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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.
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.