I would rather argue that energy consumption is the fundamental metric of the advancement of a civilization - increasing consumption is not of itself bad; whether we know how to clean up after ourselves (or if we're too busy trying not to die out) is a different problem. Limiting our energy consumption is a recipe for civilizational collapse. We have the wolf by the ears, and we can't let go. Best we can do is move forward and try to obtain enough reserve energy and resources to find a way to clean up after ourselves.

With the exception of Avatar, is there any advanced fictional civilization that doesn't use vast amounts of energy in proportion to their tech level? I'd also point to the historical record.

Yeah, that's why I said this is an unpopular opinion.

Historical records tell us that energy consumption is a great indicator of civilization advancement, but so is territory. Now, the problem is that there is no further territory to acquire for us as we have pretty much exploited our planet to its bones.

Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under our weight.

>Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under our weight.

You've said or implied this twice, but haven't put forward even a plausible mechanism why this would be a crumbling downfall.

The fuel is abundant and safe. The byproducts are safe. There are no carbon byproducts to contribute to global warming. I don't see any logic to your statements besides: previous bad, therefore next bad. I believe this is the definition of a non-sequiteur.

Please correct me if I am wrong or have missed something.

The issue with free cheap energy such as fusion isn't its direct byproducts, but its impact on society.

It will fuel an economic growth without precedent, which in turn will increase the consumption of material goods, which in turn will increase the extraction of natural resources. Those resources will become rarer and more difficult to extract, thus leading to more destructive extraction strategies.

Energy puts a cap to our ability to destroy the planet in order to satisfy our material needs.

I don't believe one second that our civilization is capable of controlling itself. And don't tell me about multi-planetary scenarios or whatnot. They are neither realistic (regardless of the energy availability) nor desirable.

Thank you. Very clear and reasonable explanation.

Mining of auxillary materials to pair with all that energy would be a problem. Multi-planetary scenarios for humans aren't realistic in anywhere close to the near term... But mining asteroids instead of the earth might be realistic. Many solutions which may not be realistic now could be with such an energy source.

It will be a precarious time. That's for sure.

If energy is free and unlimited more can be devoted to recycling. Also the vast majority of people like nature, more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving nature in the US than every before. What about free, unlimited energy would change this preference?

Unless we live in orthogonal dimensions, you know that free unlimited energy is never devoted to recycling. Plus, fusion will produce electricity, which needs to be stored in batteries. Or it will be used to produce hydrogen, which in turn will lead to a massive conversion of our mobility and transportation infrastructure, causing massive extracting of materials required for their manufacturing.

> Also the vast majority of people like nature, more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving nature in the US than every before.

Really? Definitely in an orthogonal dimension then...

Yeah, energy capture is essential for civilization development. There’s a book that goes into this by looking at history called why the West still rules by Ian Morris. He also talks about how there’s a thing called the development ceiling so the problems of development so as a civilization captures more energy and develops it encounters problems in managing the kind of growth and complexity that comes from that, and, you can look at history as a series of cycles of civilizations either failing to manage that complexity, and then collapsing or managing to pierce the ceiling of development and enter the next cycle. There’s also something interesting, called the advantages of backwardness, so at the time of a civilization of collapse, and some kind of change, it’s often the case that more backwards parts of the world have some kind of advantage that that allows them to become the next core of civilization. So yeah, energy capture is essential to development and increasing levels of development are totally correlated with increasing amounts of energy capture, but that increase development comes with complexities.

So do you think it's the use of energy in and of itself that causes issues?

Not energy in and of itself. Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push planetary boundaries even further.

We need a reduction of human impact on our planet, not an increase of it.

How would fusion increase our impact on the planet? Wouldn't it reduce our impact on the planet by decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide we release and eliminating oil extraction?

how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down our house" and how is that applicable to fusion tech?

> how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down our house"

Likely a call out to global warming.

> how is that applicable to fusion tech?

One thing that is never really discussed in terms of fusion energy is what you will do with the heat generated from these processes as there is a theoretical maximum for how much heat the planet can dissipate.

Whether the poster is correct or not, its widely acknowledged that the ability to transition from gravity powered/wind powered energy to coal combustion fueled a great deal of the economic and technological improvements from the 1700s onward (we call it the Industrial Revolution).

There are many more planetary limits than just climate change, and many of them are governed by how much natural resources we consume and, incidentally, how much waste we produce.

Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push these boundaries even further.

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

We aren't bound to just this planet though. Not everyone has to live here. Not every industry has to operate here. Power doesn't have to be generated, or consumed, here.

Please. I know lots of folks here live in Silicon Valley and are breastfed with this kind of fantasy, but making our species multi-planetary isn't just a matter of energy availability.

Plus, and most importantly, trashing our one and only planet "because we are not bound to it" is just one of the most unethical and most dangerous plan one can think of. And I know that there are plans to become a multi-planetary species without making Earth inhabitable in the first place, but I think the quote "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" applies beautifully here. And the fist of climate change combined with biological collapse will hurt badly.

The only sense in which it would be our demise is that it would be an inflection point in how life is lived, similar to how someone from 200+ years ago would find our current lifestyles to be almost entirely alien.