If we had an easy source of energy.

[Mouthwash]

The year is 1900. Physicists stumble into an efficient and safe method for generating nuclear fusion; more total power becomes available than is today. The process is simple enough to be provided locally and is impractical for bombmaking.

What happens (in technology, geopolitics, daily life, etc)? How does the world look by the year 2000?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Geo politics is certainly a lot cleaner without the need for oil...if we assume that whoever stumbles upon it manages to disseminate the knowledge.

 

[Kaitzilla]

So many things would be different.

No global warming.
We'd all drive tanks instead of SUV's.
In theory, we'd have as much fresh water as we wanted.
Space program would be much larger.

 

[Zelig]

Technological development of energy-efficient processes never gets off the ground, so we're stuck with sucky lightbulbs, poor battery life for electronics, no gas+electric supercars, etc.

Free energy makes powering robots cheaper, data centres cheaper and lowers the cost of computing, leading to automation-induced unemployment.

Geo politics is certainly a lot cleaner without the need for oil...if we assume that whoever stumbles upon it manages to disseminate the knowledge.

We still need oil for all the things other things we make with it, and probably still for cars and it's actually significantly easier and cheaper to extract since it doesn't even need to be energy positive. With free energy, oil gets extracted wherever labour costs are lowest.

 

[Mouthwash]

Free energy makes powering robots cheaper, data centres cheaper and lowers the cost of computing, leading to automation-induced unemployment.

It may lower the cost of computing, but there's a whole process of miniaturization which now has little incentive to take place. I doubt that we would have personal computers by today, even as we might be colonizing Mars.

(I can't help but drool over the steampunkness of it.)

 

[Zelig]

It may lower the cost of computing, but there's a whole process of miniaturization which now has little incentive to take place. I doubt that we would have laptops by today, even as we colonize Mars.

(I can't help but drool over the Steampunkness of it.)

Yeah, I alluded to that in the line above the one you quoted. Instead, we have giant death (or mining, fishing, etc.) robots that are large enough to fit a small fusion reactor.

Laptops aren't particularly difficult, it's just good battery life that's work. I'd expect ~1 hour instead of the 10+ hours laptops get now.

 

[Mouthwash]

Gah! Caught in the editing!

 

[Kyriakos]

Didn't Tesla claim he had found the way to do that- but was not backed financially?

And while i have to suppose that the vast majority of people want such outcomes, some mega-rich would stand to lose their position as greed-archons.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yeah, I alluded to that in the line above the one you quoted. Instead, we have giant death (or mining, fishing, etc.) robots that are large enough to fit a small fusion reactor.

Laptops aren't particularly difficult, it's just good battery life that's work. I'd expect ~1 hour instead of the 10+ hours laptops get now.

My laptop doesn't get anywhere near 10 hours.

With all the energy we need, why not invent the replicator and holodeck?

 

[Wolfbeckett]

So many things would be different.

No global warming.
We'd all drive tanks instead of SUV's.
In theory, we'd have as much fresh water as we wanted.
Space program would be much larger.

Cars for certain would not have changed much, gasoline would still be needed for them. Fusion electricity only helps cars if you have the battery technology to store that energy in a portable form, and the kind of battery technology that is good enough to get cars around a decent distance has only just started becoming available recently.

 

[Agent327]

The year is 1900. Physicists stumble into an efficient and safe method for generating nuclear fusion

Well, so much for Einstein then... (The consequences of his relativity theories didn't become clear until the 1920s, by the way.)

FWIW, mankind will never have all the energy it needs: need is not something absolute. Nor can need be measured in absolute terms.

 

[Mouthwash]

Didn't Tesla claim he had found the way to do that- but was not backed financially?

That is categorically impossible.

And while i have to suppose that the vast majority of people want such outcomes, some mega-rich would stand to lose their position as greed-archons.

In 1900 oil consumption was lower by a factor of forty.

Cars for certain would not have changed much, gasoline would still be needed for them. Fusion electricity only helps cars if you have the battery technology to store that energy in a portable form, and the kind of battery technology that is good enough to get cars around a decent distance has only just started becoming available recently.

Electric cars still work. Plug them in for five cents, every few hours- but outlets are as common as streetlights. Only buses would use gas.

FWIW, mankind will never have all the energy it needs: need is not something absolute. Nor can need be measured in absolute terms.

Which I did not claim. "All the energy we need" refers to an amount that would solve the energy issues of today.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Cars for certain would not have changed much, gasoline would still be needed for them. Fusion electricity only helps cars if you have the battery technology to store that energy in a portable form, and the kind of battery technology that is good enough to get cars around a decent distance has only just started becoming available recently.

With unlimited energy cars would change...because there wouldn't be any. All the subsidizing of the auto industry would never have been even remotely justifiable so there would be no roads to speak of. Trains that could run on power supplied through the track, beltways for pedestrian travel; you don't even have to worry if the transmission is efficient or the motor is wasting 90% of its capacity just hauling itself along. With unlimited power it would be far more useful to develop ways to apply it than technologies that didn't use it.

 

[Agent327]

"All the energy we need" just refers to an amount that would solve energy issues of today.

That doesn't deny the economic truth that need depends on want - not on what's available.

There's plenty of food in the world today - yet people today are starving, simply because the food is not where it is needed. In other words: the food is available, but unfortunately not in the location where the demand is. (Meanwhile where the food is available, we have obesity problems. Go figure.)

 

[Mouthwash]

That doesn't deny the economic truth that need depends on want - not on what's available.

There's plenty of food in the world today - yet people today are starving, simply because the food is not where it is needed. In other words: the food is available, but unfortunately not in the location where the demand is. (Meanwhile where the food is available, we have obesity problems. Go figure.)

OK.

How does this affect my hypothetical, in the absence of an allocation or transportation problem?

 

[Agent327]

The problem is not that 'there's not enough energy' (there is plenty), but that there is an insatiable demand for energy. Not sustainable, inexhaustible energy, but the quick-fix-immediately-available-but exhaustable energy. We prefer to drive our cars and pollute our world, despite pious words of our leaders to the contrary. No hypothetical will solve that problem, because it's not about need, but about desire.

(Your hypothetical already answers itself, by the way. It solves a real problem by pretending it didn't exist in the first place. That's why I saw no need to comment on it.)

 

[Zelig]

My laptop doesn't get anywhere near 10 hours.

They're not all over 10 hours, but top models are pushing 13+ hours and you really have to put some effort into finding anything that does fewer than 7 hours.

With all the energy we need, why not invent the replicator and holodeck?

Because "expensive energy" isn't really a problem for star trek replicators and holodecks. I wouldn't expect free energy would help development on either 3d printers or VR headsets/Hololens.

 

[EgonSpengler]

In theory, we'd have as much fresh water as we wanted.

I've always thought that limitless energy was the essential foundation of the socialist utopia in Star Trek. As for the real world, one of the big issues with water desalination is its energy requirement. If fresh water were easier to get, Syria might not be in flames right now. The drought isn't the only issue there, of course, but it was the spark that set off the civil war, and without the civil war, would ISIS have been able to get a foothold? Egypt and Ethiopia recently headed off their looming war over fresh water, but India and Pakistan are still dancing on the edge of the cliff.

Space program would be much larger.

A question for the engineers in our audience, is "energy" synonymous with "propulsion" in space travel? I know that one of the issues with getting things into space, and to Mars and elsewhere, is the weight of the fuel needed to get them places.

EDIT: I mean, if you simply hurled a nuclear submarine into space, it wouldn't go anywhere, right? Because it's propellers would have nothing to push. It'd still need some kind of rocket propulsion, wouldn't it?

 

[warpus]

The U.S. wouldn't be propping up the Saudi regime and it wouldn't be in power today. My guess is that 9/11 wouldn't have happened.. but so many things would be different that it's not easy to really say.

 

[Perfection]

Someone traveled back in time from 2015.

Maybe they were inspired by this thread.