MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by xyzzyz on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:51PM (#28465991)

Earth gets multiple orders of magnitude more heat from the Sun than humans can ever hope to generate. In concrete terms, Earths gets 153 PW of energy in terms of solar radiation. It also radiates as much. In comparison, humanity uses something like 20 TW in total (that includes not only electricity, but also transportation etc). So, we could increase our energy use 100 times, and still be only around 1% of what we get from the Sun.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by kongin on Thursday September 09, 2021 @01:48AM (#28466714)

So that's between 150 and 250 years with the 2.5% energy consumption grows, then that much again for us to produce more energy than the sun shines on Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by xyzzyz on Thursday September 09, 2021 @03:00AM (#28467077)

Yes, and with 2.5% energy consumption growth, in only 2500 years, we'll consume entire power output Milky Way galaxy.

Extrapolating exponential growth over long timescales leads to silly results.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by baq on Friday September 10, 2021 @12:38AM (#28477871)

nothing silly about it if the purpose is to make a point in a discussion with an economist. some of them just don't get it that energy consumption is correlated with economic growth and you can't just grow yourself out of every problem.

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