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pythagorean_cultist t1_je2l8sb wrote

Sustainable nuclear fusion

Extraplantary colonies (Mars, Moon)

Solar sail deep space vessels

Mass access to organ regeneration ( Penn State did a lot of research into this)

High efficiency desalination plants

I'll stop here

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m4hdi t1_je38eek wrote

Weather control!!

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Pixel_Knight t1_je3q7r1 wrote

I don’t think weather control is possible. The amount of energy in the weather system is too massive to be able to affect it with any reliability. You’re talking about moving thousands of tons of mass and literal quadrillions of Joules of energy. The amount of energy stored in even a single rain system is almost unimaginable. Humans don’t have a way to control that without incredibly advanced technology.

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LakesideTrey t1_je3f60x wrote

Many governments on earth partake in it to a certain extent "seeding" clouds to fertilize crops more efficiently.

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ktElwood t1_je49uf8 wrote

Best we can do is insurance companies.

Mankind can't harvest the sun's energy that is reaching earth, so it all goes into thermodynamics of the weathersystem.

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[deleted] t1_je39opi wrote

[deleted]

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LakesideTrey t1_je3d456 wrote

The government (and elite in general) don't want to kill poor people. Day laborers are what fuel the economy and keep them wealthy.

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DeathGPT t1_je3dm3z wrote

Yes, but they won’t go out of their way to prevent natural disasters as it fuels political discourse even when the technology for super computers is here, pretty sure they could handle tornado and rain but they won’t. There’s many ideas in the scientific community for resolving tornados and other natural disasters but they won’t even attempt it.

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LakesideTrey t1_je3fmh4 wrote

In order to prevent tornados you would have to be able to regulate air temperature over huge areas. That is much harder than a supercomputer and more advanced than what we have now.

I think the lack of significant investment in geoengineering is simply due to the fact no one with a lot of money wants to "waste it" on a risky investment.

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NoSoupForYouRuskie t1_je3e9g1 wrote

Nah. They are replaceable. What part of 8 billion alive and 100 billion more on the way. At some point we might even find out about "modern population control".

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LakesideTrey t1_je3eyu5 wrote

Most first world countries gearing up for a baby bust and possible demographic crisis due to low fertility rates. The U.N predicts the global population will begin reduction by 2086. I doubt we will be hitting 100 billion on earth anytime soon.

Plus, even if your point is right, if something is replaceable that doesn't mean you actively destroy it. If the human population is replaceable that doesn't mean those in power want to destroy it.

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NoSoupForYouRuskie t1_je3f2r7 wrote

Look around. Idk about you but I'm not jaded anymore. This planets fucked and all we care about is the moment.

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dickinsauce t1_je3qy4a wrote

I was hiking yesterday, it looked pretty nice to me!

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NoSoupForYouRuskie t1_je3wpbd wrote

Go to any city. I doubt you did. Infact I'm willing to bet I travel more in a day working or even on my days off then you do. Go outside, sure it's okay for now but it won't be forever if we are not careful. Go spread hate. I'm sure that's what you want from this right?

There's bodies in the streets in poor communities. People dying in waiting rooms. But sure. They are not replaceable. How many humans die a year?

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ktElwood t1_je49rcv wrote

Well, nuclear fusion is always 20 years in the future :D

Extraplanetary colonies are "cool" but...really useless.

Voyager probes are our deep space vessels - cosmic radiation will BBQ humans in space.

If you could regenerate organs, prolong human life substancially, society would collapse. Imagine billionaires being biologicly 25 for 250 years...

My personal tinfoil-hat-theory is that who ever defeats aging in humans, will be transported to a remote island and never be seen again.

We have desalination, we just use too much water.

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je4vg6o wrote

Imagine everyone living for 250 years. Personally I'm not willing to sacrifice an extra 150 years of life just to kill a few billionaires.

Society would not collapse. Anti-aging could actually save us from an upcoming demographic crash. As populations urbanize, birth rates go down, and most advanced nations are way below replacement rates.

Meanwhile, between cheap solar, probably fusion (see my other reply), and cultured food production, our per-capita impact on the planet could well shrink by a lot over the next fifty years.

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je4u6q7 wrote

At this point fusion is probably more like ten years in the future.

Fusion progressed exponentially from 1970 to 2000, at a faster pace than Moore's Law. Then 35 nations threw almost all their fusion money at ITER, a giant reactor in France that won't actually run before 2027, and hopes to attempt fusion in 2035.

But technology moved on. We have new superconductors that let us build a reactor like ITER but ten times smaller, and several companies are doing it. We have supercomputers that are way better at plasma simulations, letting us design new types of fusion reactors that are smaller and cheaper. Lasers have advanced exponentially too; the NIF project technically got net power from fusion last year, but used giant lasers that are less than 1% efficient; we have lasers now that can do the same thing, but they fit in a small room, are over 20% efficient, and can fire once a second instead of twice a day. We have way better power electronics.

Startup companies are taking advantage of all of this. Zap Energy is attempting net power this year, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026, and Helion is attempting overall net electricity in 2024 with a mostly-aneutronic fuel.

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WildGrem7 t1_je7p7mu wrote

If you think we will have viable working fusion for the masses in 10 years, you’re delusional. They haven’t even broken Q>1 yet and to make it vaiable the need far far greater than that and far more frequent than the 1 or so reactions a day they’ve been able to achieve. Not to downplay the advancements that we have had in the last decade - they are huge - but the cost of getting that Q up to the needed 5-10 will be astronomical then actually getting reactors up and running will take a lot least a decade alone if you compare them to current nuclear reactors from scratch to energy production. You’re looking at…………30 years. Minimum. Lmao.

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je81cc9 wrote

You talk like there's only one fusion project. Plenty of projects do a lot more than one shot a day. Helion does way more.

Get up to speed on what's actually happening in the field before you write it off so confidently.

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WildGrem7 t1_je839rt wrote

Would love some sources of anything over Q>1

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Plate_Of_Soup t1_je4hb69 wrote

I'd add to this list Space Elevators. We have the geostationary orbit satellites, just increase their mass somewhat, and we can hook up a cable to visit the stars

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je4ujk1 wrote

We don't have a cable that can reach to geostationary without breaking under its own weight. It's theoretically possible with nanotubes, but we'd need to mass-produce 7cm nanotubes, line them all up parallel and glue them together, and we're not there yet.

We do have cables that could get to LEO, which would let us build an orbital ring. That'd arguably be even better than an elevator, but it'd take more coordination between countries.

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Plate_Of_Soup t1_je4wa5s wrote

Halo conspiracy intensifies

Very interesting! Instead of cabling, is there nothing like a high-tech spider silk that could do the do? Or is this equivalent to nanotubes?

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je593kl wrote

Spider silk is really strong but not as strong as the nanotube cable would be, and not quite strong enough for a space elevator.

With the orbital ring, you only go, say, 150 miles up. You have a ring in any circular orbit around the planet. This ring does not have to be solid; the key is a bunch of hunks of iron, moving at faster than orbital speed. Those are electromagnetically deflected by passing through rings, which are cabled to the ground. The deflection pulls the rings upwards.

Getting to 150 miles altitude is just like a space elevator. After that, you use the momentum of the orbiting metal to launch you to orbital speed. You have to keep accelerating the metal chunks, so you need a bunch of solar panels.

All this can be done with today's technology for a few billion dollars in launch cost, you'd effectively get lots of space elevators instead of just one, and it could get payloads to orbit for $0.05/kg. But you'd need all the countries along a great-circle path around the planet to work together on it.

Before doing all that though we could do a launch loop, same basic idea but it's just a couple thousand miles long, and instead of the metal orbiting the planet it travels in an arc and back along the ground.

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Plate_Of_Soup t1_je5cnw2 wrote

So 1) geostationary satellites equipped with solar panels from as many points along the great-circle ad possible, 2) spider silk equivalent between the satellites to create the loop, and 3) anchorpoints for payload delivery?

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je5iiuh wrote

For the orbital ring? Not geostationary. Lots of little rings, say 10 meters wide, with attached solar panels, hanging stationary just 150 miles up, cabled to the ground. They're held up there by the momentum of the iron chunks, circling the earth at faster than orbital speed, each one deflected by the electromagnets of each little ring so it doesn't shoot out to a higher orbit.

Here's a video but that's a more advanced version that's actually solid all the way around the ring.

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Plate_Of_Soup t1_je5py5y wrote

The narrators combination of drawl and rhotacism is wildly engaging

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ItsAConspiracy t1_je5rjty wrote

He has a ton of great videos, and there's a subreddit. (And thanks for teaching me a word :)

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