Solved our energy problems

[Undertoad]

It's easy if you stop to think about it. So J and I were arguing about what the gov't can do to fix the problem. But to really solve a problem, you have to get to the root of the problem.

Right now, to get energy, we take oil and coal from under the top layer of the Earth, and we burn that and get the energy from it.

The problem is, that energy comes from long, long ago. It was first shucked off by the Sun; then it was absorbed by plants and plankton and beasts and whatever, who used it for a while, then died -- and became pockets of energy under the crust of the planet.

Cut to today: the mining of that past energy has become the economics problem that is the entire story of our modern era. A half-billion people move in the middle class in India and China, and suddenly it fucks up the demand, and prices increase.

The real problem is that, in one way, we are not really entitled to that energy. Oh sure, we can use it as best we can, but eventually the energy of the PAST will no longer be available to us. This seems inevitable, when one does the math.

Originally Posted by me

This is "sustainability", a word that is golden in some schools of thought (born-again ecologists), and filthy in others (some - not all - business people and short-run capitalists). But when you stop to think about it, stop to do the math, you realize that the "sustainable" means "economically viable for a long time". Markets like sustainable conditions; Capitalism actually demands sustainability, even though many self-labeled Capitalists may not notice or understand it.

What energy we Earthlings are actually entitled to is the amount of actual energy coming to our per-capita area of land. Divvy it up as you wish, but the amount of sunlight that hits the earth, right now, is roughly the sustainable energy we earthlings can say we are "permitted".

And we do use it; we employ it to work as we like, growing things, drying things out. We convert it to some battery power once in a while.

It's not much and it sure would be nice to get more of it somehow, for all of us. So here's what we should do.


First, we should adapt a nice sector of the Moon for human living, and get a nice shuttle between here and there going. I know Mars is a lot sexier and stuff, but the Moon is *better*. In fact, the Moon is *awesome*. Mars is a freakin' loss. I mean we should do some science there, figure some shit out. But look, it's even further away from the Sun than we are. That means it gets less energy than we do, which means it sucks in a very basic and obvious way. We can kinda guess that there is not interesting life on Mars -- only because there is not enough energy on Mars.

But -- check out the Moon. It's right close to us, so we can probably figure out how to get a lot of stuff up there on the cheap, and start working on using it to our benefit.

Even better: it's obviously our ideal launch platform to get to the rest of the area. It has no atmosphere, so that horrible problem of how to get back to the surface of the Earth is not a problem on the Moon. You just land there, no foam tiles needed. And launch is totally easy when there's so little gravity holding you back.


So. First thing we do is we build the Moon up to suit our human interests. And then, we start building robots that can use the resources of the Moon, plus whatever additional resources we bring to the Moon.

These robots are initially programmed to build copies of themselves or modular parts of themselves. Then, they build robot factories on the moon until large sectors of the moon are populated with them.

At that point they are re-programmed to build whatever we think of next. And the first thing is, they are used to build factories for the best solar collectors and batteries we understand at the time.

They build massive solar collectors, and then they launch them at the Sun. As they get closer to the Sun, they get more and more sunlight and more and more energy.

At this point, they orbit the Sun, collecting energy the whole while. They might use some of that energy to do various things but mostly they collect it and store it. Then they ship it back to us.

Maybe these solar collecting thingies stay orbiting the Sun, and we send them containers to collect the energy, and they send them back. When I say "containers", they could be batteries, or organic material, or whatever way energy can best be stored. Maybe they just heat up massive elements and fling them back where they can be used the way we currently use geothermal. They can use some of that energy to get back to the Moon, or maybe we'll know how to do some sort of orbital fling, who knows.


Here's the thing. The energy that we have here, plus any tidal or geothermal we manage to work out, that is our bootstrap energy. It has allowed us to bootstrap partway, it seems -- where we can get around and have a good infrastructure to build societies and get smarter. But we're not bootstrapped the whole way until we can work out how to suck even more out of the Sun.

Maybe we can suck Venus's bootstrap energy, or Titan's. At least until we get to the next level.