@LukeAlmighty Thing is, if we lose enough technology or energy output, we simply won't be able to make us of nuclear material anymore. We won't have enough resources to build and ignite a nuclear power plant.

As for fusion... no... we've been "a decade away" for how long now? And we're still "a decade away". Best estimates are for a TEST production facility for 2040 I think. Which means, there's still far off from widespread adoption. And that's of course assuming the test goes well, and there isn't another Greenpeace social panic that sabotages everything... again. I'd rather maintain zero hope for fusion and be pleasantly surprised if it does happen. Fission is a known quantity, and we should have had a fission power plant at every corner by now (figuratively speaking).

Global warming is a bit more complicated than that, but I was trying to avoid the topic altogether. The whole sea level rising issue has been horribly explained by the media for as long as I lived. And now that I finally had someone explain it properly... yeah... it IS happening, and no EU "carbon plan" will stop it.

@alyx
> Thing is, if we lose enough technology or energy output, we simply won't be able to make us of nuclear material anymore

And my entire premise is, that by the time we start to notice the issue, we will have already switched to nuclear anyway.

There is literally nothing stopping us today from saying "start building now", and have 3 times as many of them 10 years from now.

@alyx
As for fusion, that was an argument for 200+ years in future. And I do believe, that nuclear should be capable of carrying us over for at least that long, even if used exclusively.

@LukeAlmighty You're more optimistic than me, cause I don't see any kind of political willpower to build up nuclear. All I've seen throughout my life was tearing it down. When I was a kid, not even a teenager, I was certain that by now we'd have the majority of our energy being nuclear, with research being done to perfect solar panels for when we'd start running out of uranium.
There's been some advancement in solar panel tech, so at least that's something. But nuclear has been the biggest disappointments for me.

@Nepiant @alyx charcoal burning plant is basically just the primitive nuclear plant. Basically every form of power gen we have is just heating water as hot as we can get it and passing through a turbine system to turn it and make it electricity. People literally don't realize that we literally run the world off team power even still. The only difference between steampunk and current day, is aesthetics.

@Azur_Fenix @alyx Wind and solar don't run on steam (though wind DOES still use a turbine). And neither do some forms of fusion. Just saying.

@Nepiant @alyx I don't count wind or solar for a reason. They are complete and utter shit and their cost to benefit is shit too. Wind is to inconsistent and high maintenance and solar takes to much space and requires peak sunlight to be worth it. Solar is only worth it if you use the Dyson sphere method or run extremely long panels in space and use a space bridge connection to link the power back to earth or a solar reflection system to direct the light back towards a collection dish on earth (think like using a mirror to create a focused beam of light like a magnifying glass does), which would be insanely dangerous to any birds or aircraft and require a lot of very specialized workers. A wrong calculation could send them beam to basically burn a city or possibly country off the map.

As to the forms of fusion, nuclear fusion, like on the level of the sun. Isn't viable yet. An may not be. Geo power is to limited, has to be near a part where the mantle is thin enough to drill or find a natural geo vent, because drilling to reach/make geo vents not close enough to the surface isn't viable, we literally don't have the means.

Thurium is another maybe kind of tech and I don't remember if that's water heater based or not.

Also hydro gen, but you ethier need to make an artificial damn complex and reroute water to it and be sure you can stack enough water for to be for it or find a natural one that's in a location you can make a dam at and get the personal and equipment there to build and that you can keep it maintained and protected.

Ocean turbine power using deep sea current might be possible but the maintenance cost would be insane and impact on sea life too high.

@Azur_Fenix @Nepiant
Solar wouldn't be that bad if battery tech wasn't shit and reliant on a scarce metal like lithium. There's an abundance of silicon on the planet, even if some of it would need more refinement, but you know you won't run out of it making solar panels. But lithium is rare and environmentally expensive to mine. So solar panels+batteries are just bad for a long term, main energy provider.
There are other energy storage solutions that you could couple with your solar farms, but batteries would still be the most efficient, and thus preferable.
You don't need space based solutions though. Ground based solar farms in deserts or other unusable land, and every inch of roof space is where the aim should be.
I like the idea of solar, but I'd like it more if the battery problem had a better solution than lithium-ion, that used a more abundant element. It's the biggest reason I much prefer nuclear for now.

Wind just kinda feels bad overall. You still need those batteries, and as weather gets more chaotic, they'll become far too vulnerable, with storms risking to destroy them. There will be situational locations where they will be good, but again not something you can depend on everywhere.

Geothermal is neat, and will continue working great for Greenland. I'm sure there are a few more geographical locations where it's viable, but otherwise we're not drilling down because it's not efficient enough.

Thorium is liquid salt initially, which then transfers the heat to water, boils it, and sends it to a regular generator.

For hydro generation, you won't get that many more dams constructed on rivers. But you might get inland artificial lakes, used for energy storage. You pump water in them with excess energy from solar or wind power, and when needed you run the water down through a generator.

Ocean turbines are gonna be a no go. As it is, there's a panic regarding the Atlantic current, because measurements show that it is slowing down, and scientists aren't even sure why, though the suspect is global warming and changing climate. So they might not be that dependable in time, and interfering with them could have drastic side effects planet wide. Better not.

@Nepiant @alyx
Well, no.
Many people do confuse collecting and transferring energy. When you mine coal, you get an amount of energy, that is stored and can be released. You release that energy by burning it, at an ineffective rate. (let's say 50% just for example).

So, when you gather wood, you also have an energy ready for collection. But, if you decide to use it to create charcoal, then transfering that energy will only lead to initial loss of 50% of energy only so you have the remaining amount in a form, that needs 2nd burning to get the energy out with another 50% loss.

This is why vast majority of alternative energy sources are a total scam. Because they steal energy we are already using only to return part of it back later.

@LukeAlmighty @Nepiant
A lot of this. Charcoal gives you poor efficiency. And you won't be able to grow trees fast enough to even maintain, let alone technologically grow, a society with a high number population.
Again, in the 90s, we were panicking because we were using too many trees to make paper. We were already burning other stuff for energy. In the winter, you're gonna use A LOT more trees to heat up a house than you'd use for your paper needs in the same amount of time.
You might have some steam stuff from charcoal, but you're not exploring advanced technology off of it.

@Nepiant
>Also, if trends continue
The trend won't continue. Silicon chips are already getting to the level where electrons can quantum tunnel out of the transistors. I think soon we'll count the width of transistors by the number of atoms in them. Silicon is coming close to physical limits.
And quantum computers are shit. They can't even really offer what they were promised to do, that is being able to performs computations that binary computers are unable to. Turns out, any algorithm you'd want to do on a quantum computer can be calculated on a traditional binary supercomputer computer too.

I'm sure medical treatments that can improve lifetimes will come. I've seen that there's been massive progress with diabetes for example. But immortality? Nah... I don't see uploading the human mind as something being feasible even within an extended lifetime.

Moore's law is basically dead. Even NVidia is saying it these days. Why do you think they're pushing for AI generation crap in video games (fake frames and AI upscaling)? Because they already know they can't cram that many transistors in the same space anymore.

wat dem picchus mean

@alyx
>The trend won't continue.
But we can already fit a whole human brain inside a human skull, lol. Why wouldn't machines be able to create something like that?

@Nepiant Biological neurons work vastly different than silicon chips. For now we can only emulate/simulate neurons, and it takes much more power and physical space to emulate neurons than real neurons use.

For now, we have a better shot at growing biological brains in vats, finding some way to transfer our neuron pathways to those vat brains, and keep changing brains as they age, than to upload our brains to silicon.
Otherwise, we need to figure out a brand new way to create/grow artificial, physical, neurons, and not just simulate them in software.

@alyx
> Turns out, any algorithm you'd want to do on a quantum computer can be calculated on a traditional binary supercomputer computer too.
Yeah, only extremely slowly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hajass/alphabets_quantum_computer_solved_a_problem_which/

@Nepiant
Don't blindly trust Google's marketing. Nor Microsoft's for that matter, cause they also make big claims recently. Believe it when they actually put them in use, and your search results are powered by quantum computers instead of silicon.

@Nepiant
I used to think so too. But then I saw Germany closing down it's nuclear power plants before closing down it's coal power plants, and then opening up more coal plants as the Russia-Ukraine war started.
The only think I've seen in the last decade has been a complete inability of humanity to actually adapt when it comes to energy production. I've seen Greenpeace social panics take precedence over rationality. I have zero conviction that the future will be different.