Surging solar in 2011 proof of Ray Kurzweil’s bold prediction? | Hacker News Reader

Surging solar in 2011 proof of Ray Kurzweil’s bold prediction?

singularityhub.com

10 pointsgeuis11 comments

I'm surprised to see Singularity Hub of all people spend so much time arguing that even though the rate of growth is right on track, the absolute size is still too small to care.

The tldr quotes seem to eventually come down to "The last 20 years have shown exponential growth in solar power—and rising sustainable energy subsidies in parallel." and "For example, last year’s solar capacity growth set records because firms expected dramatic cuts in government incentives, thus pulling future demand into the present."

geuis, I would suggest you limit submitting articles which base their argument entirely on exponential extrapolation without regard to physics or other factors. If you do believe what the author wrote, or it spoke to you in some way, share with us as an additional comment after submission what you found compelling about the article.

Edit: and this comment "That’s pretty positive news. As Kurzweil notes, “We are awash in sunlight.” Just 1/10,000 of the sunlight falling on the Earth’s surface can satisfy humanity’s energy requirements. And that doesn’t imply a landscape littered with panels—in fact, an area equal to just a few percent of the Earth’s unused deserts would suffice."

Has been thoroughly debunked several times by the fact that you can't actually transmit all of the worlds power from an 'unused desert' to its consumers. When we have super conductors tracing through the planet more densely than we currently have networking cables, then we can start talking about putting all the power generation in a 'couple' of places.

Thanks for the thoughts. I personally don't like adding comments about submissions, as the point to submitting stories is that they should be interesting and self-explanatory on their own merit. I believe the community, if it finds something interesting enough, will upvote it. If its something that is pointless but gets upvotes, then enough people will flag it for removal.

In regards to the "1/10,000" comment, some people have conceived of designs where energy production is centralized in desert areas. While if built, indeed the amount of power would be sufficient, but this is more often simply meant as an example of the amount of land area that would be needed world-wide. It does not in itself imply that this is the strategy that should be pursued.

In the same way that we say, "faster than light" instead of "speed of electromagnetic waves in a vacuum" and "half a dozen" instead of 6 (and I've never understood where this phrase came from), it is simply a metaphor that lets uninformed readers better grasp the concepts being imparted. In reality, what is implied is that globally it would only take an equivalent amount of land distributed world-wide to achieve the same effect.

Thanks, this is where we disagree I think "I believe the community, if it finds something interesting enough, will upvote it. If its something that is pointless but gets upvotes, then enough people will flag it for removal."

That statement is true, but carried to excess we submit the entire Internet of stories to HN to be filtered by the flag it or die process. I try to read the stories on the /new pages and vote up ones I find interesting, or comment but my willingness to do that is harmed by having a lot of material that should never be submitted in the first place. The auto-killer does its part, I've seen /new with 90% auto-killed content sometimes, but it has to be careful as well.

No. (As per Betteridge's Law of headlines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines)

This will become the hacker news law. On any submission with a headline ending with a question mark somebody will point out the stupid betteridge law.

I downvote any comment that does nothing other than cite the stupid thing. I encourage others to do the same.

Sadly, I don't know what else to discuss about this article.

I'd suggest creating a more original hacker news law. I'm sure some of us are willing to work it into their TedX presentations, and whoop de doo we have our own annoying reference.

Then what if the story was submitted under the title "Is there anything that may stop solar power exponential growth from reaching 100% of our needs in 20 years?"

If you think that the answer is still 'no' while it completely reverse the conclusion, maybe this law isn't a "law" in the scientific sense - not even a theory, and shouldn't be cited (karma whoring?) any further on HN?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com