> Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?
The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:
The point is that you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet. Which is hardly irrelevant to the people still there, e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space. The computation may take a megawatt-hour but transmitting the result back to the surface is only a few watt-seconds for a radio link.
Likewise, the humans who live on other planets can be consuming local energy without heating Earth, and the people still on Earth would still get the value of their inventions, discoveries and writings.
> e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space.
…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
> If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again.
So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?
> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.
Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
> Maintenance is performed locally. […] By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.
But that still doesn't affect energy density. If you want twice as many server farms then you build twice as many space stations in twice the volume of space and the energy density remains constant.
But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.
> you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet
No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
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The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.
> It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.
> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.
> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.
At this point we're just trading sci-fi story ideas. If we can learn to manage our population growth and/or energy consumption growth, then that's awesome!
The original claim was essentially that energy use can't increase past a certain point because it would result in too much energy density. The obvious flaw in the claim is that it assumes no ability to increase the volume of space in which the energy use takes place, which is an invalid premise. Space is really big.
No, dude, even if you postulate FTL spaceships, the size of the Universe doesn't matter, you always eventually become an explosion. All exponential growth curves are S-shaped.
At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.
