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Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert by noobermin on Monday December 05, 2016 @04:54PM (#13110060)
Tangentially related side note, as a plasma physicist, every time I see advances like this, I worry a little bit for my future career[0]. It turns out there's a fusion reactor at the center of this solar system that's been dumping energy on us for billions of years. Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally.

Not that doing fusion won't be interesting from a scientific point of view, but if we develop solar and batteries further, we could really require no other energy revolution than this.

[0] tongue-in-cheek, there's always stuff to research.

Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert by pm90 on Monday December 05, 2016 @05:12PM (#13110220)
We would still need fusion for interstellar travel.
Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert by dermotbrennan on Monday December 05, 2016 @05:24PM (#13110330)
Or even for ships and planes. Whats more likely in the long term, that cargo ships will be powered by batteries or that they could be powered by a compact fusion reactor?
Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert by dx034 on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @07:15AM (#13114022)
With the right batteries, why not? You can pack them in 40ft containers and swap them at the port to charge them on land when energy is cheapest. That way it could probably be even possible to retrofit old container ships.
Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert by jeffwass on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @04:45AM (#13113432)
>"Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally"

I originally came to reply "Not geothermal".

But just read up a bit and found out only a fraction of geothermal heat came from Earth's gravitational collapse. The bulk of the heat is from radioactive decay. Which of course was sourced from stellar fusion.