Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the past–and we missed it

Re:Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the... by ALittleLight on Friday September 04, 2020 @02:48AM (#24372363)

"The deuterium in a single cubic meter of seawater contains the as much energy as nearly 1,400 barrels of crude oil - enough to supply the civilizaton's energy needs for hundreds of millions of years - until long after the Sun itself has flamed out."

What does that sentence mean? It seems like a claim that the energy of 1,400 barrels of crude oil is enough to sustain civilization for a long time, but that seems implausible to me. Also, off by an order of magnitude on the timeline for the sun burning out.

Whenever I read stuff like this now I start to get paranoid that this is written by GPT-3.

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Re:Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the... by i-am-curious on Friday September 04, 2020 @02:54AM (#24372408)

That's 1 cubic meter. We have a lot more seawater?

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Re:Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the... by alquemist on Friday September 04, 2020 @03:06AM (#24372475)

There is a lot of water out there.

* Total ocean volume: 1.3e18 cubic meters, 1.8e21 oil barrels equivalent [1]

* Current oil consumption: 35,442,913,090 barrels per year [2]

* Oil share of total energy consumption: 34% [3]

* Number of years of reserves at current consumption levels: 17,577,561,935 years.

Assumptions:

* Consumption levels are flat, definitely false.

* Energy cost of retrieval: 0, definitely false.

* Retrieval rate: 100%, definitely false, as the concentration dilutes over time.

[1] https://ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/oil

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

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Re:Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the... by ch_123 on Friday September 04, 2020 @06:03AM (#24373502)

The US alone consumes tens of millions of barrels a day according to the US govt[1] so this claim of "1,400 barrels of crude oil - enough to supply the civilizaton's energy needs for hundreds of millions of years" is very far off the mark.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6

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Re:Fusion is not 20 years in the future.It’s 50 years in the... by feanaro on Friday September 04, 2020 @02:56AM (#24372417)

I think GPT-3 would've probably written it more accurately.

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