
Ask HN: Live in the Future--How would you increase your energy consumption 100x? - obeone
History teaches that for some things (like artificial light [ancient oil candles-&gt;LED]) as the price decreases linearly, consumption increases geometrically.<p>Imagine a breakthrough in energy generation tomorrow, (i.e. fusion, automatic robotic placement of solar cells, etc.) where the world has access to vastly more usable energy&#x2F;electricity than it has ever had.<p>Living in this imagined future, in what ways would you personally would consume 10x or 100x the amount of electricity (or energy) you consume today?
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jerf
I'd say it's important to distinguish between "ways I _could_ use lots more
energy" and "ways I might _actually_ use lots more energy".

The former is easy. I _could_ decide to let my house's insulation just rot and
heat it with electricity. But even that probably won't even get me to 10x. I
could suddenly decide I want lots more "stuff" that takes lots of energy to
manufacture. But I honestly can't tell you what stuff that would be,
especially since "stuff" is actually trending down for a lot of us, replaced
by bits. I could want a bigger house in general, but even the relatively
wealthy people I know are not generally upgrading to houses that take 100
times the energy to build and maintain as mine. That would literally be
somehow stuffing a decent-sized subdivision into a single residence.

Ways I'm _actually_ going to use 10x the energy are, IMHO, in short supply.
And 100x is just mind-boggling.

The assumption about how the future is going to use more energy are generally
based either on the idea that we're going to continue exploding in population
(increasingly poorly supported by the evidence), or possibly in some post-
Rapture-of-the-Nerds civilization start burning energy doing some sort of
calculations the likes of which we mostly can't imagine. I say we can't
imagine the calculations because merely "fully simulating a human and their
environment" is probably _already less energy_ that you use now in this
environment; someday our great-great-to-the-X grandchildren may be horrified
by the way we pumped gas into our gas tanks not because of the environmental
damage for an environment they don't really care about, but because each tank
of gas could have provided enough energy for 10 or 100 or whoknows how many
human-equivalent life simulations.

At the moment, I just don't see very many reasons why an HN reader is likely
to use 10x the power that they do now.

~~~
obeone
Thanks for the thoughtful response. My own original thinking was along these
lines as well.

However, some thoughts that did occur to me along the lines of cleaning the
air and water that we each consume, as well as carbon sequestration. Much in
the same spirit that someone launches other local public goods (tor node,
public wifi, etc.), perhaps a generous neighbor/employer decides to undo all
of the carbon or water pollution, or air pollution that they've ever created--
thereby creating a "blast radius" of positive effects around their cleaning
apparatus. Such technologies currently exist, but are energy intensive.

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f_allwein
This is exactly what Michio Kaku writes about in "The Physics of
Extraterrestrial Civilizations": [http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-
of-extraterrestri...](http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-
extraterrestrial-civilizations/)

He argues that a civilization's progress should be measured by the amount of
energy at its disposal. According to this, a civilization that can command all
its planet's energy (Type I) would be able to modify the weather, alter the
course of earthquakes, volcanoes, and build cities on their oceans.

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PaulHoule
Very carefully -- not to heat up my environment. In dense cities heat output
is already about 1% of solar input.

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bbcbasic
We could use the energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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sharemywin
Legion of robotic minions.

