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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

IMHO on on the long run, the only valuable thing is information (I'm talking really long run, think multiplanetary). A bit too long to describe all aspects of it, but if you think it through I should become obvious. One of the aspects is that with enough technological progress energy should be abundant, so what's valuable is knowing how to apply it to get desirable results.

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I don't know why you think energy will be free. It's a zero sum game that's built into the laws of the universe.

There is a shit-ton of energy in the universe. It's one of the few things that's ridiculously abundant.

Consider: We live on a ball of molten iron. Dig a deep enough hole and you get a nearly unlimited supply of thermal energy.

Yes, but unless you're going to move your house to the bottom of that hole, someone is going to have to install and maintain the power lines to get that power to you.

In that way it's very similar to oil.. no one has to pay to create the energy contained in oil, but they do have to pay to dig it up and distribute it. And yet, oil is not even close to being free.

Edit: a better comparison would probably be hydro.. which also isnt free.

I think you have a wobbly misunderstanding of physics.

Iceland uses geothermal. They have it easy due to geological circumstances, but that's mostly a cost-saving measure. Any country can do the same.

There's also geothermal systems for homes that cost far less that work by tapping the temperature differential in the ground: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/geothermal-heat-pump-how-...

Oil is expensive because it's a scarce resource that requires a lot of effort to extract, process and transport.

Please refrain from unnecessary, unsubstantiated insults. Rgbrenner's point that geothermal is costly for the same reasons that oil is costly - that is, it takes work to transport the energy in usable form - is valid. You're right that geothermal has a humongously deep supply curve, but that doesn't mean its price will be zero.

I'm specifically referring to the remark you'd have to build your home in a hole, which honestly makes no sense at all.

The point was that if you want energy in your home, you either (1) have to transport energy to your home or (2) place your home at the source of the energy. Since placing your home next to a large temperature differential is difficult, then the future will continue to rely on option (1), transporting energy to your home. And if energy has to be transported, its final price will not be zero, even if its wholesale price is.

Nothing will ever be truly zero cost, but those costs can be minimal.

A geothermal system for your house involves "transporting energy to your home" but the distances involved are so minimal that once installed it's next to nothing.

> Since placing your home next to a large temperature differential is difficult...

Well, that's wrong. Every house sits on top of a significant temperature differential which is why geothermal systems work. In large parts of the continental US the ground deep beneath the house maintains a consistent temperature year round. This can be used as a thermal sink in the summer, and a source of heat in the winter.

A friend of mine just got geothermal for his very ordinary house in a major metropolitan area. It was cheaper than the solar on my house was a bunch of years ago. Your point seems very bogus to me.

E = mc^2. In the far future I think we'll do fusion and it'll be portable and cheap.

Yep. When we are brokers of energy at a scale where it can't be considered infinite, we will also be a fundamentally different species than we are today.

That being said, until we have highly optimized how we utilize that unlimited source, it will remain a scarce resource.

Very little is unlimited when crossed with exponential growth rates.

Early books (1860s to 1880s) on oil, gas, and coal noteed that tthe United States' coal reserves were good for one millon years, _at then-present rates of consumption._

The rates increased. A few centuries, tops, now.

British coal extraction peaked in the early 20th century.

UCSD physicist Tom Murphy extrapolates human acttivitty to galactic-sscale energy conssumption in fairly short time.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

There is also more food than humans need. But there are some starving ones. Distribution is the problem. As for universe, the only meaningful sources are earth and Sun, anything farther away may not exist at all.

Kind of answered this to tedsanders below, but basically I think what makes you win in this zero sum game is information. There are pretty much just two things available in big perspective that can make you win: energy and information. And I think information scales better.

It's not obvious at all. And I spent months writing about such issues in my physics dissertation.

If we're talking about some theoretical far-off future, then I posit that prices should be constrained by the conservation laws of physics coupled with the distribution of conserved quantities in the universe. Greater technical ingenuity may get you more redness or more temperature or more velocity, but it will never get you more mass-energy, more momentum, or more charge.

Didn't want to get too far with this to avoid derailing thread into an AI one, but once you are not restricted with human body you can get a lot more done with much less energy. But that's just some orders of magnitude and it does not matter that much with the exponent.

So what do you use this energy for? Probably want to know more. Energy is necessary for computation but that's pretty much all what universe is - energy and mass. If you know the process of harvesting it (technology = information) then it's not like you need to do some work. The idea of doing some physical work to get something done is getting deprecated. Once you know exactly how to do something, you can set it up. Information becomes results.

So what if there are others that also want to have access to the energy and mass available in the universe, some kind star wars scenario? Technological progress destroys raw power, so it's about who can develop faster. Progress is done through computation. For computation we need algorithm (=information) and energy. Amount of energy influences speed of computation linearly. I'm making an assumption that with algorithm improvements you can do better, much better.

Energy is necessary in any process where you want to decrease entropy.

Is that dissertation available anywhere?

dredmorbius@gmail.com if you don't care to share publicly.

It's not publicly available, unfortunately. I'll send you a copy this weekend. (The main topic is not about the long-term limits of technology, but there is some discussion in the introduction and appendices.)

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