US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
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Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#2Can any physics experts chime in? This seems similar to stuff I’ve read over and over but I want to believe…
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#3I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#4Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#5I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
The price of energy has always been approaching zero. Restated, the amount of energy available to an individual has generally grown exponentially, with pauses here and there because civilization. We might be resuming that growth in the next few decades.
Fusion isn’t and won’t be solved in the immediate future. There is a long path towards commercial viability and a lot of milestones along the way… and not really a great method of associating them in a popular science sort of way that doesn’t seem like “we’ve solved fusion!”
Real significant progress is indeed being made and is expected to continue, people are going to be excited then disappointed by milestones being announced because we’re closer but not there.
Fusion isn’t just always thirty years down the road though, we can see the destination getting closer.
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#6I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
In many jurisdictions the cost of delivering a kilowatt-hour is already more than the cost of producing it. So cheap energy is not going to have a substantial impact on normal people unless we switch to wireless electricity delivery or something.
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#7I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Who's we? If fusion is solved, the country that has will just become a net energy exporter (somehow, if it's the US, idk how they would ship that power). Nothing much will change for the rest of the world, they will just switch from one dependency to the other.
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#8I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
In many jurisdictions the cost of delivering a kilowatt-hour is already more than the cost of producing it. So cheap energy is not going to have a substantial impact on normal people unless we switch to wireless electricity delivery or something.
Not just cheap though - near zero. If we have an infinite tap of it, we can afford to waste a lot of it in the process of delivering it. The inefficient becomes efficient when you plug in infinities and zeroes
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#9I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Don't get your hopes up yet: This just demonstrated that the released energy (in form of heat etc) is higher than the energy input – yet the released energy hadn't been converted to electricity that could have powered the lasers.
Supposedly this would be done by a heat engine, with can normally extract 60% of energy input. So 2.5 * 0.6 = 1.5, so it is yet again not producing any surplus energy.
Re: US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
#10I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
The price of energy has always been approaching zero. Restated, the amount of energy available to an individual has generally grown exponentially, with pauses here and there because civilization. We might be resuming that growth in the next few decades. Fusion isn’t and won’t be solved in the immediate future. There is a long path towards commercial viability and a lot of milestones along the way… and not really a gr…
I think all progress will accelerate significantly with the dawn of true AI. The fusion scientist can now ask ChatGPT for ten (or 10,000) ideas on how to solve a particular roadblock, and a lot of the suggestions will be actually good. The cost of intelligence has suddenly become near-zero, and that will supercharge everything to do with innovation