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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> Fusion could be economically/societally dangerous.

Fusion is the opposite of that. Cheap energy is the greatest driver of economic growth and social prosperity the world has ever known. The fact that fossil fuels are becoming increasingly expensive and at the same time destroying the global climate is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. Anything legitimately capable of reducing energy costs while fighting climate change is rightly hailed as an economic and social miracle.

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Yes. Widespread deployment of nearly-free power would save a lot of households a lot of dollars on heating, cooling, and electric costs. It would save web hosting companies a lot of money. After a few years of additional electric-car development, it'd save them fuel costs too. It would go a long way to solving the California drought (desalinization becomes much more attractive).

All that money could be spent on something else that's actually meaningful instead of on oil-extraction infrastructure and the fortunes and lifestyles of Saudi Arabian oil princes.

It's crazy to think through the ramifications of fusion power. A Sahara irrigated with desalinated water. Mining trash to get the metals out. Sequestering CO2. Turning the entire globe into a climate-controlled mall.

I would bet on desalination becoming practical using solar power, before fusion is cheap enough to compete.

The day/night cycle isn't a problem for desalination because fresh water is easy to store, and the places that most need water tend not to be cloudy.

I think the killer app for fusion is large vehicles: cargo ships, spacecraft, helicopter islands, etc.

Everyone is content to happy, well-fed, in one big climate-controlled mall.

Awesome utopia.

One problem to watch out for if you have effectively unlimited power, is that global warming would no longer be an indirect effect of stuff like CO2, but just a direct result of not caring about efficiency any more.

Can't you just crank up the AC and blast the heat into space somehow?

The question would then be - what is really meaningful?

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