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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!"
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!