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Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 2:44 am
by ohiovr
Hello,

I haven't posted on this forum I'm pretty sure so i thought I'd give it ago. Is free energy really a good thing for the future of man? What will mankind do with this incredible gift? I read somewhere that it would take 5 earths to bring the rest of the world up to the USA's level of living standard. How many earth's would it take with free energy? At some point it is all ridiculous. Bee are going extinct, and we have neither the political will nor the technology to prevent it from happening. There is simply no substitute for bees. There will never will be. Because by the time man figures out how to make robotic bees, the ecology that supported the plants we harvest will have been destroyed forever. There is no turning back. In Ohio every last acre of land not on a hill or mountain is used as either office, factory, house, or farm. If energy is cheap the whole world will be like this. I read that 47% of all vertebrates in the world have died since 1970. Habitats are simply disappearing. Free energy just means that there is no energetic limit to how we can mold the earth into our shape, squeezing out millions of years of biological development in just a few decades. We depend on the earth's ecology. I don't believe in global warming. But the oceans are becoming more acidic and it is causing shelled animals to weaken and become less viable. Maybe free energy would help in this area, lots less co2 being made.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:13 am
by kunkmiester
Cheap energy also means cheap expansion into space. You want five earths? Let's start building.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 2:27 pm
by ohiovr
Well there is mars and the moon, but what else? That's not even 1 and a half earths. Giant space stations?

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 3:06 pm
by KitemanSA
ohiovr wrote:Well there is mars and the moon, but what else? That's not even 1 and a half earths. Giant space stations?
O'Neill Islands.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:32 pm
by hanelyp
Abundant cheap energy, along with the needed know how, allows material wealth with less raw material input, using materials that are otherwise unusable. With enough cheap energy the garbage you throw away becomes potential industrial input.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:58 pm
by kunkmiester
ohiovr wrote:Well there is mars and the moon, but what else? That's not even 1 and a half earths. Giant space stations?
Duh. Plus what Hanleyp said. Need to expand your reading list beyond Malthus and company. Start reading some 50s and 60s hard Sci fi. Cheap energy means the sky is not a limit, nor are or grades.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 6:01 pm
by Teahive
Release too much cheap energy as heat into the lower atmosphere, and global warming will indeed become a problem. I remember reading a study on that once, though it saw the point where this might become an issue a few centuries in the future.

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 11:18 pm
by ohiovr
kunkmiester wrote:
ohiovr wrote:Well there is mars and the moon, but what else? That's not even 1 and a half earths. Giant space stations?
Duh. Plus what Hanleyp said. Need to expand your reading list beyond Malthus and company. Start reading some 50s and 60s hard Sci fi. Cheap energy means the sky is not a limit, nor are or grades.
I've never read malthus. Why do people have to bring every god damned prejudice into a conversation?

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2014 3:03 pm
by DeltaV

Re: Free energy not all good?

Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2014 4:24 pm
by ltgbrown
I brought up this discussion almost four years ago!

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2577

At the time though, I thought we were just a couple years away from "knowing" we had cheap clean energy.