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from the nothing-lasts-more-than-8-years dept.
Mankind has a history of long term projects. The Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall, getting Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain...
Some of these projects took multiple centuries of effort. Not a single person present at the start of those saw them completed. This is made worse when you consider lifespans that were half or less what they are currently.
But what was the LAST project that spanned lifetimes? Do you know of any going on today?
The Great Wall was started in 300 B.C. and completed some 1900 years later.
As humanity considers things like colonizing other planets and space megastructures we are talking about activities that will take centuries of effort. This turns into millennia as we look at things like terraforming and actually spreading humanity beyond our own star.
Does humanity in the current instant gratification social media quarterly results era have the appetite for projects that our grandchildren won't see completed?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @09:53AM (9 children)
I'm that AC. Electricity is not plentiful but scarce. Of course you can fire up a coal plant and get plenty of electricity but doing so will completely fuck the planet, as science has so amply proven. Humanity has existed for millions of years and has only used electricity for the last 200 years or we can live perfectly well without any of it. And the very wellfare of people and nature requires that we don't use it like we do today, in huge amounts and towards stupid and useless and downright evil goals. I'm not religious at all by the way, I'm all for reason and responsibility.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @03:49PM (4 children)
The 1kw per square meter of sunlight falling everywhere on Earth, four to five more orders of magnitude more energy than humanity uses for all its purposes including agriculture indicates otherwise.
No AC or refrigeration, no instant global communication, no huge multipliers of our labor from electricity-based tools, no cheap lighting, and a huge drop in our ability to manufacture the stuff we want and need. I can point to numerous, important uses for each of these. The refrigeration of spoilable food and medicines, the ability to widen one's mind by communicating with people around the global; the work- and time-saving devices to make our lives better; lighting to improve the quality of our living habitats; and the amazing variety of goods and services, powered by electricity, that we use to shape our world and better our lives. Sure, you can live with stone clubs and whatnot, but if you want to do something more than merely live, that requires some of the furnishings of the modern world.
Because living less well and using resources even more inefficiently than we do now, will be so much better for people and nature than now. As I noted earlier, you're ignoring both that the power sources for electricity are remarkably plentiful, even going past solar power, while the needs and wants are significant. Calling it "useless and downright evil goals" is merely an abuse of the semantics of morality. It's not, thus you are wasting our time with spurious and wrong accusations.
Then you would be saying different things. Your words here demonstrate your true outlook.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @07:55PM (1 child)
AKA industry will continue unhindered by environmental concerns!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @08:02PM
Because that is the only other option, amirite? Either we halt all human progress to save our extremely precious electricity which is the most important thing in the world, or we allow industry to run riot over the lands and turn the place into a parking lot. There is no other possible course of action - what we're doing now must somehow fall into one of those two pigeon holes. But it doesn't seem to fit. Maybe if we whacked on the logic harder?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28 2018, @09:21AM (1 child)
I thought we were discussion electricity, not energy or sunlight... After you've covered the entire surface of the planet with 100% efficient solar panels and promised to maintain those in perpetuity we will resume discussion...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 31 2018, @05:17PM
Electricity can be obtained as reasonable efficiency from sunlight and of course, from energy. When you have a bunch of orders of magnitude more than you need, a little inefficiency is not that important.
Why in the world would we bother to do that when we only need two to three orders of magnitude less (counting the inefficiency of the solar panels)? Agriculture in comparison uses up about a third of the Earth's land area, which is crudely an order of magnitude less than the Earth's total surface area. Thus, agriculture already uses up one to two orders of magnitude more land area than we would need with 10% efficient solar panels (counting clouds, night, angle of the Sun, etc).
What is insane here is that you're speaking of electricity as if it is a resource so scarce that we need to conserve to an extreme its consumption, even though there's plenty of evidence that's nonsense. In an economic sense, sure, electricity like all finite resources is scarce. But at the same time it is plentiful and there's plenty more we could be doing than merely optimizing its usage.
We don't generate electricity because we hate Mother Earth. We do it because we use that electricity for all sorts of useful things. And the incredible cheapness of electricity, particularly when compared to the cost of the things we do with it (rarely is electricity or energy usage a significant cost of a human activity!), indicates that your concern is greatly misplaced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 27 2018, @01:36PM (3 children)
If electricity was scarce to me I certainly wouldn't be using it to post on SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28 2018, @09:17AM (2 children)
I think if my words light a bulb in your or somebody else's head so to speak then they might not be wasted after all. Unlikely but yet possible.
You and I use electricity carelessly because it's dirt cheap. How can it be scarce if it's cheap? Externalities. Were we to pay the real full cost neither of use could afford it. And that's the way it should be.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 31 2018, @05:52PM
Nonsense. Externalities of electricity generation are greatly overstated. For example, an IMF study [imf.org] provided an exaggerated estimate of externalities (providing a numerical estimate of roughly $4 trillion which it then terms a "subsidy"). Drilling down, one sees that most of that externality is decided to be respiratory illnesses, with about half as much due to the allegedly dire effects of CO2 emissions on global warming. There's no awareness, for example, of the effects of overly clean living on asthma and other autoimmune diseases which are a significant contributor to the respiratory illness situation. Coal burning didn't force your kids to stay inside most of their lives.
Second, the above study means that most of the damage that is actual, comes from countries that haven't adopted developed world pollution standards yet. In the developed world, there probably are modest health-related externalities from the residual pollution from electricity production, but it's not as much as you claim. Third, we don't even know that there is a net negative externality from CO2 production. The costs have been greatly fluffed up while benefits (less extreme cold weather, more arable land, and the Northwest passage around Canada) are slighted.
But even if we just take this externality on faith, it is still only $23 per MwH ($0.23 per KwH) of energy consumed globally with electricity being somewhat lower (better efficiency and less dependence on fossil fuel burning). Sorry, even using these exaggerated numbers electricity would be no more than triple its current price (and probably not even that). That's not even remotely going to make electricity usage unaffordable in the developed world where most of us reside.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 31 2018, @06:13PM