Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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."
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.
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
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!
I would turn it up to 11!
--
$tar -xvf
So you're saying there's no such thing as a free launch?
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?
A million bucks is a feasible investment for a city that size, but what do you do with the 9.75 gigawatts left over?
Power eight DeLorean time machines?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF