Comment by ReptileMan
13 hours ago
And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.
13 hours ago
And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.
Huh. Your statement was probably hyperbole? But just back of the napkin:
If we use about 20 TW today, in a thousand years of 5% growth we’d be at about 3x10^34. I think the sun is around 3.8x10^26 watts? That gives us about 8x10^7 suns worth of energy consumption in 1000 years.
If we figure 0.004 stars per cubic light-year, we end up in that ballpark in a thousand years of uniform spherical expansion at C.
But that assumes millions ( billions?) of probes traveling outward starting soon, and no acceleration or deceleration or development time… so I think your claim is likely true, in any practical sense of the idea.
Time to short the market lol.
If we extrapolated the rise in the standards of living of a Detroit Black blue-collar factory worker in Detroit from the early 60s to our current days, most of them should own 64ft yachts by now.
of course, but no need to look that far into the future - 400 years at 2.3% pa is enough to boil oceans.
AI capabilities are growing exponentially thanks to exponential compute/energy consumption, but also thanks to algorithmic improvements. we've got a proof that human-level intelligence can run at 20W of power, so we've got plenty of room to offset the currently-missing compute.
Economic growth is not directly proportional to energy consumption. A major feature of any useful tool is that it (often dramatically) reduces energy consumption.
Economic growth tracks almost 100% with energy consumption. The earth at night map is quite telling on the matter.
Newsflash! Less happens while people are asleep!
Correlation doesnt say anything about the sensitivity/scaling. (i recognize that my original comment didnt quite make this point, though the correlation is definitely not 100%, so that point does still stand)
can you note the difference between the earth being lit by torches, candles, kerosene lamps and incandescent bulbs, versus LED lights? LED isnt glowing harder, it just wastes less energy.
A rocket stove, or any efficient furnace, can extract vastly more energy from the same fuel source than an open fire. I assume combustion engines have had significant efficiency improvements since first introduced. And electric engines are almost completely efficient - especially when fed by efficient, clean/renewable source.
How about the computing power of a smartphone versus a supercomputer from 1980?
What is more energy efficient, a carpenter working with crude stones or with sharp chisels?
and we can, of course, put aside whether any measurement of economic value is actually accurate/useful... A natural disaster is technically good for many economic measures, since the destruction doesn't get measured and the wealth invested in rebuilding just counts as economic activity
And, Of course, then there's creeptocurrencies which use an immense amount of energy to do something that was previously trivial. And worse, when it is used in place of cash. But even there, some are more efficient than others - not that anyone who uses them actually cares.
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