Now do wind
Tidal energy is not renewable
231–240 of 350 posts
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#232The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
20000X the energy of a current human shows how absurd it would be for growth and energy use to not decouple. I can’t even imagine what I could do on Earth using that much power. Fly my own 737 to a new city every day? I suppose spacefaring humans might use that kind of power but if they are living in space they are no longer part of the biosphere of Earth.
Consider modern use of energy vs ancient, and the ancients couldn't imagine our factories, power plants, data centers, etc. Now consider the crazy compression of energy in the conversation to LED lighting.
In the future, we might use a lot of energy for the we cannot imagine today.
In the future, we might stop using every the way we do today.
In the future, we may produce and consume substantial energy in places other than earth's surface.
In the future, the concept of energy itself might be different, much like people couldn't imagine the type of energy involved in nuclear fission.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#233I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies. Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The total energy received by the earth from the sun during a year is about 5 mil…
Humanity needing that amount of energy seems obviously absurd, but then I suppose a CPU with 100 billion transistors seemed clearly impossible in 1960. Maybe a few hundred years from now, Internet archaeologists will find your comment as one of the first harbingers of the coming World Energy Crisis, much as we see the 1912 Rodney & Otamatea Times "Coal Consumption Affecting Climate" snippet today.[0] Then they'll fin…
I'd say that the CPU example actually proves the point.
A computer today costs roughly the same as a computer in the 1980s, and it also consumes roughly the same amount of energy as a computer from that era. We got faster computers because we got better at making transistors.
If we look at laptops, a device which consumes 200W already gets hot enough that it is uncomfortable to actually place on your lap. A 1kW desktop computer is pretty much impossible to cool.
At our current population, those 5 million exajoules a year is a constant power consumption of roughly 16 megawatt per person. For comparison, that's about the same magnitude of energy you'd need for every human to launch a Falcon 9 to eat lunch in the ISS. Once figures get this big, you simply run out of things to do.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. […] How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years I keep posting this link here on HN but, once again, it seems very appropriate: > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. https://dothemat…
A global cooling system is easily conceivable. The ISS uses radiators to dissipate heat into outer space. We could do the same. We could concentrate heat with heat pumps and pump hot steam, molten salt, or plasma up a space elevator and radiate the heat away. Edit: The link points out that in 1,400 years we'd be using energy at the rate produced by the sun and in 2,500 years at the rate of the entire Milky Way. Even…
we can (and do) radiate heat into space already. there's a specific infrared wavelength that passes out of our atmosphere unimpeded.
building things which receive sunlight but which emit IR at this wavelength would have a cooling effect, though I don't know to what scale.
no need to pump anything up to space, lol. just put hot stuff inside vessels which are painted with a material which radiates heat at this specific wavelength.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#235The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
If you assume 2% increase per year, anything is irrelevant. Nothing can allow humanity to sustain unbounded energy growth on a single planet.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#236The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth , and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril. Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most curr…
Constant percentage economic growth is possible indefinitely because the economy is made up.
It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#237The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth , and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril. Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most curr…
it is possible to have exponential growth with a brief period of financial crash/recession, when prices reset to previous bottoms and exponential growth continues (boom&bust cycle).
so far it has been the case with human economics across all countries/economies. yes some shareholders will be zeroed out during recession, but others will continue on the growth journey
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth , and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril. Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most curr…
Constant percentage economic growth is possible indefinitely because the economy is made up. It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386222>
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is one escape from this, basically confining more and more "growth" to artificial numbers on paper (or in a DB). Cryptocurrencies are kind of going in that direction, where the "value" that is reported as economic growth doesn't correspond to any kind of real-world matter or activity, but is simply assigned to some specific group of bits. I can kind of believe that this virtual kind of growth could cont…
The problem with this, or any other hypothetical "decoupled growth" argument is that, well, it's purely hypothetical. There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies , which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, an…
It’s only hypothetical in that the future hasn’t arrived yet. Most predictions are hypothetical by that criteria.
We know the economy is decoupled from physical limits because we have built it to be that way. If you go to my bank right now, they are not going to have a physical pile of valuable objects there which is my account balance. They have a computer that stores numbers, and obviously it needs energy to operate, but it doesn’t cost 10x energy to store 10,000 instead of 1,000 in the database entry for my account balance.
Re: Tidal energy is not renewable
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth , and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril. Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most curr…
Constant percentage economic growth is possible indefinitely because the economy is made up. It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.
If you want to define growth as cash, then sure. If you want to define it by tangible output, then not so much.