Comment by mike_hearn
2 hours ago
OK, so what are they?
Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do.
Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post.
Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;)
What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
Scaling up PV production to the point where we could convert the entire Earth's electricity generation to solar is incredibly significant.
Yes there's the problem of intermittency, varying sun availability and so forth - which is why solar will never provide 100% of our power and we'll also need grid-scale storage facilities and domestic batteries and all sorts of stuff - but just imagine being able to make that many panels in the first place! Literally solar on every roof, that's transformative.
But sure, let's send it all to space to power questionable "AI" datacentres so we can make more fake nudes.