So if coldfusion is never going to happen, what is the energy source of the future?

>Ultimately it'll be black holes and Hawking radiation
No.

if you can afford to do it, geothermic. Think about it for a moment; the heat the earth's core pumps out underground will never run out in humanity's lifetime. Iceland already does geothermic to an extent. There's almost zero risk of the energy source just as heat and vapour ever causing a disaster like nuclear power stations might. Solar energy and wind energy are tempromental. Thermal energy never gets interrupted by clouds or a drop in wind

Ultimately meaning trillions of trillions of years in the future, beyond the star forming age of the universe. In that period BH's will be the only source of energy in the universe

Yeah, exactly. Wait for glorious anarcho-capitalist Mars, I guess

Iceland can do geothermal because they have the proper geological/tectonic arrangement with volcanic activity.

...

Hydrogen gas

I'm not even remotely familiar with earth science, but how could you even scale up geo to be a main power source? Most areas in the world don't have the right conditions for geo to be feasible.

Yep you are correct many areas aren't suitable but where it works it's great.

i think you meant to say 50 years

We'll have net-positive fusion by the end of the century.

Solar. Everything ends with solar as the final power source.

>black holes

>what is the energy source of the future

Burning tires and dung.

Not nuclear cause politicians like to listen to plebs who are scared of it.

desu i don't think fossil fuel is going anywhere soon

Wood. Modern civilization isn't going to last another 100 years.

Maybe mining asteroids and the moon is a good way for future energy.

I have heard that the moon have a shit load of helium 3 which can be used, but fusion or solar power seems to be the best course.

try 10 years

>Trillions of years from now
>Humans still around
>Humans still have heat death theory
>Humans weren't able to do anything about it.

Sounds depressing tbqhwyfam

Nuclear is the garbage form of energy. It's the lowest level of the next level.

wouldnt there be some limit way before heat death of usable heat being exhausted i.e. all fuel sources and solar, I imagine some race towards the remaining suns that are still usable.

No idea.The only "serious" discussions about civilization billions of years out is all sci-fi with solutions varying on the narrator's optimism or pessimism.

giant fucking stars

We already had net-positive fusion

really hot fusion

He3 + He3 = H + H + He4 + 12.9 MeV

other forms of fusion generate more energy more efficiently. though they have a lot of neutron radiation to deal with.

>implying our species is gonna even survive the next 100 years

I hope you don't survive long enough to procreate

>normal fusion by 2050
>*insert huge gap*
>zero-point fuckery by 2XXX
That is, if we don't meme up ourselves in the upcoming late-XXIc. resource wars. Also, discussing stuff beyond 2200 is pointless as high AI would have left humanity behind by then.

>even contemplates fucking resource wars after fusion becoming mainstream
get the fuck out of here

>various shithole "developing" nations would be able to afford XX billion $ reactors
Let's not kid ourselves here. Even if fusion becomes functional by 2030 (which will realistically not happen before 2040-60) it'll take decades to reach meaningful reactor number and capacity. Look at nuclear- fucking miracle tech, and it still barely got to 10% of world power in +70 years.

hot fusion?

It basically depends on the economic viability of fusion. If it is expensive to build and maintain, them it will be just a curiosity proped up by state incentives, if it is expensive to build but cheap to maintain, it will be something of a first world thing, used by economically powerful countries to get around their dependence on imported/polluting energy sources, if it is cheap to build, but expensive to maintain, it will just become one among many other energy sources, and if it is both cheap to build AND to maintain, then the sky is the limit.

>them
>proped up
*then and propped up

it's defo not gonna be cheap to build, that's a given, it requires much more sophisticated containment technology than fission reactors (basically a shitton of concrete), and if we seriously want to power whole civilization with it, there will either have to be a fuckton of them or they will have to be enormous, BUT, once you're there, with UNLIMITED POWAH, you can just throw your hands up and use it to bruteforce your way out of all kinds of scarcity, starting with powering whole grid, then desalination, heating and lighting of greenhouses anywhere you want, powering all land vehicles with electricity, which now costs basically nothing

>it's defo not gonna be cheap to build, that's a given
It depends on the relative price of a fusion reactor. For example, if it costs 1 billion bucks to build one, and only 5 million to build a thermoelectric plant, then the fusion reactor would need to produce 200 times the energy of the thermoelectric plant to be equivalent in terms of up-front cost, but yeah, at least at first, fusion reactor will be very expensive to build AND maintain relative to their power production, and time will lead to an decrease in build and maintenance cost, and an increase in power production(but how much it will be, and how fast it will be is the crux of the question).

fission
energyfromthorium.com/cubic-meter/

>Look at nuclear- fucking miracle tech, and it still barely got to 10% of world power in +70 years.
We could have converted the entire world's electricity supply in 30 years if there was enough motivation, and the political fearmongering didn't exist. France did it in less than 20, and they were not in a big rush.

Poorly upheld safety standards and disrepair of some older generation reactors don't help the case either.

Fearmongering, through and through. Going by the history, nuclear is the safest form of electricity generation by far, even including the "poorly upheld safety standards", and "disrepair of some older generation reactors", and even including Chernobyl which was more or less designed to explode.

More people have died from a single hydro dam accident by several orders of magnitude, than have ever died from radiation poisoning from nuclear power.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Im very pro nuclear energy, was just adding what are indeed a select few cases that contribute to peoples fear or concerns.

TEPCO knew fukushima was at risk but chose not to do anything to prevent it.

Understood.

>meaning trillions of trillions of years in the future
All you need is some solar panels the size of small states (even with modern solar panel efficiency), and some really accurate lasers. You should even be able to determine the spin and trajectory.

Well, creating it's just a matter of accuracy and scale, so that's the easy part - you also need some way to actually harness the radiation of the micro black hole you just created. A large titanium shell would harness it, I suppose, but you'd need some sorta efficient gamma-ray reflecting material, which may or may not exist, to use it for anything else.

If we had regular progression, it certainly wouldn't be millions of years off to make them, at least. Granted, that's a big "if". I doubt we're going to get off the planet at this point.

Unless you have some sorta energy->matter conversion device, yeah. Even unlimited energy doesn't fix everything. Indeed, it'd fix very little, and break a few things to boot.

Wasn't Chernobyl the very thing why safety became a thing?

That and Three Mile Island, yes.
euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

Elaborate

If the machines could get energy from something that only produces 37 degrees of heat, then they could have gotten it from basically anything and done so far more easily than sticking people into a hyper realistic simulation.

>7 days
>where the 7:th is for rest

How is heluim 3 an energy source?

When you have working fusion, any gas giant is a fuel source that lasts for trillions of years and doesn't burn itself out by itself. Earth-like planets would still be habitable with no sun if we have fusion, although we would need to live at the bottom of the ocean trenches.

Also, assuming a civilisation is advanced enough, it is theoretically possible to extend a star's life for trillions of years by "star lifting". It's a process where space installations accelerate mass loss from a star to slow down its burn rate/mine massive amounts of matter. You can take the ejected mass and extract the non hydrogen elements (which are basically poisonous to the star) while dumping the hydrogen back into the star to give it fuel.

You underestimate the potential impact of fusion. If it works like the numbers say it should, then we will have so much energy to spare that it would be feasible to transmute matter on large scales. I mean taking the byproducts of fossil fuels and putting in the energy to revert them back into fuels. Every factory in the world could become carbon neutral when using the energy from fusion to capture and transmute their waste emissions.

humans need fusion within 50 years or we will be extinct.

We'll be fine. The worst that could happen is the great conveyer shutting down and the northen hemisphere entering an ice age, The Day After Tomorrow style.

Wasn't it in the original script that they used the human brain for computing instead of using their energy?

the worst that could happen is a canfield ocean event (which makes earth basically unlivable for us)

I dunno. It makes sense to generate most of what the brain sees within the brain itself, though. Already, everything we feel amd see is an illusion created by electro chemical impulses in the brain. A joke of neurosurgeons when they operate on patients is the do things like poke the speech center of a patient's brain and say "this is the part of you that is speaking with me".

Only for a little while. They've happened before.

Humans are a virus on the planet...people will die, but we're going nowhere in terms of a century

Wasn't helium-3 the big energy source of the future? Or is it too much a pain in the ass to get ahold of?

A second-generation approach to controlled fusion power involves combining helium-3 (32He) and deuterium (21H). This reaction produces a helium-4 ion (42He) (like an alpha particle, but of different origin) and a high-energy proton (positively charged hydrogen ion) (11p). The most important potential advantage of this fusion reaction for power production as well as other applications lies in its compatibility with the use of electrostatic fields to control fuel ions and the fusion protons. High speed protons, as positively charged particles, can have their kinetic energy converted directly into electricity, through use of solid-state conversion materials as well as other techniques. Potential conversion efficiencies of 70% may be possible, as there is no need to convert proton energy to heat in order to drive a turbine-powered electrical generator.

Yeah that's all well and good, but what I was wondering was about the basic problem of getting ahold of the shit. It's not like scooping it out of jupiter is a practical solution in the foreseeable future.

Mass drivers on the moon, powered by a local fusion plant. This has the added benefit of doubling as a WMD when the need arises.

I don't care for your definition of benefit

Dyson swarm

Its completely viable with our current levem of technology. Only problem might occur with transfering energy but that isnt a necesity. We can sustain population in space anyways

If I'm not mistaken you can transfer the energy via microwave beams. We'll probably only be able to capture a small portion of the transmitted energy, but a small portion of the energy from a Dyson swarm is still a fuckload of energy.

Can we? We don't know if people can survive in zero gravity for long periods. Astronauts lose a lot of heart muscle when they stay in space.

just have the space station rotate at an appropriate angular velocity relative to the radius of it's axis of rotation and you could simulate a comfortable 1g.

>Space station explodes from centrifugal forces ripping it apart with the force of an entire earth.

>the force of an entire earth.
It's called 1g.
And it's totally possible to build a station able to withstand that, the math is well known.
The real problem is the cost.

Maybe hot fusion but small so there's not an inconvenient amount of heat.

Cycling machines and treadmills

i like it hot though

>According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died at the province[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.
jesus fuck

Everybody knows dams are retarded. Whats your point?

His point is that nuclear, while thought of as dangerous, is the safest and other sources, thought of as safe, are very dangerous (comparatively).

The fag laser thingy
nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-net-energy-from-fuel-1.14710

Is hamster wheel theory even plausible? How many people would have to run for it to work?

Think you meant to reply to but factories, regardless of energy provided, can only produce things from existing materials. They process materials with energy, they don't create them from energy. We don't have Star Trek replicator technology - and that's a long, long way beyond fusion, if it's possible at all.

Extracting materials would be easier, and production would be cheaper, yes, so things would be cheaper, yes. But some necessary materials will always be rare.

...and of course, you still get into all those resources you can't produce. Like time. If the manufacturing industry becomes infinitely effective, and thus essentially background noise, the service industry merely takes over, which is pretty much what we see happening already anyways. Those resources suffer from the same supply/demand issues as any raw material.

>How is heluim 3 an energy source
explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html

Actually, the sad thing is that it's very plausible. There's lots of kinetic energy devices that are sickeningly efficient, the only problem being that you'd need to put some labor into them (in some cases, maybe only once a month or so). ...and that's somehow "inhumane", despite all the manual labor so many billions of humans, and in some cases, animals, are doing every day anyways.

Plus it isn't "neat technology", just looks janky as fuck, and thus doesn't generate much interest, and, probably most importantly, doesn't make you money the way a non-renewable resource does.

The difference is: If I don't want to get fucked by a breaking damn, I don't live near one. That doesn't work so well with a broken reactor.

>Enclosing the sun with billions of sattelites with magic wireless energy technology
>Viable

>I can't understand it so it's impossible
Go home brainlet

But it's not a long way off. This is something so many don't realize. It is simple chemistry we can do right now.

CH4[g] + 2 O2[g] -> CO2[g] + 2 H2O[g] + energy

This is the chemical reaction for the combustion of methane. It is reversible, like most reactions. You just need to put in energy to get those products to combine. This is where the vast supply of cheap energy from fusion comes in.

Fusion can't replace everything directly, you can't put a fusion reactor in a car, for instance. And often you need a lot of energy very quickly instead of efficiently, like in a rocket. But what fusion can do is provide a constant source of energy for things like neutralising fossil fuel emissions and recharging batteries. It's the stream of water that runs endlessly. It's similar to what a self refilling water bottle can do for a man looking to cross a desert.

You've just described how to make more energy, with energy.

I think you might be missing the point I was trying to make.

I didn't describe that at all, and for the record I never originally intended to reply to you.

>not even a class 1 civilization
>wants to do something a class 2 civilization is capable of
>viable

>He wants to eat chocolate
>Only big boys eat chocolate
>Hey how are you eating chocolate
>Guess you're a big boy now

You're weird. You can't walk unless you can walk and the moment you start walking is when you start walking and become a walker. It's the same thing.

Unless we can make space travel dirt cheap it won't be worth it.

orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf
review this and witness memery

Space travel is dirt cheap right now
travel to space travel is what is really painful on the wallet

but you can't run until you can walk, user.