Re:China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
by dpark on Friday November 11, 2016 @03:58PM
(#12934270)
> Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Please, no. Some of what you said I'm onboard with, but definitely not this. The human impact of perpetual day is large and negative. The negative impact of massive artificial lighting on astronomy is also quite massive.
Re:China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
by motoboi on Friday November 11, 2016 @06:15PM
(#12935363)
I made me curious about something.
Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in significant ways?
At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?
Re:China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
by londons_explore on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:09AM
(#12936707)
If you have enough cheap energy, you could refrigerate earth and send excess heat to space.
I think we're a long way from that yet though.
Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete.
Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land.
Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.
A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.