10
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Infinite energy
How would life change if we had infinite sustainable energy. What could humanity do with something like that given the current state of technology. Everyone would have a fully charged phone at least.
How would life change if we had infinite sustainable energy. What could humanity do with something like that given the current state of technology. Everyone would have a fully charged phone at least.
Even if I limit your exercise to simply “electricity is so abundant as to be effectively free even at scale” then I can imagine the largest barrier to a genuinely circular recycling economy just vanishes. If you have infinite free electricity then there’s no need to bother with plastics anymore because glass, paper, and most metals also become effectively free
Melting and recycling aluminium and steel and copper and all the other commonly used metals becomes incredibly cheap. Glass is probably the same
Access to drinking water via seawater desalination is suddenly achievable, so every part of the coast (not just where a freshwater river runs nearby) of every bit of land suddenly becomes habitable in ways they weren’t before
Temperature control like air conditioning and heating become effectively free to run so all those super cold climates that have gas heaters can switch to (horribly inefficient but who cares if it’s free) resistive heating, and hot and humid areas can run air conditioning and dehumidifiers all day without worrying about the electric bill. This would also impact refrigeration at large scales, so the price of chilled food (fresh and/or frozen) probably drops a decent amount too
Induction cooktops are already pretty cheap to run and only need a little consideration for what types of pots and pans you can use, but if the price to run them is free, then more houses would switch away from gas stoves and eventually the demand for gas into domestic housing would drop enough to not be worth keeping, so there would be a significant switch to electrification in homes, so the number of deaths due to carbon monoxide each year should also plummet
I’d even go a step further and propose that, with infinite energy, all materials become effectively free. You’ll "just" need to figure out a way to either break composites into pure elements again, or make elements anew entirely (or both). This concept is also explored in the latter chapters of Manna, if memory serves correct.
Yeah, truly unlimited energy means unlimited energy. We can create any element we desire now, but the energy cost is so insane that no one would ever suggest it. A world with unlimited energy can do almost anything they want. If the energy is portable, they could travel at almost light speed. So I think the very first thing an author would need to do is define what they mean by unlimited because one of completely free energy would mean the author would run into many logical traps when trying to create issues.
That said, I did just think of one issue in an unlimited world. Heat. All energy usage outputs heat as a by product because no machine is perfect. So let's say a society discovers the unlimited energy macguffin and begins to do amazing things. They even tackle the causes of global warming today. But generations down the line, they start to run into the issue of global warming again as all their amazing machines release too much heat in mass. The Earth can't radiate enough away quickly enough. So the society would have to struggle with ways in which the could try controlling their heating world. The conflicts would be around how they're machines are needed to build the methods by which they try ejecting heat but using them generates more. Ejecting heat would also require ejecting mass so the world would run the risk of throwing away significant chunks of the planet. Bringing replacement mass in would be a struggle as mass would heat up if dropped onto the planet but also if carried down by rockets. There could be social strife to turn off the machines but society is too dependant on them.
That's the most practical issue I can think of right now in an unlimited energy world.
Ideas are sustainably infinite and we fight over those too. In another hundred-thousand years, it will still be up to the individual to learn how to share. Though people are like this when left unchecked, don't read this integral flaw as a condemnation but as an infinitely sustainable opportunity to learn.
The core thing that we could do is direct air capture of CO₂ and subsurface sequestration. There is a solid 1 Tt (that's a teratonne, or 10¹² metric tonnes) of anthropgenic CO₂ to mitigate in the atmosphere. It takes about 1 MWh to capture and concentrate 1 tonne of CO₂ from air or water. So mitigating that amount of CO₂ will take about 10¹² MWh, or 10⁶ TWh. Right now, the world uses about 2.3×10⁴ TWh, or about 2.3% of the energy that would be needed to sequester all anthropogenic CO₂.
"Infinite" energy (setting aside the implications of special relativity and the fact that such a thing would eliminate the entire universe in the manner of a false vacuum bubble) would make mitigation of anthropogenic CO₂ and the stabilization of climate change feasible at a rate limited only by our ability to build the infrastructure.
Infinite energy, unless paired with massive societal changes, would be a planetary catastrophy.
Of the 9 planetary boundaries, the most urgent is biosphere intergrity (habitat destruction mostly) and the most talked about is climate change. Infinite energy might (maybe not, see Jevons paradox) help for climate change, and enable us to completely blow past (not the good kind of blowing past) all 8 other limits.
Infinite energy does offer lots of new opportunity, so we might be able to survive, with a few pets, but most species wouldn't.
I expect we'd be able to use carbon capture to solve most of climate change.
But basically all human activity is like a machine that uses energy to turn nature into garbage (nature - > raw resources - > extracted resources - > product - > used product - > garbage). If we get infinite cheap energy, we'll also get infinitely more garbage and infinitely less nature.
It'll always seem like an acceptable tradeoff on it's own (smartphone and EV for everyone!), but nevertheless the main thing stopping us from turning the planet into single use napkin right now is that we don't have the means.
I sound anti human, but I'm really not. I just think we have an overconsumption management problem, and we should work on that before we get infinite power. (Just like free booze isn't a good fix for a broke alcoholic, broke is a symptom, not the illness)
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.