Wouldn’t we need a method of propulsion that didn’t require the thrust of a funneled combustion? Well, I guess with infinite power we could probably quickly come up with one. If you can convert energy into mass, with infinite energy you could create infinite mass… black holes.
Why work so hard?
You could make a really killer ion drive a lot soon, & easier.
A couple thoughts:
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Oil wouldn’t disappear because plastic is made from oil. The price would drop, and there’d be a ton more plastic made, with dire environmental consequences because packaging and disposable everything would become much cheaper.
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A lot of processes to synthesize rare materials would become economically feasible, causing a drop in a lot of other commodity prices (with a lot of economic disruption from that).
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Weird, powerful new weapons like railguns and lasers that are currently prohibitively energy-expensive. This would tend to revolutionize warfare over the long term in the same way gunpowder did.
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Have/have not disparities increased. If cold fusion became a reality tomorrow, you’d see a tremendous increase in wealth in developed economies better able to exploit it, while poor third world countries would get poorer because what little economic advantage they have would disappear with new, cheap-energy replacements.
Some would try; and they’d fail. It wouldn’t do much good to suppress it in America if, say, the Netherlands or Brazil is implementing it in the open. Most nations in the world aren’t as outright corporation-worshipping as America; at least some would say “too bad for you suckers!” if the energy companies asked them to suppress such an invention.You could never keep something known on a worldwide scale secret anyway.
Methods of propulsion using microwave and laser beams have been proposed. And electromagnetic “mass driver” launchers for satellites.
Actually, you can stay on the grid and a generator at the same time; if you produce excess energy the grid soaks it up and you get money back in your electricity bill. That could have interesting consequences if everyone is doing that. You might need an outright takeover of the electrical grid by the government, or give up on it entirely; I think it’s likely that it wouldn’t be possible to make enough money off it to pay for it’s own maintenance.
It would also become trivially cheap to recycle plastic. The main reason plastic consumes landfill space is that it’s expensive to recycle it, and the reasoni t’s expensive to recycle it is energy.
With ridiculously cheap or free energy, you can recycle plastic with ease.
For that matter you can recycle a lot of things easier; instead of fancy, finicky energy efficent methods you can just melt everything down to it’s basic elements and start from scratch.
Massive unemployment, like ridiculous levels, think the vast majority of people unemployed.
High voltage DC has some advantages over AC, like decreased capacitive losses.
We’d wipe ourselves out within the generation. Excessive unemployment would lead to civil unrest. To quell the unrest governments would have to paint “those damn foreigners!” as the real enemy and mobilize the extra population into the military. With the awesome destructive power that could be unleashed when this infinite amount of energy is directed militarily, I can’t imagine anything except an uninhabitable planet before too many years.
Well, time to start working out a societal system where unemployment instead becomes more vacation for everybody. The lack of energy scarcity would go a long way towards making that possible.
Would unlimited power increase the chance of seeing much more powerful computers, like quantum computers, any faster? I mean, sure, it would mean you could have a billion megawatt cpu, but removing that “restriction” doesn’t necessarily mean it’d be easier to make, would it?
If we could get quantum computers, perhaps molecule assemblers, or “3D printers” could come around.
I’m not seeing why free energy would equal unemployment. Seems to me the increase in efficiency is likely to decrease unemployment.
I’m sure we’ll get the usual “well, what about the oil workers?” stuff, but geez, we should be past this nonsense now. More resources - and that’s what free energy would be - equal more wealth, not less.
I was assuming that he meant it suddenly came on the market rather than was a gradual increase in efficiency like some badass solar cell tech that was developed slowly over time.
It’s not just the oil workers, it’s the gas station attendants the automobile industry, it’s all the people who are dependent upon them, it affects everything.
It’s a Black Swan, the systems disruption will be serious.
We’re still reeling from the mass unemployment of telegraph workers caused by the invention of the telemaphone.
Heck, you don’t even have to go that far; network switching put tens of thousands of operator jobs into the dustbin in a matter of a few years.
As the boom would be fuelled by increased production, it would not be inflationary. At worst, inflationary pressures from increased spending would slow the fall in prices, because it is only the fall in prices that is fuelling the increased demand.
Just because the marginal cost for them is zero doesn’t mean they can’t charge for electricity. They could drastically reduce their prices and still make just as much profit as they do today.
Maybe, but it would be the good type of unemployment - the sort that doesn’t result in any loss of production.
Different scale.
Seeing as you’d be de-scarcifying the undercurrent to pretty much every technological solution to filling basic human needs, it’d probably be the greatest thing in the world.
honestly, you’d probably be about 100x closer to some abundance-based star-trek communism.
Come the electric cars, gasoline powered cars aren’t going to just vanish, unless some mutated monster form of Cash For Clunkers is unleashed (Cash for Combustion?). If every major car manufacturer stopped making cars 10 minutes from now, would the gas stations suffer? They get along just fine with the current number of gas-powered cars. Once the electric cars come around, the number of gas cars on the road will dwindle, but it would probably take decades for them to be off the roads completely. As business for gas stations slows, they can go out of business at their own pace, and the number of oil companies can slowly consolidate down to one or two.
The actual owners of gas stations (not the oil companies) usually make most of their money from snacks and sodas, so maybe if they can just find some reason to get people to stop by, they can subsist as mini-marts without that dreadful smell of unleaded. Maybe cars will still need to be juiced up, so there’ll need to be recharging stations.
But anyway, it wouldn’t be a sudden cataclysmic loss of business for the gas stations and oil companies. It’d be a slow process, and people can adapt to slow processes.
After the bloody civil wars that occurred due to the massive shift in the paradigm of course.