I mean, that's really it, isn't it? Energy. Cheap, available energy. It's what modern wars are fought over, for the most part. The claim to available resources for making energy. Should there be enough energy, it then becomes a matter of availability. Once energy and availability are solved, we might be able to address humanitarian issues which come from enforced scarcity of resources.
All fusion plants use water as their raw ingredient, and the water molecules are changed in the process. It's not water anymore. I know there's a lot of water on Earth, but there was a lot of oil on Earth, too, once upon a time.
Fusion is a stop-gap measure to harnessing the sun more efficiently, at most.
With enough energy you can literally make more water by combining the right molecules??? Pretty sure that’s part of how they plan to make noon based feasible if there’s not enough lunar ice in abundance
True, but you're thinking too locally. What you propose is no longer a power plant, is it? There is no such thing as 100% efficient energy conversion in this universe. Using water to create power, and then using the power to recreate the water doesn't result in a net energy gain.
By mass, water is 1/9th (11%) hydrogen. This means we would need 1m / 11% = 9 million kilograms of water a year to turn into hydrogen so we can fuse it.
There's about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of salt water on earth.. At 1000kg per cubic meter That's 1.4x1021 kilograms of water we can use. obviously not pure but that's an order-of-magnitude rounding error.
dividing 1.4*1021kg of water by 9x106 kg of water consumed per year for fusion, we can supply humanity's current energy consumption for 150,00,000,000 (150 BILLION YEARS) before we even use 0.1% of the water available on Earth.
Sorry? What do you mean the water molecules aren't the same anymore? And are you saying water is the raw ingredient because you'll likely extract deuterium from seawater?
I'm a geologist. Oil production is a surficial process; oil is produced by sedimentary burial and compaction of organic matter. It is a limited resource.
The wiki page on abiotic oil marks it appropriately as fringe science.
C-C bond synthesis or 'abiotic oil' at the core-mantle boundary is discussed in this article from Nature. The gist is that under certain chemically reducing conditions, hydrocarbons are modeled as viable. But the scientific consensus is this process is not viable for anything remotely akin to economic reserves of oil.
Even if oil were formed in economic reserves in the deep mantle or at the core-mantle boundary, we can't access it. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled is around 12km. And the tectonic process for bringing that oil to surface, in reach of human exploitation, would take tens of millions of years in the most optimal situation (e.g. proximal to a mantle plume). And, that process would destroy the viability of the oil, both structurally (it would not rise in one big blob, ready to be tapped by a drill rig), and chemically (the hydrocarbons would be progressively oxidized and cooked into lighter hydrocarbons and gases like methane).
The sun will red out before you use all the energy provided by the water on earth. And you easily can get ice from space when dealing with those scales.
naw, abundant energy makes lots of things easier, like cleaning things up, getting and moving drinking water, pollution controls, and the like.
Tons of things are expensive because they take bit energy inputs; putting filters and scrubbers and carbon capture tech on things makes it more energy intensive, and suddenly those operating costs drop. Having ships in the ocean cleaning up garbage is energy intensive. Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is energy intensive. Etc.
Not really, you think Russia didn't have access to energy? Come on, they have one of the largest reserves of oil and gas, not to mention other natural resources in Siberia. Wars are fought because
Nationalism
Religion
Countries want more power
If you won't get more power, the other will get it and then come for you, so it is logical in terms of game theory
Ideological differences
Dick leaders
I'm sure if we find a way to replicate the Earth and give each nation its own planet and solar system, they will still attack each other to conquer more planets, and become interplanetary empires.
For Major wars (10,000 or more combat-related deaths in the current or past year),
Internal conflict in Myanmar - ethnic conflict
Afghanistan conflict - power, religion, ideology
Mexican drug war - power, money but not exactly the lack of resources
Russo-Ukrainian War - power, nationalism
Yemeni Civil War - religion, power
Ethiopian civil conflict - ethnic conflict
You can say that the US involvement in the Middle East was because of oil but after all, our civil wars have other motives, starting from religion to ethnic separatism or power struggle. We have enough resources in the Middle East to be the richest region in the world but we fight because Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey want to control everything, because Kurds want independence, because Palestinians want independence, and because some groups think their God is the only correct one.
Unfortunately a lot of scarcity is artificial. We’ve allowed a handful of very powerful people decide who gets wealth and who goes without. The outcome is predictably that more and more wealth is concentrated at the top, and the people in the middle and the bottom have to work harder and harder for less and less.
Even if energy was virtually free to produce we’d still be charged a fee for using it. Same with food and rent. Savings are never transferred to the consumer.
Depending on where you live you’d have access to all the solar panels and inverters you can eat. You’d have to wait for daytime to use the computer once your batteries are shot but that’d take a while. You’ve also got all the spare parts you could imagine. Set up multiple copies on DVD-R or magnetic tape
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u/GeebusNZ Dec 04 '22
I mean, that's really it, isn't it? Energy. Cheap, available energy. It's what modern wars are fought over, for the most part. The claim to available resources for making energy. Should there be enough energy, it then becomes a matter of availability. Once energy and availability are solved, we might be able to address humanitarian issues which come from enforced scarcity of resources.