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What if Energy was (Nearly) Free?
anvilmark asks: "Sci-Fi and sci-fi games often incorporate the romantic idea of 'free trader' ships with ports of call on a myriad planets across the galaxy. Recently I was toying with the physics of propelling such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well and realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to do it (not to mention interstellar travel). This led naturally to contemplating how cheap energy would have to be in order to make this activity profitable. To make a long story short (too late!), I began wondering what would happen if the introduction of fusion power takes energy costs from pennies per kilowatt hour to pennies per megawatt hour (or GWH)? How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
..for dads everywhere to yell about.
"Electricity's expensive! Ya trying to cool off the whole neighborhood? Close the #@%$ door!"
To get delta v, you need two things: 1. energy, and 2. reaction mass. "Free" energy wouldn't help with #2.
From a SF perspective, though, what "free" energy would help with is terraforming. If you could afford to create free oxygen from oxygen bound in a planet's crust for next to nothing, and warm the planet for next to nothing, then you've got the problem pretty much licked, except for weather control.
How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?
;)
Somebody will undoubtedly declare war on somebody else.
Go read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Free Energy = Laser wars
A New Laser For War And Peace
"How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
Hmmmm... I wonder if anybody'd notice the extinction of the Energizer Bunny.
"Derp de derp."
... me spending more money on games and thinkgeek.com instead of boring energy bill ;)
---
Heavily armed, easily bored and off my medication.
I once read an article about light speed travel using conventional proportion. It stated that in order for a human to survive the G-force, the vessel would have to have a mass ~ that of the earth. A vessel that large would require all the chemical energy in the known universe to reach that speed. (by conventional tech)
Your article, or at least the way you condensed it, doesn't make any sense.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I've got no clue what point that it'd become viable.
However, there's one item of trade that's better suited for such a system.
Information.
There's actually been some novels about it, where the traders don't trade for goods, but for information, new concepts, inventions and the like. Information for information (and supplies as nessisary, but that's less often). It takes up less space, and you don't need to rendevous to preform the trade.
Let's be reasonable. If we're going to have massive amounts of inexpensive energy available, then it's going to get used in large amounts. And unless this energy is coming straight out of the Earth's biosphere's ambient energy, we would be dumping massive amounts of extra heat into our ecosystem.
If we're not careful, we could wind up generating enough heat to change the weather and alter the Earth's rate of temperature change.
no thanks
the guy that owned (Nearly) would be totally set...
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
I am not sure about many other Universities around the country... but electricity for some universities is purchased in blocks. Basically this means that it costs just about as much to turn all the lights off in labor as the added cost of just leaving them on all the time. I wonder if energy costs for the average consumer decrease then might we see more of this type of thing in the American household. Longer lasting lights would also add to this happening.
I think Everytown, USA, would be filled with gawdy advertising of various forms.
Hopefully there would be some useful innovations, too, but most likely it would promote insane inefficiency. (Think Ford Expedition*10...)
So we get free free energy. What do we do first? We refridgerate every building on the planet. That would raise the outdoor temperature significantly over a few years.
On the bright side, it will be possible to microwave the entire planet and get rid of RFID tags.
If such energy became available, it wouldn't likely be available to the every planet-bound citizen. More likely, it would be like nuclear power in that it would be very highly regulated and unavailable directly to individuals. They could get the benifits of it, but only in moderation at an extremely high markup.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I suspect that this would drop my hosting chages. About 5 years ago, I was charged mostly for bandwidth and RUs. Now they don't care so much about how large it is as how much juice it uses.
Personally I would
leave my lights on all the time.
Run my all the computers i own 24 hours a day (i already do...)
Keep all my old appliances and use them for pointless tasks. (wait, i do that too.)
Surround myself with energy inefficient fans...(i did that yesterday!)
Buy a fuel inefficient car. (my car gets 15 mpg.) :)
On second thought, i don't think my life would change at all
In linux libertas
I've done a lot of thinking about this myself, and it turns out to have some interesting implications.
First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.
On the other hand, cost of electricity does dominate the cost to make aluminum, steel, and many chemicals: profits would immediately go up, and costs would quickly drop precipitously for everything from cars to Tylenol.
Free electric power wouldn't in itself make space travel cheaper, but if you have cheap fusion you can either make fusion rockets, or extend VASIMR. If you can get thrust high and exhaust velocity very high -- say tens to hundreds of km/sec -- then you can quickly start doing things like going to the Moon with constant acceleration. In other words, a trip from Earth to Moon could be quicker than a trip from New York to Boston today.
Waste disposal would change radically -- give me enough power and I'll just do mass spectroscopy on a plasma made from the wastes. Call it 'mass mass spectroscopy' -- out the end comes pure (isotopically pure, if you care to do it) oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and so on. This will be very handy for Lunar exploration, as it makes possible the easy separation of 3He from 4He; 3He makes for good fusion fuel, and 4He ("depleted helium"?) makes for cheap reaction mass or lots of other things. On the other hand, it makes uranium enrichment much easier as well -- throw in yellowcake, and out the other end comes O2 235U and 238U.
If lunar 3He production is economic, so is production of hydrogen (either from fossil water or as a byproduct of 3He production) as well as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, potassium, thorium, and so on. (See KREEP.) Add O2, N2, and lights to a lunar lava tube, and you've got living space and farms -- with cheap power.
There is the infrastucture costs, salaries, maintenance, delivery systems (poles, wire, labor), and whatever else goes into producing the fusion reaction.
Some of the obvious effects of near-free power:
1) we'll use a lot more power, simply because we can. In some ways this will reduce combustion - electric heat in the winter, electric vehicles (at the very least, electric for short range vehicles and gas for long range). Appliances will have more features and draw more power both while active and while idle.
2) Appliances will be less efficient. This also means they will generate more heat. Everyone will have air conditioning, though, because it'll be cheap to run. The extra waste heat will be enough, especially in southern cities in summer, to increase the local temperature (more so than now).
3) new energy-hungry applications will arise that aren't developed now because of the power requirements. Non-portable computers will tend towards beowulf clusters because it'll be cheaper to buy N chips than single superchips.
4) the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power. Depending on the fusion technology's specifics, this will either mean lots of small fusion plants, or large fusion plants and a lot more power lines. Power lines my be overhead, or buried. Expect lots more research on cheaper, warmer-operating superconductors. Expect the results to end up used in everything else, especially electronics.
5) Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
6) Changes in travel, especially sea travel. You can't build a ship the size of an aircraft carrier right now without being a major world power, because of the expertise needed and fuel needed. Fusion may allow this, though. This will certainly make long range shipping cheaper. It would eventually effect people as well - many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight, especially if it was a vacation trip on a budget and the scenery was good. (business-class travellers would likely still fly).
I'm sure there are more, that's just the ones that jumped out at me after a few moments.
No concept of investment whatsoever.
Silly. Trying to get free energy... What maroons!
I'd send a few probes at every 10 degrees away from Earth and have them drop various hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon trapping thingies every so often. Heck while the probes are travelling they should collect the building blocks for building the trapping thingies, deposit the stuff, then use some to get a nice boost to the next drop point.
By the time the probe reaches its end, the next generation on earth would have the resources to go out and reach someone... er something.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
It's really a simple answer:
The first reckless party held by a bunch of teenagers would result in the evaporation of the oceans.
Let's face it, we live in a relatively closed system. An amount of energy comes into the biosphere that is relatively constant. The biosphere has evolved and developed dependent on that amount of energy being relatively constant.
Any 'revolution' in energy that means we have infinite amounts of it will mean the waste heat from all the new consuption will reck havoc on everything.
If hope we have Star Trek like replicator by that time too. Need a new toothbrush or keyboard, just push the button and there it is.
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
Well, if energy was free, then it would still be free today, and I'd imagine that most of the aftereffects would have already occured.
However, if energy were free (note use of subjuctive), which i think is what you meant, I take the cynical view that it would only destroy ourselves more quickly.
For example, it's not that we can't get to Mars via rocket today, we simply can't get enough energy crammed into a feasible size. If it were cheaper nothing would change.
At the same time, you are assuming that just because the mass/energy ratio of fusion is much higher, that makes it cheaper. This is not the case. In fact, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear power. Looking at current research into fusion technology, the extremely highpowered lasers and plasma contol technologies would be very expensive to build.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
If energy were plentiful and cheap, I think DeBeers would find a way to make people think it wasn't to keep the price artificially high.
And, unless sand was the new source of energy, I wouldn't want to be a Saudi prince.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?
We could all stand by and watch the Middle East blows itself up over some bullshit religious or racial nonsense and not have to worry about how it would affect the civilized world.
Here
This is easy - if energy were nearly free, the whole world would turn into Las Vegas. Seriously. Because of the Hoover Dam out there, a typical household can run everything including the air conditioner for, like, $15/month. It's sickening.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Whatif the only tax we had was on non-renewable energy? And it was like a VAT tax, ie passed on at each step in the economic cycle...e.g. the steel makers paid a tax and passed it on to the parts makers who paid additional tax on the energy they used and passed it on etc. No other taxes what so ever...
It is often said that the effects of this kind of thing are overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term.
I won't directly speculate, but I'd point a few thing things out:
One, almost axiomatic right now is that even if we colonize space, we could never afford to lift any significant fraction of humanity off the surface. Effectively infinite power makes this possible, and the social changes this would unleash, even before it happened, the effect on the public conciousness and unconciousness, are almost entirely unpredictable. Right now, without even thinking about it much, we live on Earth, and there is nothing else. We have no Frontier anymore. Having one again would change things in almost unimaginable ways.
Two, it's the secondary effects you can't predict. Physicists might be able to build a bigger and better particle accelerator with more power, thanks to some previously prohibitively-energy-expensive alloy or something, and crack the secrets of the universe.
Three, the final limits of computation as we know it are driven by power consumption. Consequences of that left to the imagination. (Quantum computing may provide a partial out, but then again, probably only partial if it's significant at all; There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)
Consequence of Free Energy ?
Well, one thing we all forgot is no more wars (for oil) and meddling in oil rich regions of world.
The result ?
More soldiers back home safe with their families. Less of my tax dollars spent on weapons and more for providing medical care to the uninsured.
Why is the topic-icon for this subject a picture of Celine Dion?
After a couple of years or so, the lawyers would descend, empowered by this new, unlimited energy, and gum up the works in a storm of IP lawsuits.
In the end, you would be paying slightly more to the same vendors you were buying your energy resources from before the discovery.
Heavily paraphrasing old memories of Pournelle's A Step Farther Out: With sufficiently cheap energy, we can reduce toxic wastes to their component elements; turn the Sahara into farmland; give everyone on Earth at least the standard of living the US had in the 1950s; mine the asteroids; colonize our solar system and others; move industry into space and turn the Earth into a garden.
And he's right. The cost of producing the vast majority of goods and services is heavily dependent on the cost of energy. Make that energy "too cheap to meter" (as was promised us when the first nuke plants were under construction - sigh -), and the cost of production - including raw materials - drops to essentially the cost of labor. And labor costs drop too: a well-fed, prosperous work force using exotic tools, e.g. diamond-tipped cutters or 8-way Xeon workstations, is much more productive than hungry, unhappy, poorly-equipped workers.
That being said, if this scenario is taken to the extreme, the possibility of global warming from simple waste heat rears its ugly head. There are probably ways of dealing with that, but, given the number of times my power's gone out this week (lots of wicked weather), I'm not sure I'd trust the planet's viability to bleeding-edge tech. So it goes.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0115857
You find out how to make energy clean and cheap, and you're dead.
Just ask what Bush and his "big oil" buddies think of it.
I'v were using that much energy that heat's that much of a problem we'll just move the earth away from the sun alla the puppeteers solution.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Cheap energy sounds great with great possibilities, and with some effort from the society might even be possible. Imagine electric cars more powerful than gas ones running off almost nothing.
But things work much better with efficiency. If you eat only as much as you need to, you'd look great. People buy centrino and transmeta laptops because they run longer on the same battery than an Athlon Thunderbird. Making living quarters as small as possible and stacking them has made the manhattan possible and pushing chip sizes down has turned the IBM S/390's power into a PDA. Do you want to upgrade the hardware for your server so it can run Windows 2003 or just replace it with FreeBSD??
We're already guzzling collosal amounts of energy and for one species, we're amazing in how we are altering weather with our endless consumption. Think of all the cars on the highways in the morning rushhour. Only the people need to be transported, yet many seats in each car goes empty, and fossil fuels are used up to carry that huge hunk of metal with its gases causing so much smog it blocks your view.
Maybe some computer guy dreamt in the 70s working on mainframes, about acres of mainframes pushing pixels so he could play a very cool 3d game at high resolutions with reflections. Arent the modern 3d chips a better solution? You get the idea.
Your cargo ships could be flinging themselves among orbits, but localized manufacturing with no need to transport anything is better. Fusion power will eventually come, but even the number of deuterium on earth is finite, and I believe once the process becomes practical, applications requiring huge amounts of energy will appear fast, and before you know it, future Bushes will be attacking future Iraqs for deuterium.
Any society that can live without, will survive. Others will just squeeze their planets till it is no more.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I would turn it up to 11!
--
$tar -xvf
Maybe... SUVs the size of tanks? Wait, we already have that.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, haven't we learned that in today's economy cost has nothing to do with selling price ? There'd be some "consolidation" followed by some price fixing tactics such that what homes pay will not change.
That Cold Fusion was a farce.. It would have given up the cheap energy and the keys to greater things.
One good reason why we don't have cheap energy can be put into one culprit:
Enron
Enuf said..
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
But I doubt this will ever happen. Not because of technology. But because people are greedy.
crmartin (98227), above, points out that the cost of energy would decrease about 50%. Why? If you're currently paying that rate for the electricity, there's no reason to decrease the price. Same with gas and oil prices. They raised the prices, MAYBE out of necessity, but when they have the opportunity to bring the price down significantly, maybe they will a few cents, to keep people buying, but why take a huge chunk out of what has become a large profit margin? They have you, by the ass, paying this rate that they've set, and just because their operating cost has decreased (and the now-bolstered remainder going into profit), doesn't immediately mean they're going to drop the price. Why would they do that? They have you over a barrel, dancing to their song. If anything, major corporations may just extort you more! I know this sounds pessimistic as hell, but it's the truth. I see it every day.
Informatus Technologicus
Not so fast. You don't need that much energy to get from the bottom of one gravity well to the bottom of another, provided you can swap momentum around. There are a number of schemes along the lines of the cable cars that harvest energy from cars going down (and momentum from stopping cars) and feed it to cars going up / accellerating.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, but often the problem isn't the cost of the lunch but of all the stuff you wastefully throw away while eating it.
-- MarkusQ
The sun puts out more energy in roughly a month than all of the energy man has ever consumed in all of his existance on this planet. Harnesing that power doesn't mean lining the roof tops of the world with silly solar panels that wear out in the rain and sun and only work for a faction of the day, and that's in perfect weather conditions.. Instead an array of millions of power generating satelites orbiting near Mercury and beaming power continouously to a base on, say, the Moon would provide nearly unlimited energy for the entire planet, essentially for free.
Forever.
This will never happen, though. The initial cost of developing the satelites would be astronomically high, in the trillions and trillions, at least. Even though it would pay for itself a hundred times over in a generation, the human race isn't yet clear sighted enough to understand what a boon limitless energy would be for the world.
One, almost axiomatic right now is that even if we colonize space, we could never afford to lift any significant fraction of humanity off the surface
With solar power (at the top), beanstalks, and clever scheduling policy (in a nutshell: young women get priority) we could get everybody off within a generation or two. With automated canister city factories & asteriods to play with we could even have a nice place to put them.
The problem isn't energy. The problem is that you could never implement such a scheme, even as an evacuation, given how mule-headed people are.
-- MarkusQ
I hadn't thought of it until I watched Chain Reation, but I now don't doubt that there would likely be nuclear war in the Middle East, between Israel and the Arabic Nations. I will let you speculate on who strikes first but there would be no reason to hold back war, especially when we drop all our support of the regimes that we currently support. They'd have to fight to keep their populaces under control.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Most recycling is either simply not done or not sensible simply because of the energy cost. Would we have inexpensive energy, we could afford to turn coal into oil, or recycle aluminium (today the cost/energy ratio - as shown by a Danish gov't report - actually would imply that burning aluminium would be cheaper than recycling it). Most recycling is simply not put into production because of the enormous energy cost involved in breaking down the molecules involved in building plastics and other stuff.
Low cost energy would also boost hydrogen technology, because the production would become very cheap. I don't know whether the same is true for Methanol, which is nowadays used for fuel cells (because hydrogen is too volatile for efficent storage).
On a completely different field, it would amost nearly kill off a lot of jobs (in the Western countries). Since a lot of products are already overengineered today, a low energy consumption is one of the last advantages additionally built into products. If there is less need for enigineering solutions in such products, there will be less need for engineers.
One of the biggest uses would have to be travel. Buy an electric car and never pay for fuel again. Start using propeller based planes or switch to super-fast electric trains. Maybe we could even have jets with ION propulsion. Ten times the propulsion for the same amount of fuel. Now we're talking about economical space travel. The cost of a trip to orbit could become affordable to about everyone. We could take the time to get to mars down from nine months to under 1.
With free enegery, the big change is that diamonds would be cheap to make in arbitrary sizes and quantities. Diamond fibre reinforced alloys have strength to weight ratios that make Formula 1 car designers long for the day they can afford to throw away all their flimsy heavy carbon fibre and magnesium alloys. Imagine what it would do to the construction and transportation industries if they were cost-effective?
Diamond itself also has amazingly good heat conductivity that will allow revolutions, since you can simply pipe heat away from wherever it is not needed to wherever you want to locate your cooling device.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
We, the USA, would get to use less gas eventually if we had this technology, but we dont, so acid rain is still polluting everything.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium
You assume that fusion is the only way. Personally, I see the world moving beyond fusion power fairly quickly. By far the best source of energy for our needs is the sun. Now I'm not talking about everyone having a solar panel on their roof, I'm talking massive scale harvesting of all the energy that usually is "wasted" going off to light nowhere. Say you harvest 500 square kilometers of sun that usually would only serve to show alpha centauri that out sun exists. This is an extremely unpolluting and excellent source of energy.
The problems are three fold: getting the energy back to the earth, capturing enough energy for the whole planet and dissapating all that extra energy once it's used (lots of extra heat = nasty). I figure these will all be easy to solve over the next century.
I'd be pleased to see my ideas come into being, but you must understand that in order to protect my intellectual property, I have a patent pending on the use of the sun (or any star) to facilitate life or living.
Many thanks,
Darl McBride
The problem with the whole Scifi spaceship dreamy thingie is that the amount of energy required to power a ship, say of Millenium Falcon size, out of the Terran gravity well and then onwards into interstellar space is probably going to be enough to destroy a small city, if not a large one. And if you have that sort of things concentrated in a small ship some nutcase is going to buy one and perform an uncontrolled release.
A jet airliner loaded with fuel has a similar explosive potential as a small tactical nuclear weapon, as New Yorkers found out the hard way, and a spaceship will probably have the potential energy of a very, very large thermonuclear weapon. And if the nice ship is designed to blast off in one shot and zoom into the sunset the powerplant is going to have to be designed to release a large amount of that energy in a short time (unlike nuclear batteries in contemporaty spacecraft which do have a lot of potential but only need to release a small amount of it over a long time).
The long term place for serious energy production lies in antimatter in any case. One gram of antimatter annihilating with matter is enough to completely blow a city-sized hole into the ground, easy. One day the question of whether you want to put that sort of generating capacity into a small, handy penlight sized batter will be a technological problem. Perhaps we should think of the sociological problems before we do that.
But that all lies in the future. A more relevant question is about the here and now. Even today you get quite high energy densities in small devices. Modern Lithium Ion Cellphone batteries made cellphones possible. Your average innocent looking blocky thing inside you cellphone has a thermal and electical fuse inside it to completely shut down the battery if it should ever run out of specs because Lihium Ion batteries can explode. The cellphone makers put this safety mechanism into the batteries because early models blew up next to users heads. The marketing droid referred to this as "discharge with flame". Indeed. What sort of flame would you get from a penlight-sized antimatter batter that some teen geek opened up?
One argument against this is that it depends on how the free energy is delivered. For instance if it is by means of a fusion powerplant driving the electrical grid, you are still limited by the carrying capacity of the network.
Hoever, if you get a situation where someone could get a cute little mini fusion plant in his house which will deliver Gigawatts of energy some other possibilities becomes possible. Read the heat waste argument in the discussion.
Another favourite liberal argument is that there is always the argument that as technology puts more destructive potential into people's hand it also puts more potential to counteract that destruction. Even current technology is quite powerful, one guy in New Zealand (I think) is currently building a demonstration model of a cruise missle. For $5000. There was an article in K5 about this a short while ago. Visionary people like James Gosling are already getting scared by the potantial.
The question is if one guy's experiment will destroy most of humanity before humanity develops a counterattack. Its like a food cycle. If there are too many sharks they eat the fish and then there is not enough fish, the sharks die, and then fish multiply again and then there is more food for the rest of the sharks and cycle continues. Problem is, if that cycle gets off the chart and both species dies off.
And last, "free" is a relative term. "Free" for me means *I* don't have to pay the energy costs of my system. One way of harnessing pretty much free energy is to use a self replicating system where each generation harvests its own energy from the environment, so you, the creator does not have to supply all the energy for the system as a whole to run its course. A Computer virus uses energy paid for by someone else to run on his computer, so for you the virus writer its pretty free. Biological agents are the same thing. The guy who gets infected eats carbohydrates to keep your bioweapon alive.
Until he dies.
The whole "free cheap portable source of energy" problem will create a bad
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Presumably the population of either a Dyson Sphere or a Ring World would be so large that emmigration would be a physical imposibility due to lack of materials and energy to build and move whole colonies. So some very, very long term form of regeneration is needed.
Putting a ring world around a "small" Dyson Sphere might capture all of the star's energy. Useful spectra can be re-emitted in the ring's plane of rotation.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
Very, very, hot! Seriously, a fair bit of that 'free' energy is going to end up as heat - it's a matter of efficiency. Energy that doesn't go toward doing the intended work ends up as heat. If energy is used within the troposphere, the resultatnt heat must either be dissipated to space radiatively, or it'll just heat the earth or atmosphere. Not good.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Any source of cheap, unlimited and free energy would be the end of man. Any source of unlimited energy can likely be scaled to the point where it becomes a tremendously devasating weapon, or is used to produce WMD inexpensively. Anyone naieve enough to think that this wouldn't happen in kidding themselves.
I read an essay or interview with Tesla (who was interested in the possibilities of "free" energy) that expressed similar views; his approach was to look at ways to develop defensive shields that made weapons ineffectual. Unfortunately, I do not believe he was aware of the devasating power of nuclear weapons or any high-energy source.
There are many very good ideas for ways to exploit quantum and zero-point behaviour to extract energy from nothing. If a device like that existed, we'd be doomed. Remember; at some point, when the universe was created - quite a pile of energy was created from, well, nothing. That's another debate.
..don't panic
I read somewhere that if Manhattan Island had to dissipate all the energy it uses by radiation, i.e. if cooling breezes didn't blow it away, the temperature of the island would rise to about two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
Remember Barry Commoner's three laws? "Everything must go somewhere. Everything is connected to everything else. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Lots of people keep bringing up Global warming as a problem but if you have all this power (cheap) couldn't you just build a reeeally big air conditioning unit?
Free energy would take the ion drive concept to a new extreme. Basically, with free energy you replace the ion drive with a particle accelerator pointing out the back of the ship and have a specific thrust that's several orders of magnitude higher than anything that exists now. The thrust might not be huge but it can be sustained for long periods with small amounts of fuel.
realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to [propel such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well] (not to mention interstellar travel)
Out of curiousity, what numbers did you come up with?
I ask because we're already sending craft into interstellar space (well, they're on their way), and presumably it didn't take an astronimcal amount of power. Of course, there's a big difference between a space probe and a tanker full of dark matter.
A lot of folks are assuming that waste heat would be a huge problem with free energy. I see it as a non-issue for two reasons.
1. It would be pretty simple to legislate low heat emissions on-planet... and dead simple to monitor via satellite.
2. High-energy manufacturing would all move off-planet to get away from heat pollution laws.
If we had totally free energy, it would be the internet equivalent to unlimited high speed broadband after a 56k trickle.
At first, people would suck it up until they were sick of it, and then some would go back to their same habits. I for one, would still be consious enough to use my reduced watt light bulbs, but I wouldn't worry about leaving the AC on while I was at work.
Some people would abuse the system (P2P, Kazaa, and whatnot) and suck up the energy bandwidth, so to speak, and the industry will benefit, much like it has from broadband.
For those of you who say the grid will be a problem, it will be. The same as it is with broadband. The tech is out but people can't have it because of coporate control and upgrade cost.
Too much money to be made in free energy for it to be free. If you want free energy, buy a house on top of the mountain and invest in some windmills. Even then you'll probably only get dialup.
As for space travel... mini fusion plants in spacecreaft would eliminate the problem of propulsion cost, waste heat from it can be expelled into space.. who cares if Marvin the Martian has a sunburn. As for launching on earth... who would notice a few more degrees in Arizona, it's only a dry heat.
Energy were created and destroyed, not conserved?
Would keep his job. :-)
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Wow - my first slashdot post...
Anyway - you have "free" energy...lets just say you have LOTS of it. energy = mass with enough manipulation
so if you need a reaction mass, create the mass from energy, then use even more energy to eject that rearward.
e=mc^2 - kids know it, it's almost cliché, but have no idea what it means nowadays
I realize that it would take a TON of energy, and we dont have technology to do it en masse yet, but if we can have "free" energy, why not say that we can do energy-mass conversions easily too>?
I'd love to see the look on the faces of all those Texan oil barrons when their precious commodity became worthless. If energy was cheap, I envision the world moving to electric everything... Cars, gernerators, lawn mowers... you name it. Also imagine the look on the faces of the Duracell/Enegizer people when they realized the potential market for batteries!
Just my 2 cents.
His writing in Alternate View in Analog is tops as are his novels, "Twistor" and "Einsteins Bridge".
In one a device that would need no fuel can propel a ship to near light speed using axion conversion. It's flawed in that it's efficiency goes down as light speed is approached but hey, it's free.
Don't know if some other discovery shot it down but there are a few more.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/av_index.html
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty