E=MC^2. Another ridiculous hypothetical...

A controlled reaction that produced electricity could be pretty useful. Portable thermonuclear devices might not be such a good idea.

 

Good? Like most tools, how you use it determines if it is "good". Could make one heck of big explosion though.

 

I'm not sure I understand your question. We are assuming a 100% clean, 100% safe, affordable energy source that consumes 1 kg of mass for every 9x10^16 Joules of energy it creates.

Since the current world energy use is somewhere around 5x10^20 Joules of energy per year, we would consume about 5.6x10^3 kg per year of some sort of mass.

The earth's mass increases by approximately 10^8 kg per year. Therefore the rate of growth of the earth's mass would slow a bit.

Is there a down side to your imaginary clean, efficient, safe energy source that you intend to mention later, or are you just wondering if someone can make up an imaginary down side for your imaginary energy source for you?

 

Remember, relativity is just a theory! I'm sure if we pray research hard enough, we can find a working perpetual motion machine. For you so-called "scientists" that claim it's impossible, I ask: Why do you hate America?

 

I must be flashing back or something...

I swear that is done today with some good herb... I mean it's almost 100% safe, sorta affordable, and you can get it by the kilo...

I bet there was even a fella named Joules in the room filled with the smoke from the "process" of energy conversion back when I was going to school in NYC...

But...

Do we REALLY WANT to harness that energy... I mean, most of the energy was wasted.

No, wait...

Most of the folks were wasted... yeah... that's what it was... and they did it from recycling the smoke too... they were using a "device" called a POWER HITTER... and doing a manual technique called "supercharging" a hit. From across the room I thought it looked sorta like a gay first encounter technique for the uninitiated... I really couldn't tell you if they got any more energy out of it though, cause most of em that did that continued to remain seated.

As a matter of fact...

There was losts of wasted energy in that room as I remember... is that the stuff the fella wants to capture... cause, as I last recall... those folks would be easily caught, they weren't getting up from their chairs for much of anything.

 

The real danger of such an infinite energy supplies:

1. War. One of the largest costs of war is Oil. Take that out of the picture, and we can wage war much, much cheaper.
2. Overpopulation. With infinite energy, our population would grow even faster, and in the end we'd start running out of other resources, like food. Unless you can reverse the process to create biomass from energy as well (which would in the end be a 0-sum gain...)
3. Growth. With infinite energy, we'd stop even pretending to try to conserve energy. If you didn't have to pay your power bills each month, how many people would set their furnace higher in the winter, AC lower in the summer, leave lights on 24/7, never shut down their computers, etc? How much more would our individual energy footprint expand? I think we'd see that we pretty quickly would surpass the growth rate of the earth, and actually start to shrink, thus increasing problem 2.
3. Greed. Just because we have infinite energy, we wouldn't necissarily care about the poor starving people in muchkinland anymore. Most people (at least here in the US) would just be concerned with the same things they are now: obtaining more and more useless junk for their own personal pleasure.

 

There is a problem here in that if you use or release energy you will generate heat as a byproduct. If you use massive amounts of energy you will get massive amounts of heat on the side. I suppose if this energy was cheap enough you could go put out orbital sun shades to compensate...

With unlimited cheap energy you could simply move out beyond the current habitat. The solar system has lots of open room and raw materials.

 

If the energy is as cheap as is being implied here, then there will be a multitude of ways to export the energy away from the earth.

But the energy is not unlimited. It is limited to the amount of mass you have available to consume. Eventually event the solar system might run out of space and materials. This has now grown to a thought experiment as to the maximum growth rate of the human population assuming massive access to cheap clean energy. How many millenia would it take for the human race to expand to a point where the solar system became overcrowded or too much mass in the solar system was consumed.

On the other hand, since the sun would no longer be necessary as the primary source of energy for the human race, perhaps the solar system wouldn't be necessary.

 

Don't worry evolutionary scientists have already done away with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics they won't have trouble at all with this problem.

One short term effect I imagine would be the impact on the world economy.


Wildkow

 

Please explain how Earth can be viewed as a closed system with regards to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?

 

Cold Fusion? That isn't science is it?

Exposing the Real Embarrassments of Cold Fusion

Nigeriaworld Feature Article - Cold Fusion, the unlimited energy source: A myth or reality?

Cold Fusion Session of APS Meeting (March 16, 2006)

Bubble fusion, back with a pop - fundamentals - 19 February 2007 - New Scientist

Wildkow

 

There is plenty of information on this available try Google. :focus:

Wildkow

 

there is always a problem when that much "energy" is available for anything...

its easy to say... program it to be harmless to children and pets... but hard to make everyone follow those rules.

look at nuclear energy verses nuclear weapons... it is getting tougher and tougher to keep one from the other...

what i see is bombs the size of a cigarette pack with a little reprogramming, strong enough to take down a large building...

one thing i am pretty sure of... with us humans, if we had free abundant energy available, we would just find something else to fight about

 

The problem with that scenario isn't energy (in this hypothetical), its the rest of the technology needed. Look at what we have right now... a 30 year old space shuttle design, and they've been working on a replacement design for how long? Even if we could design ships to take us there in mass, it's going to be a long, long time before we even set up a permanent research base with 3-6 month personnel rotations, let alone a permanent colony.

If unlimited energy of this sort is a pipe dream, then human colonization of other worlds would be the pipe.

 

I think there's something fundamentally flawed with the thought that we can just pack up and leave, given enough energy and materials. The assumption completely ignores the complexity of life that sustains us all. We don't yet have a sufficient appreciation and understanding of how life on Earth works, let alone the ability to recreate it somewhere else.