Power
Everything depends on power. I don’t mean money power or political power, I mean flowing electrons.
Think for a moment about the broad impact that energy has had on human history. You may not believe that wars are waged primarily because of oil reserves, but there is no denying the overwhelming impact fossil fuels have had in shaping the Middle East. In Africa, a billion people live in poverty, in large part due to the “resource curse”. The ability to understand physics and harness energy brought a close to World War II, and subsequently fueled the Cold War. Simple fluctuations in fuel prices have had a profound effect on the global economy. It determines how your city is laid out, or where it was built in the first place. It shapes how trade is conducted. It determines how much or how little you can afford to travel. For some, it’s the difference between clean water or disease. It is the key resource that impacts everything we do. All of this without even having to mention the global warming issue.
A time will come—maybe in fifty years, or maybe a thousand—when the availability of energy will fundamentally re-shape humanity. I hold an optimistic view that this change will be a positive one, but that’s far from certain.
Imagine that every city-sized community on Earth has the ability to produce practically unlimited energy, for nearly no money. There’s an initial investment cost, of course, but say that it is roughly equivalent to the cost of building a section of freeway through the city. What changes?
Everything changes. Every city on Earth could sustain greenhouses growing food around the clock, irrespective of climate or season. Desalination plants could bring clean water to areas previously ridden by disease. Corrupt governments lose their grip on resources as a control mechanism. The cost of travel, including air travel, plummets. Mechanisms for space travel that were previously infeasible become feasible. Entire floating cities could exist in perpetuity with minimal trade requirements. Worldwide manufacturing output is radically changed.
The entire meaning of cost and trade changes dramatically, as the very means of production—which has shaped our understanding of politics—fundamentally changes. Free energy will mean a point of delineation for us, where all previous assumptions become void.
It does not signal the full realization of a Utopian society, of course. Energy is the key resource, but not the only resource required for society to function. Humans will still have to produce goods. However, how long before even that requirement is alleviated? It’s difficult to imagine, but also fascinating: what does the world look like when the means of production is sophisticated machinery powered by free energy? (It’s hard to imagine without comparison to the future-Earth society depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
Maybe I’m only half-right about all of these fantastic outcomes. The pursuit of free energy remains the most important possible pursuit for moving humanity forward while eliminating mass human suffering.
This is why I get so crazy excited about what EMC2 Fusion is doing. In the long history of humans chasing after fusion power, that line of research is the only one which has proved to be viable as scale increases toward actual production. Very soon they will enter their third major R&D phase, which means a 100MW reactor about the size of a basketball court. The prototype will cost $200M, or roughly what it costs to build a few miles of a freeway. Full-fledged production at scale would be far cheaper.
It’s safe, leaving zero radioactive waste. Its fuel is virtually limitless and naturally occurring. Its design is already published and broadly understood by physicists internationally; once proven at production scale, countries everywhere will rush to begin manufacturing their own. No other alternative energy research comes close to the potential that this has.
If the full-scale phase has disappointing results, it will be a sad day for a lot of people. There have been so many successful phases leading up to this point, however, the possibility of this thing actually working is becoming more and more compelling with each passing year.
Pay attention to this, folks. We may live to see enormous global change in our lifetimes.
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