How To Fix The World

[hobbsyoyo]

Gold is worthless, except in terms of how much rice it can buy.

Not really worthless in my opinion. Gold's an incredibly useful material and it's a shame that the luxury status it retains gets in the way of its best possible uses. It's wonderful in lots of applications due to the unique properties that incidentally attract people to it for purely ornamental reasons. And then it's all wrapped up in global exchange as a store of wealth, further reducing its more practical utility.
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He3 is pretty overblown to be honest. It makes certain types of fusion reactors more feasible but because we don't have much of it now, we can't verify that it's actually viable, much less the best fuel of the available options. Lockheed and other companies have begun to invest billions into their own commercial designs that don't use He3 so it may be bypassed entirely. I think at most it may be utilized when we start colonizing the moon but it won't be the cause of that colonization itself.

Personally, I think solar power will provide most of energy in this century. The switchover is just now beginning and it will be rather dramatic how fast we will abandon fossil fuels in favor of solar.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Not really worthless in my opinion. Gold's an incredibly useful material and it's a shame that the luxury status it retains gets in the way of its best possible uses. It's wonderful in lots of applications due to the unique properties that incidentally attract people to it for purely ornamental reasons. And then it's all wrapped up in global exchange as a store of wealth, further reducing its more practical utility.

I remember learning in school that they use gold on space tech and such (I've actually done some CIV4 mods that make gold a strategic resource for high tech units), but you're not building lunar rovers and space shuttles when you're starving. Your only using gold for that stuff when you've got plenty of rice to spare...

Until the apocalypse when we need to build ARK ships to escape the dying planet of course...

But that is another story game.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I remember learning in school that they use gold on space tech and such (I've actually done some CIV4 mods that make gold a strategic resource for high tech units), but you're not building lunar rovers and space shuttles when you're starving. Your only using gold for that stuff when you've got plenty of rice to spare...

Until the apocalypse when we need to build ARK ships to escape the dying planet of course...

But that is another story game.

It is used in aerospace but I was actually talking about more humdrum consumer and commercial electronics.

 

[El_Machinae]

Fusion power would solve all of humanities' problems if it could be made to work.

Debt problems, global warming, food, fresh water, all those worries could be set aside.
The USA could give up on the middle east finally, and seize control the moon for that sweet Helium-3

Fusion power really could be a leapfrog technology for us. But, interestingly, it would do nothing for debt. Debt is just an artificial construct of ownership. Fusion power would create more useful 'stuff' for sure. But it's not guaranteed to shift the current spread of ownership. It could aggravate it. It could improve it.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I always wondered about the implications of free unlimited energy. Humankind as a whole would become much more powerful with all sort of potential implications. Basically, it would mean having more of everything. However, any energy changing hands means, by the second law of thermodynamics, waste heat. That is written in stone. There would be a limit for the maximum energy we can use before Earth temperature begins to increase, fixed by the capacity of Earth of dissipating heat into space. I wonder how close we are to such limit already..

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I wonder how close we are to such limit already

Nowhere close.

Clark touched on this subject in 3001. He talked briefly about a global warming electric bugaloo crisis but I can't remember what the solution was.

Probably something with space elevators?

 

[Broken_Erika]

The solution is simple. It's called Nuclear Winter!

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Nowhere close.

Don't forget that for whatever reason it is already warming up. That means it cant radiate enough to keep temperature, I guess 99% due to solar radiation plus greenhouse effect and only a little because human energy usage. Using fusion should decrease the amount of greenhouse gases and make Earth more shiny, but still...

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I believe solar generation incurs very little direct waste heat generation. Moving electrons from fields to stations to homes adds waste but this penalty is more or less the same for all forms of power generation. In fact, on-site solar cuts this transmission loss way down. Meanwhile every other form of energy I can think of save hydro and wind generate lots of direct waste heat during energy production, source material mining and refining steps. If we are really worried about our thermodynamic waste becoming a primary concern rather than gas emissions, solar beats out fusion and fission by a wide margin.

I would be genuinely surprised if a multi-megawatt solar electric field produced a megawatt of waste heat. Pretty sure that's par for the course for any comparable nuclear plant. Thermodynamic cycles involving fluid-based heat transfer are just inherently hot in a way that light striking glass and semiconductor plates is not. Photons I believe do cause the atoms they strike to kick out some low-energy photons but these light rays would already do that when they strike the Earth anyways so the net heating added by solar electric production is negligible.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I was thinking in a scenery where we have access to an unlimited or nearly unlimited source of energy, Lots of huge fusion plants fed with sea water for instance. I doubt any solar fields could get close to that. Anyway, since waste heat is produced in every single thing we do, not only energy production, a world where every guy and his dog has a flying car would face a waste heat problem derived from the mere use of the huge amount of free energy at our disposal.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Fusion plants dump huge amounts of waste heat into their heat sinks - the ocean in your example. Solar fields don't produce much waste heat at all.

When every person has a flying electric car, yes, the flying car will itself produce waste heat but you can't ignore the generation side of the equation. Nuclear fusion would cut dramatically back on greenhouse gas emissions which is good but they also themselves generate a ton of energy that is not put to work. This heat is pumped into lakes and oceans and or released into the atmosphere through cooling towers. In a world with truly limitless energy production, this will be a major contributor to global warming. Solar electric fields don't have that waste heat at point of generation to deal with, therefore the overall grid is more efficient and there is less waste heat warming the world.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I should say that I don't really think this kind of waste heat is a massive problem - hence my long way off comment. I'm just rolling with the premise of truly limitless energy production.

 

[Lexicus]

There is no such thing as "free" energy in thermodynamics terms. You have to pay a price in waste heat for all the useful energy you generate.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Solar fields don't produce much waste heat at all.

How sure of that are you? Desert is a great reflector...though accumulation of greenhouse gasses makes reflecting less effective, but still. Vast arrays of solar panels, on the other hand, trap solar energy to convert to electricity, but also are trapping a bunch that they aren't converting to electricity. Get on a roof with a solar system and you can feel the heat radiating off the panels, and if you touch them they'll take your skin off.

I'm strongly in favor of our local "hey, shade the parking lots with solar panels" programs, because they can't really be worse heat traps than the blacktop anyway, but I'm less enthusiastic about the big "pave the desert" projects, for a number of reasons.

 

[innonimatu]

Regarding energy no one mentions the glaringly obvious "solution" or starting to reduce its use. The reduce side of things is bad for the economy.

 

[Patine]

There is no such thing as "free" energy in thermodynamics terms. You have to pay a price in waste heat for all the useful energy you generate.

Thermodynamics is often applied on a bunch bigger scope and scale of matter, energy, momentum, entropy, etc. that you're suggesting, in most calculations anywhere near accurate (as close as is even possible).

 

[El_Machinae]

Regarding energy no one mentions the glaringly obvious "solution" or starting to reduce its use. The reduce side of things is bad for the economy.

Nearly everyone talks about reducing energy consumption. Cars get more mileage. Energy Star appliances. House insulation. Jevon's Paradox then kicks in.

 

[Hygro]

Nearly everyone talks about reducing energy consumption. Cars get more mileage. Energy Star appliances. House insulation. Jevon's Paradox then kicks in.

Jevon's Paradox applies to almost everything.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Jevon's Paradox applies to almost everything.

Including paradoxes.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Some interesting numbers from a couple of articles in Wikipedia: Average solar input per square meter is about 140 Watts (it can reach as much as 1300 W/m2 at noon in a clear day), average anthropogenic heat 0'028 W/m2 while energy flux from anthropogenic green house gases is estimtated in 2-3 W/m2 (about 100 times higher, exactly as I randomly said )

So waste heat is hardly a problem yet, compared with anthropogenic green house effect it is tiny at a global scale. Locally can be huge though, up to 50 W/m2 in big cities. A third that coming from the sun! It can reach even several hundred W/m2 at some dense industrial zones and at the center of some big cities in winter when heaters are working at full capacity.

But let's don't forget Earth must be in thermal equilibrium. So it must emit to space the same amount of energy as it receives from the sun to keep temperature constant. Human generated greenhouse gases are already altering such equilibrium making Earth emit 2-3 W/m2 less. (To GW deniers: let's accept this as fact for the sake of the discussion)

In a hypothetical happy future where fusion has been finally domesticated, hunger and misery banished from this world, population has continued growing, and every country has become highly developed, anthropogenic waste heat could perfectly become 100 or even 1000 times the current one and a big, big problem. But in such perfect world we could easily build many km2 of orbital solar panels which would produce countless millions of Watts and would project big shadows over Earth, so we could regulate Earth thermal equilibrium as we please.