Comment by HPsquared
3 days ago
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
3 days ago
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
Yes. But it still has to compete with all the various types of biomass, for example.
I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
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You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.