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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?"
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
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...)
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.
Depending on how much acceleration you add, cheap energy helps quite a bit.
Accelerating an electron from to almost the speed of light can increase it's mass 6 fold. Not much per electron, but when done in large numbers adds quite a bit.
Also, elemental hydrogen is available in reasonable quantities wherever you go, accelerating THAT to extremely high speeds is even better...
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.)
So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom? Nothing, in fact stops it and the energy business turns into a very low margin utility. If energy is free or almost free then transportation costs are likely to be minimal. You can't buy *every* jurisdiction to politically keep out new market entrants and there can't be high costs to entry otherwise the energy would not be free, it would cost the generation cost plus the amortization of the significant entry costs in plant and equipment, etc.
A lot of things would change. A great many jobs would disappear while a great many others would appear and the disruption would be economically awesome. We'd stop having to do all sorts of tricks to minimize power loss because power loss would no longer be a significant expense.
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 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