtake t^3 no matter the constants, so power density of the sphere trends to infinity, so the civilization will cook itself in waste heat.
But yeah I expect we’ll not make it 100 years let alone 500. Our ability to change our behavior to avoid obvious problems is poor bordering on suicidal.
So nuclear?
It's the same reason that the Earth radiates exactly as much energy as it receives from the sun, just a larger number of lower energy, higher entropy photons. What the sun really provides is a source of low entropy.
My thinking is that the energy that got absorb in other processes such a photosynthesis is a delayed release.
The energy released must have some time delay. Maybe it all averages out overtime.
Difficult problem I wonder if it is worth answering.
With a brief, 60 million year time frame exception during the Carboniferous, though, the energy stored in life processes is a wash. Assembly and decay are a net balance, and life itself is a strong driver of entropy, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if, on the whole, the biosphere is a net energy sink.
An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37122796 | https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313586 | https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/country-over...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
There are 8 billion people in the world, and we’re on track to have 10 by end of century. Which is more likely? Everyone lives like a European (from a consumption perspective)? Or a bunch of people don’t or die while some do?
There are no systems that can ever be created to actually balance out / eliminate inequality, outside of very small communities operated via extreme authoritarianism.
See: modern Sweden. A formerly highly effective welfare state, increasingly brought to its knees by poor immigrants (and it's going to get a lot worse over the coming decades). They can't remotely handle what's happening to their country in terms of inequality, despite how good they have been historically at managing it. France - also historically effective at managing a high quality of life welfare state - has entirely failed at managing a similar scenario, and for the same reasons.
The exact same principle applies globally as it does locally. It can't be done under any scenario. So yes, vast inequality will persist forever, as it has forever.
The end of inequality is when there are one or fewer humans remaining.
We don't have to guess at likelihoods (will everyone live like a European). The answer is known and certain. Even within Europe half the population can't afford to 'live like a European.'
I'm willing to bet our descendants will be approximately as irrational and lucky as humans have always been.
There's a good chance that at least one of those ten billion are going to have some radically good ideas, and an even better chance than a few more will have some really good ideas.
People are acting more and more in unison, that means no variability and no room for radically good ideas
I don’t think there’s any reason we should take “let’s kill everyone else so we can keep our nice stuff” should make any more sense in 2023 than it has over the last… well, such arguments pop up in all of human history, I guess.
To answer your question: i think it’s more likely that we build an egalitarian global society, or at least continue on the path.
> To answer your question: i think it’s more likely that we build an egalitarian global society, or at least continue on the path.
Good luck with that. Hope is not a strategy, but hopefully the future is not as bleak as the current data predicts. Show me a voter cohort that will willingly give up substantial go forward energy or resource quality of life for people on the other side of the world who they have not nor will never meet. Do you know how many people are dying right now at this moment because their basic needs are not being met? One every 4 seconds per Oxfam. This is before more frequent heat events, crop failures, aquifers reaching terminal depletion, etc.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/humanitarian-organiz...
Agreed it’s (extremely!) depressing, but facts are different than a reality based on feelings. Finding truth is following the facts to the (sometimes) unpleasant places it takes us.
Voters might never do it, but the guy who wins the Presidency and only has to face voters every 4 years, he starts thinking about Nobel Peace Prize the moment he sets foot in the WH, and to make a legitimate candidacy he needs to be a great humanitarian and/or getting some significant Foreign Policy victories.
Bush 43 took it upon himself to fund a whole lot of malaria and HIV prevention campaigns, and even Trump pursued the defeat of ISIS and normalization of relationships between Israel and the Arab world.
If we reach peaked our energy consumption in merely 250 years, that's less than 150 times our current consumption. I didn't do the math, but would date to suggest this gives us a few years more time on this planet.
The world used 9,717 million tons of oil equivalent in 2017.
Plugging in our growth rate that would mean the world used the equivalent of 13 tons of oil in 986 which is 515.84 million BTU.
US residents making <$20k and having wood as their primary heating fuel source use 50 million BTU of wood a year.
While we can argue specifics 10 households worth of fuel sounds a little low for a world with a population of 390 million.
Current tidal generators work either by inserting a turbine into the moving water; or by a dam that captures the high tide, then releases it through a turbine at low tide. Depending on the exact details, it could slow down the rate at which the current later flows over the seabed, which would reduce the energy dissipated from friction with the seabed. But, there's no guarantee that this would compensate for the energy taken by the tidal power generator.
You could imagine a different type of tidal power generator: covering the seabed with a giant treadmill. As water flows past, it drags the surface of the treadmill, generating power. My guess is this would dissipate less total energy than the natural friction of the seabed does. But, it doesn't sound very practical.
(Anyway, all of this is a moot point. As other commenters have noted, if human energy consumption actually were to grow 2% annually for 1000 years, we'd have way bigger problems than the moon becoming tidally locked.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration#Angular_mom...
>it will take about 10.468 billion years for Earth to lock to the Moon naturally.
This is bananas. I stopped right there and closed it. I see somewhere else in this thread that they tried to do that by extrapolating an exponential growth curve through an outlier (the industrial revolution!) for a thousand years. Maybe that explains it.
But... that's not an error. That's just bananas. Absolutely insane.
Some quick googling, FWIW, gives the earth's rotational kinetic energy as a quite plausible 2.1e29 J (though a little of this will not be extractable tidally, as the earth will lock to the moon at a few percent of rotation speed), and the total world energy consumption as 22.8 TWh/year. So the back of my envelope says that at current consumption we have a hair over... two trillion years.
But so what if we made a more reasonable assumption that annual energy usage will stabilize at, say, 5X of what it is currently, and the (unreasonable) assumption that we get 100% of that energy from tides.
Then how much of a rotational slowdown do we get after 1000 years?
Equivalently, after 1000 years, we'd see a rotational slowdown of around 0.001%.
So maybe not technically renewable, but many orders of magnitude more renewable than e.g. fossil fuels...
This theory is very interesting, although the author presents it with too much confidence for such big claims.
> The Earth's rotational kinetic energy is about 10²9 J, and the world uses something like 10²² J/year, so you could power the entire world for millions of years before you'd run out of rotational energy.
(my phone somehow has a ² but not a ^9; the first number is supposed to be 1e29)
I'm lazy, so I'm hoping some geologist will stop by and educate me.
See https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1517943113, "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production"
Stop burning petroleum and wait long enough and it will re-form just fine.
> Instead, coal accumulation patterns implicate a unique combination of climate and tectonics during Pangea formation.
and I don't know how to determine if those conditions will happen again?
Post humanity, post-earth time scales might not be relevant to most discussions.
You understand incorrectly. Wind is largely a form of solar energy. The sun heats the earth and its atmosphere at different rates depending on the location, and wind is primarily the result of temperature differentials.
The Coriolis effect can definitely affect how wind behaves, but it doesn't provide the energy. E.g. a hurricane's winds travel in a circle/spiral due to the Coriolis effect, but a hurricane is a heat engine that gets its energy from the sun heating the oceans.
Technically-technically, no forms of energy "generation" (technically just conversion) are 100% efficient so something is always lost to heat. I guess the important question is, what is the net effect in changing that kind of energy into purely thermal energy?
That is, there's a constant incoming energy flux. That's not to say that there isn't some maximum amount of available wind energy, or some maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from wind without causing other effects (even excepting, say, bird strikes and the like).
But wind isn't "used up", there will be more wind tomorrow, so long as the sun shines and there's an atmosphere.
The more likely impact would be of wind turbines removing sufficient energy from wind that thermal transport of the atmosphere itself is disrupted, though this would occur only within an immediate locale and at lower altitudes. Even very high turbines are only about 260 m (850 ft) tall.
The mechanism here would be a reduction in the distribution of solar heating within the immediate vicinity, similar to urban heat island effects.
And searching as I write this for "wind turbine heat island" I find precisely that mechanism described in this paper:
Wind plants can also impact local atmospheric conditions through their wakes, characterized by reduced wind speed and increased turbulence. We explore the extent to which the wind plants near an atmospheric measurement site in the central United States have affected their long-term measurements. Both direct observations and mesoscale numerical weather prediction simulations demonstrate how the wind plants induce a wind deficit aloft, especially in stable conditions, and a wind speed acceleration near the surface, which extend ~30 km downwind of the wind plant. Turbulence kinetic energy is significantly enhanced within the wind plant wake in stable conditions, with near-surface observations seeing an increase of more than 30% a few kilometers downwind of the plants.
"Wind plants can impact long-term local atmospheric conditions", Nicola Bodini, Julie K. Lundquist & Patrick Moriarty, Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 22939 (2021)
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02089-2>
But that's not from energy transferred from the wind via the turbine, but of disruption of existing wind flows.
> A 2018 study estimated that generating electricity demand with wind power in the United States would warm surface temperatures by 0.24 degrees Celsius
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/wi...
Look up Hadley cells. https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/research/equable...
Warm air rises near the tropics, rotating with the Earth. It then goes towards the temperate zone, still rotating with the Earth to form the jet stream. It then falls, creating the trade winds as it slows down. It then is sucked back towards the tropics, creating a reverse trade wind because it is only going as fast as the temperate zone. And then it rises, completing the cycle.
The prevailing wind in both temperate zones and the tropics is therefore due to the Earth's rotation.
Wind energy is solar energy once removed.
Wave energy is solar energy twice removed (solar -> wind -> waves).
Ditto for hurricanes. Hurricanes turn rising/falling air into cycling air into hurricane force winds because the Earth rotates. But the energy for it came from the Sun. Often removed by another factor, Sun warms ocean, ocean drives the storm.
It would take quite a lot of planning and work but maybe there are ways to mitigate these losses by balancing out the effects between different processes. Typically nature finds such dynamic equilibria as a matter of course -- I suspect anything humans attempt to control will not be as resilient or sound.
The question few seem to ask is should we be this (literally) power hungry in the first place?
No we shouldn't be this power hungry, we've effectively never replaced an energy source by another... we keep on stacking the new ones on top of more of the old ones [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Absolutely!! Reducing excess consumption will always be easier than making up for it later because the latter inevitably causes losses which become heat from which "useful work" can never be recovered. We can avoid those losses by simply never requiring them in the first place.
But too many have the Myth Of Progress burrowed deep into their core ideologies and will fight tooth and nail to keep the trivial conveniences they've built their daily routines around.
On your first point, though, I'm not sure it will be a net negative considering the human component in the equation, and anyway, outdoor cats are orders of magnitude worse for birds than wind turbines are, not to mention concrete jungles with no trees and high average noise levels.
Nobody asks because the answer is "no" - huge parts of our lives are absurdly inefficient, wasteful, or just gratuitous when it comes to energy usage. Heating, transport, all of it. Computing, too.
However, bird strikes can be mitigated via careful placement, etc. Also, we are not close to the point where wind farms impact wind currents.
Eh, who am I to criticize? They say that your early grad school years are a time to publish large amounts of papers that you don't think are likely to stick. This is a little bit out there even by this standard though.
His doomsday scenario of total tidal locking would never occur -- as energy is removed from the rotation of the Earth, the maximum power level that can be extracted would decrease. Also, the cost-efficiency would also drop.
There would be a point where the day is "merely" longer, the Earth is not yet tidally locked to the Moon, but extracting more tidal energy is no longer worth the trouble.
The original point however is still valid. Even if the rotation was slowed to just 1/2 of what it is now, the Earth would have a 48-hour day and that would obviously cause absolute havoc with the environment.
Rather than fluffy repetitions of the slogans of in-groups, it's an attempt to explore long term impacts using fundamental scientific principles, none of which are individually too complex.
And if we don't agree with the 2% annual energy growth rate for 1000 years then that's fine, we can fiddle the numbers for what we believe, and the same analysis can be valuable even if it ends up supporting a different conclusion.
I'm interested by the language style as well, it reads like they put it through a filter to generate "simple English" as a deliberate choice.
Even 100% clean energy, if infused into the system may increase temperature, or speed up circulation of currents, and other effects.
Of course, it's not nesessary all energy goes into temperature. Some can be conserved, e.g. as chemicals.
But in general, the more energy we have in our disposal, the more potential for damage.
We will dig deeper, smelt more ore, etc, etc.
But that is not really correct. it would be but there are large land masses interfering with the process. Ocean tides are better conceptualized as water sloshing in a bathtub.
The abstract sounds... lets go with "not completely implausible" but the assertion that extracting 1% of the Earth's energy from the tidal sloshing would slow the earth and tidally lock it in 1000 years feels extreme. Of the extreme assertions require extreme evidence variety.
The world's energy consumption was about 5.67x1020 Joules in 2013.[18] This number has increased by more than 2% per year on average in the last 50 years. The average world economic growth rate in the last 50 years is about 3%, which requires a corresponding increase in the energy supply. So, the 2% growth rate for world energy consumption should be a conservative assumption.
Four billion times as much energy as we do today. I don't think there's much risk of us growing our population to that degree, nor of us being that power hungry if our population stabilizes. We'll be either extinct or back to a sustainable agrarian population far before we reach that upper limit. Honestly, if we produced that much power, I suspect we'd have long since boiled the oceans, making the whole argument moot.
TL;DR: Don't extrapolate FAR into the future based on a small (relatively) set of data points.
This is the case with solar energy: the Sun's energy output doesn't change depending on whether we use it or not. Renewable doesn't mean perpetual - that'd be physically impossible for all we know.
The whole article sounds like something that fuel companies would sponsor to make the renewable energy look bad (look, tidal is not renewable too, so buy our gas/oil).
Expecting a deviation from this is kinda “climate change will slow down in the 2000s and 2010s from green energy” level magical thinking.
not sure how any of those numbers have any relevance to projecting the growth of energy usage under industrialized society lmao. yes, if we extinctify ourselves in the next few decades, or return to an agrarian, pre-industrial existence, the earth will be fine and will eventually return to an equilibrium.
Until one runs out of the feedstock one is using to make more fissionable material. You're not recycling actually burned fission fuel. You're making more fission fuel out of isotopes that don't fission at all.
Important safety tip.
[EDIT - Reversed AI's rewrite of my humble English, raw best with all its flaws, and whilst AI version good, just had an air of sterility and not me.]