> You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge.
This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people.
Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit?
I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make.
Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same.
Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.
If you discovered free energy then you and your family are probably getting whacked rather than disrupt the billionaire-class who depend on scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
Governments have basically subsidized energy so that it is as close as possible to free for generations now. Tons of industrial processes rely on super cheap energy, one reason China has such a powerful steel industry is because of how cheap energy is over there.
Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that.
Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer.
Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about.
Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing.
All metal processing uses tons of energy.
Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year.
Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.
Whilst I don't disagree with a lot of the points you're making (they're great):
ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
My family lived in South Africa post-WWII because my gruncle's skin grafts wouldn't take in the UK climate. The Kariba dam gave free electricity to the surrounding area, the idea that this was something people paid for elsewhere just blew the minds of everybody there. Free energy is not a new thing.
However, politics and socioeconomics play a big part in whether or not a country can make successful use of energy, but the possibility of something being possible doesn't mean it'll happen. Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
> ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
Also isn't ExxonMobil one of those strange vertically integrated situations where most of their revenue comes from themselves? They drill the oil, then process it through their own plants which results in them paying themselves lots of money, but I may be mis-remembering that.
Anyway, solar is coming, wind is coming, and electric cars are coming, and no one is getting gunned down in the streets.
Heck China would love infinite free energy! So would any other country that wants completely dominate heavy industry overnight.
> Energy isn't cheap in the UK.
It has been a long time since the UK highly subsidized heavy manufacturing.
Energy prices have of course been going up everywhere, as, most people, realize cheap energy that results in dead kids and cancer for everyone was, in retrospect, really stupid.
> Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Infinite free energy would solve all water reserve problems, although it might end up being an environmental disaster near ocean shorelines...
This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people.
Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit?
I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make.
Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same.
Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.