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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

20000X the energy of a current human shows how absurd it would be for growth and energy use to not decouple. I can’t even imagine what I could do on Earth using that much power. Fly my own 737 to a new city every day?

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.

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> I can’t even imagine what I could do on Earth using that much power. Fly my own 737 to a new city every day?

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.

Aviation historically, has not gotten cheaper overtime. If anything, it is more expensive. Only rich people had planes 100 years ago and only rich people own them now and the trend line doesn’t indicate it’ll be different in another hundred.

Nobody owned a 747 a hundred years ago.

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?

Exceptions like 10 EUR flights aren't sustainable. They're just auctioning off empty seats to cut costs.

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.

> They're just auctioning off empty seats to cut costs.

No, they are selling off seats that aren't taken. They are making more money since those seats would be empty.

Cutting costs would not be selling the seats and saving on fuel.

eh are they really making more money with 9,99 tickets or are they just losing less money (on that particular flight i mean)

European cheap airlines have shown these prices are indeed sustainable for the last 20 years now?

The way it works is that ticket price of 10 EUR only really covers the cost of printing the ticket :) Everything else costs extra, which means that if you, for example, want to take some luggage with you, you would need to pay around 100-150 EUR

You do but nowhere near 100-150. They try to upsell stuff indeed but luggage is not that expensive.

Is every seat on every flight 10 EUR?

No, but you can check yourself. Flying in Europe is cheaper than train or bus. Not sure if there are Ryanair style cheap airlines in the US or other parts of the world.

Isn't this trading convenience (like flying stand by or at odd hours or dates)?

My guess is if flights priced in externalities they could not be cheaper than alternatives like trains. (Unless they're leaning on whales like first class to subsidize cheaper seats.)

Indeed. In particular, the rail ticket I bought at the destination airport was about twice the price of the flight, even though it was a much shorter journey.

> Fly my own 737 to a new city every day?

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.

Consider modern use of energy vs ancient, and the ancients couldn't imagine our factories, power plants, data centers, etc. Now consider the crazy compression of energy in the conversation to LED lighting.

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.

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