It looks like we'll move on from that, though the devil is in the details. :-)
Besides, surely it must be simpler to build a fusion reactor on earth than harvesting enough material to cover the sun in solar panels. Would the solar system even have enough resources for that?
That's only true for low values of civilization. Even bronze age tech consumes more than hunter-gatherers which consume more than monkeys.
> Besides, surely it must be simpler to build a fusion reactor on earth than harvesting enough material to cover the sun in solar panels.
Dyson swarms sit higher on the kardashev scale than harvesting whatever you can get on a single planet. At some point waste heat rather than fuel will also become a real problem. Fusion reactors are ultimately thermal power stations, glorified steam engines.
> Would the solar system even have enough resources for that?
You'd start small with asteroids. And then disassemble some moons with shallow gravity wells. Which of course again requires stupendous amounts of energy just to move the material around but the sun still has billions of years left so there will be time to recoup that investment.
I don't lack for aluminium or even transatlantic flights (the most energy intensive think I could think of buying). If I really want to go to X I do. Price doesn't really bother me.
Maybe we can use 10x the current supply so everyone can have my lifestyle. But that's still vastly less than a Dyson sphere would produce.
For a long time energy was a limiting factor on human development. But I don't think that's true for the average westerner anymore. I want time off and less stress and relationships. Those mostly come down to social structures and information, not GJs...
Not quite. You have more than enough energy for what you could imagine using it for. But I guarantee you that a greater abundance of cheap energy will create new uses for that energy. That's how its worked for the entire of human history.
The amount of energy we're talking about here is mind-boggling, almost incomprehensible.
Typically we talk about this in the Kardashev scale (and usually the Sagan normalized variant). The short version of this is that:
- A Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization uses all the energy out planet collects from the Sun, estimated at around 10"16 Watts;
- A K2 civilization uses all the energy output by the Sun, estimated at 10^26W
- A K3 civilization uses all the energy produced by the stars in our galaxy, estimated at 10^36W.
We are roughly a K0.6-0.7 civilization on this scale. Human energy consumption I believe is estimated at 10"11W.
So a K2 civilization has access to 1 million billion times what we have now. It's like if every person on Earth had access to 140 million times the Earth's energy usage.
You don't. You only think you do because you are living on borrowed energy, massive amounts of energy stored in carbon over the last billion years. Unleashing this stored energy is going to burn down our planet.
So yes, we need way more energy that is not tied to digging up dead dinosaurs. Even more energy if we want to put them back in the ground. And even more if everyone wants clean water. Everyone else that is not a westerner wants lights and water and food too.
Consider also that in order to grow human population at some point you start to need large amounts of energy to colonize new space, be it planetary, on asteroids or spade stations.
If more energy becomes available, demand for it will scale accordingly because of new possibilities.
“2018, global energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.7% to a historic high of 33.1 Gt CO2.”
Only thinking of your electricity or transport needs is missing all the other CO2 sources you rely on for your civilisation. For example you eat: “Globally, the fertiliser industry is responsible for about 1.5% of annual carbon emissions, largely because 95 per cent of production relies on natural gas as a feedstock.”.
The easiest proxy for measuring your energy usage is simply the amount you spend annually, which is usually closely related to the amount you earn. Most of our energy usage is hidden throughout our economy, due to our reliance upon our society.
Maybe we will consume vast resources of energy sending people or machines to explore the universe. Maybe we will need it to reshape our home environs. Maybe we will want to produce more people than can be supported on planet earth and profit in the arts and sciences from their contributions?
Never in human history has any amount of energy been enough so is simple extrapolation that if civilization continues to grow it will consume more energy.
The big differences between us and those merchants (healthcare, communications etc) are matters of technology not energy.
Proper sewers and drinking water has added much more to our lives than cars vs coachs.
And that's what I see going forwards too: I want a longer healthier life. But that will be a matter of medical discovery, not a CAT scanner than uses 1 million times more power...
We are nearly 40x as energy intensive per capita as as were just 2 centuries ago. If we rewind the clock to 1400 it becomes harder yet to compare because we actually captured so very little energy.
What? Civilization runs on cheap, abundant energy. Before the industrial revolution we had to use labor animals, slaves and the occasionally water and wind mill. Providing light was expensive. Global supply chains (transportation), aluminium smelting, fixing nitrogen for fertilizer or calcination for cement consume stupendous amounts of energy.
If energy became cheaper then creating green fuel for airplanes and rockets, electrorefining all metals, desalination or perhaps mining and crushing olivine rocks for carbon sequestration would become more feasible.
Whenever vertical farming is discussed here the main counter-argument boils down to energy not being cheap enough. It's hard to compete with the sun delivering it to plants for free.