Comment by rayiner
20 hours ago
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
> upgrade civilization to the next level
Why?
OP has literally been playing too much civ and believes that tech trees are destiny.
If you're asking why we would want to progress as a species, I suppose that's a rather subjective question. I like the idea of materially improving the lives of humans. That includes scientific discoveries, curing ageing and other diseases, space exploration and interplanetary colonisation, material abundance like unlimited food, etc. We don't achieve this unless we make major technological advancements, and this requires major new sources of energy.
Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.
Practically, at the current rate of CO2 emissions we’re going to be needing that electricity to do carbon capture eventually
What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
> upgrade civilization to the next level
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?
I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.
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Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
Some of us don't share your faith in technological progress.
And sometimes I think Star Trek did more damage to the world than Das Kapital did.
This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.
And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble.
I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico.
There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,