Comment by breuleux
18 hours ago
> What about the ten thousandth one? Will "a nuclear fusion plant" become something that models couldn't possibly get wrong?
For what it's worth, ten thousand terawatt fusion plants probably approaches the level at which the sheer intensity of energy production would cause significant disruption to the climate (it's roughly 5% of the Earth's entire solar input). Every energy source becomes dirty past a certain point. It would be wiser to learn how to build a utopia within a limited energy budget than find a way to produce enough of it to cook the damn planet, but who am I kidding, we're going to build a million of these things.
This assumes other technological breakthroughs don't also happen in parallel. I'll go out on a limb with nothing more than a hunch that we are in the beginning stages of understanding mathematics, physics, and biology.
Yeah, maybe AI will figure out that thermodynamics is actually not real!
This assumes we're still building them on Earth.
No, it doesn’t. It assumes we’re using it here. If we beam the power to Earth from space, it’s the same thing.
Even today we're recognizing that compute does not need to happen here.
When we're talking about creating powerplants equal to roughly 5% of the insolation of Earth, I think we're sci-fi enough to discuss orbital datacenters or Mars datacenters or Jupiter fusion candle datacenters.
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It's quite possible that with "infinite" energy we could do mass scale carbon capture to offset the increased temperatures by rolling back the greenhouse effect.
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We use it in space too, we just send food and manufactured products down the elevator.
You aren't really trying in good faith to think this through are you? This idea is over half a century old. Not getting it by now is willful.
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Why would we have stopped?
Humans seem deeply tied to Earth in ways the AI that's to be designing these powerplants is not.
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