Talk-Polywell.org

The reason we use more energy is because we are doing much more work. For one thing, as I tried to point out, Kiteman's notion that we've made a series of transitions to increasingly dense energy is wrong. We didn't really move from wood to coal to oil to uranium. We still exploit each one beyond s...

The history of technology is to do more and more work with less and less environmental impact per unit work done. I hope it continues for a REAL long time. I don't think you can back that up. For one thing, you don't really mean the "history of technology." You mean the "history of energy" which is...

TallDave wrote:Fukuyama was right: history is over.

He meant in a post-Soviet world, democratic-free-market societies had won, and the debate about the best form of government was over.

Now -- in a China-ascendant and religion fundamentalist-ascendant world -- I believe he's changed his view.

PMN1 wrote:The point is the process exists, it just needs energy -

Gotta link?

I'm not doubting you, but I would like to learn more about it.

Though I imagine taking so many minerals out of the ocean water might have an affect on the chemistry. I understand the ocean is already acidifying... Yes! Even wind turbines to generate electricity will slow down the wind, and that will affect weather. It may not affect the weather in a bad way, o...

The conservative view on resource constraints are they are illusory. A resource (say, copper) becomes insufficient relative to demand, so the price goes up, so exploration and research increase, and presto! In the end prices go DOWN because more copper is found, and more substitutes are found. The "...

Assuming those characteristics, here are what my predictions would be: Bravo! Well done, and much food for further thought. I agree that cheap and decentralized electricity will affect the balance of world power. In the USSR, Lenin said in 1920 that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrificati...

How can the sunlight for any single year produce the energy (or industrial feedstocks) we used to get from the concentrated sunlight of natural gas and petroleum? You don't need sunlight. You just need heat. To get heat, you just need energy. One good source of energy might be cheap fusion power. I...

Now chemists are hoping to convert carbon dioxide into a useful fuel, with a little help from the sun. That's good news, but I question whether it can scale up. Coal, natural gas and petroleum represent many centuries of accumulated sunlight -- the sunlight that created all those prehistoric plants...

I don't deny that we have had global warming. But did CO2 cause it? Topic drift. :) The topic isn't whether human activity caused the Co2 that causes global warming, but opposite: to what extent will cheap fusion electricity make up for the depleted fossil fuels needed for industrial feedstocks (th...

That would speed up global cooling. Maybe lead to CO2 snow. I donno about that, but if adding co2 to the atmosphere by humans can change the climate, then removing co2 can do the same. And -- while global warming deniers abuse te fact -- it is true that plants need co2. Similarly, releasing carbon ...

*cough*: In theory, you could collect carbon dioxide from the air or water and manufacture synthetic hydrocarbons from it, completely eliminating the need for actual fossil fuels. I believe one of the major reasons no one is doing this is lack of large quantities of cheap energy. It's probably wort...

Don't forget Chemical Industry. There is a plethora of simpler/greener manufacturing processes that are not used today due to the uneconomical energetic cost involved. I don't know how to evaluate it. For example, the short term consequence of cheap fusion electricity might be to lower the price of...

First two, maybe, but most turbines are for jet engines and that shouldn't stop. And dams are needed for irrigation and flood control, so that probably won't stop either. Those are sensible comments, even though there is a magnitude of difference between jet engines (small, super-high temps) and st...

I decided to drastically edit my post, which was unforgivably rambling. :) However, I will say: 1. The impact of fusion electricity is dependent on cost. Whether fusion electricity will be cheap, even if possible, is (needless to say) very speculative. However, there is a chance fusion electricity w...