Perpetual motion world globe12/3/2023 The laws which would be broken would have terrible implications elsewhere. If perpetual motion was possible, physics would break. I think the arrival of Fusion is inevitable, the consequences are unimaginable, and the only questions are when it will happen, and what we will do with it. If you think I'm overstating it by suggesting free energy would change everything, then find something you think wouldn't change and see whether it depends on some limitation of energy supply somewhere along the line. We may manage to fix everything for the betterment of mankind, or we may just create new inequalities in which the rich are cool, indoor creatures and the poor are exposed to some unintended consequence. The conditions for life down here are thoroughly dependent on the temperature, which is itself dependent on energy absorbed from the sun and from our own activities. Having fought against the arrival of Fusion as it challenged every status quo and thus their positions atop the piles, some would be kings of the new world, others would have left for the Moon, Mars, Europa and eventually habitats. We turn our planet into a space-ship reliant on the systems we have created to maintain the conditions for life. All would not be lost, but we would have to construct our own mechanisms for keeping the Earth cool raising its albedo by seeding more clouds, constructing vast parasols to shield the Earth as they orbit (creating some sort of light-shade cycle for people on the ground), living ever more shielded and indoor lives as our interventions increasingly mess up the ozone layer. We would eventually reach a point where we had obliterated the Earth's mechanisms to cope. Currently, our problem is that the sun is warming the planet and we are destroying the Earth's capacity to keep itself cool. So all this plentiful energy will go to warming up the planet. a refrigerator, all the energy is eventually turned to heat. There is a problem all that energy goes somewhere. So we have fed and watered the world, whose population is perhaps 30 billion people, using our free energy. Oil: Who needs gallons of liquid that have to be shipped about the globe, when you have free or nearly-free electricity? The political landscape of oil-rich nations would be utterly transformed. By decimating the cost of such fuels, travel to space becomes far cheaper, and by extension the possibilities of constructing habitats in space open up. With electricity we can crack molecules apart and create many of the fuels we would use water and energy will yield you cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen and oxygen, as used by Shuttle. Space: The current limitation on all of us getting our trip to space is the cost of accelerating 100kg of human to 7 km/s, and a lot of that is just the cost of the fuel. Beginning at the edges, they could populate some of the most empty regions of the Earth's surface. With cheap energy, we could construct vast sheltering structures in the desert, and carve out a habitat in which people could live. The deserts: There is a video somewhere of a 3d-printer making things out of the desert sand using only the sunlight and a massive fresnel lens. It is perhaps the only way to meet the food needs of an exponentially growing global population. By using intensive hydroponic techniques, we could have vertical farms vastly increasing the food grown per unit area. The cost is dominated by the power required by the process, so nearly-free energy could permit us to liberate vast quantities of drinking water from seawater across the 3rd world.įood: At present, our food effectively captured radiant energy from the existing fusion reactor in the Sun. Water: Although there is water on much of the surface of the Earth, we cannot use seawater without expensive desalination plants. Much of human history has been about resource constraints having enough food, water and shelter without being eaten is the plight of all things, and our capacity to leverage the energy stored around us has led to our dominance, but we still face constraints: So working Fusion reactors could provide more energy than we have ever imagined possible. Fission atomic weapons are many orders of magnitude more energetic, and Fusion weapons are orders of magnitude larger again. Guns are based on chemical potential energy instead, and provide a much greater energy density. Consider weapons when we had 'physical' energy storage like gravitational potential energy and elastic potential energy, the best we could do to throw stuff at people was archery, catapults and trebuchet. If a new, plentiful energy source was found, what effect would it have on the world?įirstly, a candidate for that plentiful energy source is Fusion. I'm going to modify the premise slightly, because perpetual motion is a real turn-off to a scientist.
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