I wonder what sort of problems having near-unlimited energy at our disposal would bring. Like, light and noise pollution are already bad enough. But would people be even more careless with that? And if we manage to automate most things and energy isn’t an issue, how would we live and occupy ourselves? How would that change industries and the world? How would that change things like war and power struggles in general? What about science and electronics?
It’s a bit concerning but also fascinating
We live in a post-scarcity world - yet people are still starving ans stilll dying from easy curable diseases.
I won’t be holding my breath.
Yup. The rich will use it to consolidate power and wealth, while the poor still have to go to work and grind for 50+ hours a week just to scrape by. Nothing will change, because the issue isn’t a lack of resources; The issue is resource distribution.
If Amazon can supply dildos to the civilized world with 2 hour notice, i think the technology exists.
I can tell you, unequivocally, without a doubt, light and noise pollution are much better than energy shortages.
Yeah, I meant more along the lines of what those unknown problems could look like. For example, whales get very disturbed by sound pollution in the water and I can just imagine that a lot of other animals do as well. Not to mention that we ourselves apparently risk mental health from all the noise in the city. How would that change if we have more electronics at our disposal? Or maybe it’ll be the opposite and we can build more quiet EVs.
I’m just over here waiting to hear that the USAF has had fusion in the form of bombs for a decade but let us all keep struggling.
Well since 1952, but yes.
Freaking Air Force. I swear, everytime.
While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?
I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.
I mean I assume you have to start somewhere to be able to improve, right? Like breakthroughs with TVs, no one would realistically use a vacuum tube when you can make an OLED display. But if we didn’t start with the vacuum tube we wouldn’t know what to improve on.
Once we know that we can do it, we can start working on how to do it easier.
The first step is always the hardest. You have to start somewhere. You don’t start by having something fully scalable right away, you have to work towards it.
Yeah pretty much my understanding as well, I don’t think anyone has a notion of what it would take to generate power from inertial fusion and whatever if it would be practical.