This thread on cold fusion made me think about what would actually happen if it were to actually come about that energy was completely free and without limit. Now I was a university physics major when Pons and Fleischmann made their original “discovery” and I never believed it for a second. I still don’t, but what if it, or something similar, was true? How would the global economy react? Would it go down the tubes because of the immense disruption, or would it expand dramatically? Would anyone need to work, or if they did, how would you entice them to do so? What would life be like under this scenario?
People still need to make the devices. People still need to refine the ingredients. You’ll still need power lines. They all need to be paid. And Deuterium and Tritium aren’t limitless. Both cost to extract or create.
There’s no such thing as free energy.
Well, follow me here:
- The coal, natural gas, oil, and similar industries based on fossil fuels would disappear overnight. That would put, what, a few million (?) people in the US alone out of work.
1a) It would also bring anthropogenic global warming (if you believe in that sort of thing) to a screeching halt. *Well, maybe not to a screeching halt, but it would certainly help.
1b) Of course, that would largely depend on the automakers making engines that could be powered by cold fusion. But I think they’d figure out a way.
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The nuclear power industry is gone, too. Tens of thousands of jobs there, too.
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The economies of several nations (Saudi Arabia, Iran) would virtually disappear. The economies of several other nations (Mexico, Norway) would take a severe hit.
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Since we can now de-salinate water virtually for free, that would create a whole new industry devoted to moving the de-salinated water inland.
4a) This would provide fresh water to hundreds of millions of people who don’t have access to it.
4b) This would also create a boon in agriculture. If you’re able to cheaply irrigate formerly un-farmable land, you’re going to be able to grow more crops. Eventually, this could make a huge dent in the problem of worldwide food shortages. It could also cause food prices worldwide to drop dramatically, causing pain for farmers.
4c) Similarly, cheap irrigation could help in desert reclamation projects worldwide, leading to some positive environmental changes.
In short, free energy could create a lot of problems (namely of the unemployment variety), but it could also eliminate or at least significantly address a lot of problems as well.
Free energy is a great thing. . . except when it’s a bad thing.
What can you do with free energy? Focus on consumption of products created with said energy. Which means you no longer have an “oil problem,” you now have a “plastics, rare metals, overflowing landfills” problem. The environmental impact of free energy would be changed from greenhouse gases to general environmental pollution and resource exhaustion. Plus, desalination has environmental impacts as well-- that salt has to go somewhere, and if it goes back in the water supply, you kill marine life right quick.
I think employment impacts are overblown. Free energy opens up far, FAR more economic opportunities than are lost in the energy market today. Short-term transitory pain for massive worldwide gain.
Oh, and yeah: say hello to a population boom. Free energy = FREE energy. What holds the Third World back right now? Reliable access to affordable energy, and all the benefits (agriculutral, industrial, post-industrial) that are provided by such a thing.
On the flip side, the one demonstrable benefit of free energy on the scale of “cold fusion” would probably be a massive cheapening of space travel. So, while we may ruin the planet yet, we’d probably finally start being able to leave it. Although that creates a whole other series of challenges to address.
BTW-- there’s nothing theoretically wrong with cold fusion. It’s not quack science, it’s just weird science. There may be nothing there, and this latest research example may be another rabbit hole. But just because Pons and Fleischmann screwed the pooch doesn’t invalidate other approaches that may achieve a practical result.
Gotta disagree with you, Homie. There’s too much infrastructure for coal, oil, gas, nuclear, etc to disappear overnight. There will be a transition period in which people and economies will adjust, much like they did for electricity, the motor-car, the aero-plane, the information super-highway, etc.
Life would go on as usual, and we’d occasionaly post on a message-board about what a wonderous age we live in.
The Earth overheats, because using energy means raising the heat on this planet. The more energy released the hotter things get.
I’m not 100% sure about this. If we managed to get all the fresh water the world needs from the ocean we’d be using, what, 1% of it? And even then, it would eventually return to the ocean in one form or another.
Would the salt from that much desalination have an appreciable effect on marine life overall (though I’m sure that it would cause problems in the locality of the plant from which it came).
(Unless this is a whoosh)
Not really, no. The earth acts as a blackbody radiator at night, shedding most of that heat out into space. With less insulating greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere, it gets even better at removing heat.
Another benefit (unrelated to the above) of free abundant energy is that aluminum gets a whole lot cheaper to make.
Not a whoosh.
Unlimited energy conversion means more consumption as people want to use more energy. It is very possible to raise the overall temperature of the Earth.
While theoretically possible (and we’re talking a lot of energy consumption here), all you’d need to do when it gets too hot is tell everyone to lay off technology for a day or two. Temperatures then reset back to normal during that period of time.
Importantly, water would be desalinated by distillation rather than reverse osmosis or similar so it would be pure.
RO water may not be quite the equal of distilled, but it’s very close. I belong to an organization that operates a RO system capable of 17,000 gallons per day, and the water is pure enough that we regularly use it in place of distilled water in batteries. And my last set of batteries lasted 13 years with this treatment.
We wouldn’t have to grovel to so many misogynist, dictatorial, infidel-hating, nostalgic-for-the- tenth century AD Saudi sheiks anymore to get our oil 
Countering the fear of a population boom/bomb, rising affluence seems to correlate with a lower birthrate.
It also depends whether this free energy source is easily weaponized.
sorry, famines are not generally caused by worldwide food shortages, it is caused by the inability to move food from one location to another. We dont happen to HAVE a worldwide food shortage. We simply have governments refusing to let food transit and be distributed for political reasons in general
When the cargotainers of food stop rotting on the docks and get distributed regardless to national political party or ‘racial’ lines, then we wont have issues. One of the major complaints of food distribution charities is the corruption and political blackmail involved.
How soon are we talking about the free energy technology reaching the market? There’s a Pons and Fleischmann-style annoucement, and all the followup experiments by other labs succeed in replicating it; or Westinghouse holds a press conference, saying they’ve invented a limitless energy machine, and they go on sale on Friday (they’re the size of D-cell batteries, and cost 50¢ per megawatt capability, plus sales tax)?