The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same.
See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
Likewise, the humans who live on other planets can be consuming local energy without heating Earth, and the people still on Earth would still get the value of their inventions, discoveries and writings.
No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
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The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.
Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.
> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.
> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.
Uh, nope. That's not why you can't buy one.
Watch the Bartlett lecture.
At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.
…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?
> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.
Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.
But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.
The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:
* https://www.sri.com/fcd_technology/self-cooling-paint-a-pass...
* https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/cooling-paint-you-can-actual...
We might be able to somehow collect heat (with superconductors? I don't know) and beam it into space, but that still doesn't solve the problem.
Please watch the Bartlett lecture, please?
And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not enough to just extract a bit less, thing that still may take years to be achieved, all that was managed to be captured by some expensive carbon capture technology is probably orders below of how much we increased emissions. Absolute global numbers matters here.
And yes, it is not possible to just stop extracting fossil fuels and try to solve our energy needs with what we have built so far. But time is running out (if it is not over already). Severe drop in consumption should be in the map too, there was a shortlived dent in the trends around 2020.
Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.
Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.
Similarly, it can make sense to help people improve their home's efficiency, and in some places grants are available for this (insulation, etc.). Though in many cases you're using renters' taxes to make the homeowner wealthier, which isn't really fair.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/02/can...
EV subsidies can help build demand for the vehicles. As adoption grows, charging becomes more widely available and manufacturing costs come down with volume.
You are right we are still expanding the use of fossil fuels. But we do seem to be on a path where the peak usage is happening in the reasonably near future. The faster than expected adoption of renewables is bringing that moment forward.
I regularly read what Bloomberg NEF publishes on this topic. They published an interesting article recently: https://about.bnef.com/blog/designing-and-delivering-net-zer...
They are calling for short term policy changes to accelerate things. Most of those policies are simply about incentivizing people doing the right things.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.
If we had it fill the south half of our roof, that’d jump to 99-100%. For the remaining one percent, we could just drive to a fast charger to pick up enough electricity to run the house for 2-3 days in complete darkness.
The power grid keeps burning cities down, and then they pass the cost on to consumers.
Off grid is already more reliable than the grid, and the price of it keeps halving. At the same time, extreme weather events keep increasing the cost of the grid and lowering its reliability.
If the power company would bury their lines, then all of these issues would go away, but that will never happen with our current political system.
Delaying a renewable facility from earning money for years when it has to borrow everything up front to start is extra deadly. I want proper environmental review though, to the extent it's possible to have that without it being weaponized by NIMBYs to simply run out the clock on a project's viability.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years
1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them
Also, please notice that between 2021 (the date of your link) and today the amount of global solar power quadrupled and the growth is exponential.
Like any physical process, it’s likely to be limited and follow something more like a Logistic function, which looks exponential at the start but ceases to follow that curve forever (which matters for making multi-decade projections).
Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.
In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.
Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.
Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.
I mean that new energy sources came in addition to existing ones. We consume as much wood as we ever did. Coal didn't reduce wood usage. Oil didn't reduce coal and so on...
Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.
Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...
See this amazing flow chart on useful vs. rejected energy:
So I'm okay with people spending a little effort on step 2 of the plan now, especially given that we don't have yet proven technology to realise it.