I know that the fusion “ignition” achieved last week has no short term impact on energy infrastructure. Still, an important milestone was crossed.<\/p>\n
Realistically, it will likely be several more decades before we can get to where fusion begins to live up to its potential as an energy source. But what will happen then?<\/p>\n
In particular, if energy were to one day become vastly cheaper and vastly higher capacity, what would change? It seems to me that two obvious places are computation and transportation.<\/p>\n
Currently about 30% of the cost of taking a long flight is the cost of fuel. But what if the cost of fuel went down by a factor of 100, or 1000?<\/p>\n
In that case it might make sense to use far more energy for the same flight. And that might make it possible rethink the entire process. Some future variation on flight technology, designed around greater energy capacity, could end up being much cheaper.<\/p>\n
And of course computation is bound mainly by the availability of electric power. Server farms are energy hogs, and the relationship of “energy in == computation out” is pretty well defined.<\/p>\n
If it were possible to draw 100 or 1000 times more power, we could completely rethink the economics of computation. A.I. algorithms that currently take minutes or hours could be run at interactive rates — with every individual getting their own generous slice of the pie.<\/p>\n
Imagine the possibilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know that the fusion “ignition” achieved last week has no short term impact on energy infrastructure. Still, an important milestone was crossed. Realistically, it will likely be several more decades before we can get to where fusion begins to live up to its potential as an energy source. But what will happen then? In … Continue reading “Future energy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24994"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24995,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24994\/revisions\/24995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}