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Mercurial comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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That reasoning is just extremely unconvincing, essentially 100% wrong and backwards.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we're using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Other than energy, most other resources - like ores - are trivially recyclable. If New Rome wanted iron and copper and so on they'd just need to head toward the nearest dump, and dig there. Amount of ores we dug out and made trivially accessible is ridiculously greater than what they had available.
Annual iron ore mining for example is 2.4 billion metric tons, or 1 kg per person per day. Annual steel production is 1.49 billion metric tons, or 220 kg per person per year. Every year (OK, some of that steel is from recycled iron). Vast majority of them would be easily extractable if civilization collapsed. If we went back to Roman levels of population, each Roman could easily extract tens or hundreds of tons of usable steel from just the stuff we extracted that their technology couldn't.
The same applies to every other metal, and most non-metal resources. It doesn't apply to a few resources like phosphorus and helium, but they'll figure it out somehow.
And even if civilization "collapsed" it's not like our scientific and organizational knowledge would have disappeared, making it ridiculously easier to rebuild than it was to build in the first place.
Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is "obviously" true about the territory. taw, you said:
And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I've been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.
I'm not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I'd like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I'm asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.
They are incorrect. Here's a helpful diagram of available energy.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I've seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes' labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by "solar" since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth's surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I'm really not arguing here. I'm honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That's total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Thank you!
Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we're running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn't specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There's no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything - materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.