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tiberius-Erasmus t1_iwhefca wrote

I don't understand why overpopulation is heavily stigmatized. Problem of space? Earth has enough space to populate a hundred billion of humans more and there will still be more than enough. Problem of food? Food synthesis on a larger scale, it's good for the environment and it provides the same nutritional value as its organic counterpart without the need to spill any blood for it. Energy problems? Fusion once it's solved we'd have an unlimited source of reliable energy. Climate problems? Corporate greed is the main culprit for the deterioration of the environment, not overpopulation though it does contribute to the issue.

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Blue_Congo t1_iwhgo72 wrote

"Fusion once it's solved we'd have an unlimited source of reliable energy"

If it is solved.

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Evil_Patriarch t1_iwhh7ue wrote

Look up Calhoun's Mouse Utopia, even if you have the resources it's not mentally healthy to be in conditions that crowded, see also Japanese Herbivore Men or just look at how many people in the world are on antidepressants

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visarga t1_iwkaawn wrote

Never saw herbivore men term tied to crowding. Is that the reason? Crowding?

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TopicRepulsive7936 t1_iwjjn3v wrote

Because it results in human suffering. Not only are there more people born, the high fertility indicates they are born into abject poverty. Life sucks as is but it sucks some more in absolute poverty. The baby dying of hunger today doesn't care about your tech or politic jargon.

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purple_hamster66 t1_iwhgnge wrote

Read about The Underpants Gnomes.

You’re missing a key feature of fusion energy… we don’t know how to do it and it’s likely we’ll never figure it out. Instead of a $1T device, why not just add $1T of solar panels and leverage the fusion in the sun that we already have?

Without massive amounts of new energy, we can’t produce enough clean water, food, heat/cool air, and carbon-free transport for the people we already have.

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[deleted] t1_iwhz0y0 wrote

> You’re missing a key feature of fusion energy… we don’t know how to do it and it’s likely we’ll never figure it out.

That's an odd claim.

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darthdiablo t1_iwi2r8l wrote

Yeah - unless I'm mistaken, I thought it was more like we know how fusion works, the problem is it's a matter of figuring (engineering) how we can make fusion happen on a smaller (non-stellar-scale) level?

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Nieshtze t1_iwihufm wrote

It is easy to perform fusion in a non-stellar scale. They did that in the 50s with hydrogen bombs.

The challenge is controlling the reaction.

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[deleted] t1_iwij5em wrote

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-ZeroRelevance- t1_iwimwko wrote

Hydrogen bombs are a mix of fission and fusion. They create an explosion like a standard atomic bomb using fission, which superheats the hydrogen in the bomb to initiate a fusion reaction, which increases the energy output manyfold.

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purple_hamster66 t1_iwzijto wrote

Controlled fusion, for the purposes of energy production, is not a solved problem. Yes, we can maintain the conditions for about a picosecond. That’s what I mean by we don’t know how to do it.

When I say it’s unlikely we’ll ever figure it out, well, that’s because the new experimental designs using plasma and huge powerful magnets are proceeding, but a single fault or destabilization in the mag fields holding the 100Mº hydrogen and the entire place will explode. Adding 100Mº to the atmosphere is a big issue, and one that’s not likely to help with global warming. The risks are too big to continue this experiment, politically. Nuclear bombs mostly destroy due to the pressure waves they create, and this explosion would rival a bomb’s destructive power... it could kill an entire city. If it ignites the atmosphere, the only thing that would save us is the low pressure of atmospheric hydrogen, which means it could exhaust it’s fuel supply eventually.

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SoylentRox t1_iwhhk1l wrote

Agree totally on the solar. The only thing the fusion does for you is it saves you having to develop a long term method of energy storage. There are lots of ways to do this but there are tradeoffs.

Flow batteries being the most promising because they are efficient - you get 80 percent plus of the stored energy back - so you just need some electrolyte chemistry that is not too toxic and cheap and can be stored in gigantic cheap unpressurized tanks.

You can also make hydrogen, maybe store it in metal or as ammonia or just pressurized gas, and burn it in fuel cells. This loses a lot of energy and is also expensive equipment.

There are also various pressurized air and heat storage concepts - they all have cheap storage material but poor efficiency.

Note that hydroelectric and lithium battery storage is not long term, it's short term storage. It's for the next couple days. You need something to store energy to make up for seasonal shortfalls and for black swan periods of little renewable production for a while

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purple_hamster66 t1_iwzjdiz wrote

I think the coolest hybrid energy storage solution is melting salt stored in tracker trailers and trucking it to the destination substation where it generates electricity as it cools. This can allow us to truck energy to places that didn’t get enough renewable energy (black swan event), or to emergency sites (earthquake takes out a power plant; floods; tsunami), or as long-term energy storage. The trucks can use the energy they are transporting to power the transport, too, so fossil fuels are not needed either.

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SoylentRox t1_iwznvv0 wrote

Maybe? Why salt. Why not just heat up a bunch of ceramic bricks to almost their melting point. Salt especially hot salt can corrode and melt things. With the bricks, if the truck crashes, you just end up with glowing pottery on the ground. Don't touch it but it won't flow to you.

You also have poor efficiency converting from the heat back to work, you need a steam engine.

Frankly probably better to just transport diesel.

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purple_hamster66 t1_ix0847c wrote

Salt is used in thermal energy storage systems because of it’s enormous capacity to hold heat. I don’t know how ceramic compares, but the latent heat involved in the state change (from solid to liquid) is important because it extends the heat that can be trapped. As I understand it, it’s not pure salt, but may also have thermal oil and high-pressure water & pumps. Depends on the usage.

I don’t think they’ve thought about crashes because none of these systems are currently mobile. Even though I would imagine that molten salt flows quite slowly, the amount of energy in it would melt/damage most things. But when it finally cools, though, it’s just salt, so cleanup is easy.

Some systems use a Rankine Cycle steam turbine, like you said. Others have been designed to use thermocouples, devices that convert nearly 100% of heat differences (over a threshold) to electricity and vice versa. It’s a form of heat pump, like those used in houses, but this thermocouple is designed for much higher heat differences. Since it’s trivially reversible, the same device is used for both directions.

One other cool hybrid is heating the salt using mirrors in a vast field, then generating the electricity from the steam engine. This means you can store the energy until later if you have more mirrors than your current grid needs.

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puzzleheadedmaroon-5 t1_iwnizw1 wrote

$1 trillion of solar panels wouldn't make a dent in the world's energy needs. How about $1 quadrillion? And where would you get the minerals to make them? Dig them out of the ground using fossil fuels?

We do know how to do nuclear fission. Fusion isn't necessary.

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purple_hamster66 t1_iwradue wrote

True, we’d need more solar than $1T, but solar does NOT have to include minerals at all. For decades, homes have been producing hot water via rooftop pipes, and heating homes but capturing passive sunlight on stone facades and floors. There are also solar paints that include no minerals but are painted on rooftops… these are not high efficiency but are really really cheap.

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puzzleheadedmaroon-5 t1_ixslb7c wrote

>rooftop pipes.... stone facades and floors....solar paints

Those are all made of minerals, except possibly rooftop pipes, which can be made out of plastic.

"Mineral: a solid inorganic substance of natural occurrence." - OED

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purple_hamster66 t1_iy028dy wrote

People are mostly concerned about mining when it comes to REMs (Rare Earth Minerals), not just minerals in general. Many commonplace minerals are not mined but found near the surface or in water. And it’s not just the destructive polluting nature of the mines but also the danger to miners. (For more expensive minerals, I’m guessing the danger will be minimized by using robot miners within a decade).

IMHO, the amount of REMs in solar panels is tiny compared to the amounts used for electronics, power systems, and manufacturing in general. This could be checked.

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Desperate_Donut8582 t1_iwiebe4 wrote

Yeah earth can have hundreds of people but let’s ask you this would you rather live in cities that occupy a land area of hundreds of miles and everywhere populated or a world with 500 million people with much wilderness and space

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GreenSuspect t1_iwi3ea7 wrote

> Earth has enough space to populate a hundred billion of humans more and there will still be more than enough.

Are you serious? Where are you getting that from?

"The majority of studies estimate that the Earth's capacity is at or beneath 8 billion people."

"It would take 1.75 Earths to sustain our current population. If current trends continue, we will reach 3 Earths by the year 2050."

"At the global scale, scientific data indicates that humans are living beyond the carrying capacity of planet Earth and that this cannot continue indefinitely."

"In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption … Achieving ‘high life satisfaction’ for everyone, however, would transgress the Earth’s biophysical boundaries, leading to ecological collapse."

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/3/195/223056

https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

> Problem of food? Food synthesis on a larger scale, it's good for the environment and it provides the same nutritional value as its organic counterpart without the need to spill any blood for it.

Why the fuck would you want that? We should have a sustainable population leading awesome lives, not an enormous overcrowded population eking out a shitty meager existence

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[deleted] t1_iwi3hf1 wrote

[deleted]

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IdealAudience t1_iwid5ao wrote

Mary Shelly (frankenstein) 's dad - William Godwin, wrote against Malthus at the time - that humans were more creative than rabbits, or could be, that good environment & society & education (& democratic workplaces & government) and conditions, and so on - would likely bring anyone into a healthy productive adulthood, rather than packs of monsters..

tragic to think malthusian thinking influnced some tremendously wealthy nobility to let poor londoners, or irish during the potato famine, or people in india just die off - 'as nature running its course'.. though (hopefully) we now see these as entirely preventable..

unfortunately, it seems a lot of fear about 'too many people in africa in 2050' follow the same malthusian lines.. and again, tragedy is certainly preventable.. sustainable systems and healthy cities are possible..

but... the people making billions and millions (and $200k) off of SuperEvilMegaPollutoCorp are good at what they do, as far as that goes - & they're entirely capable, apparently, of getting plenty of media to convince their consumers, workers, & voters within 2000km of their headquarters - that this whole climate disaster thing + high rents and low wages, and whathavyou - is due to too many people in africa + too many people in africa getting apartments and microwave ovens and schools and vaccines..

"there's just too many people of those people" consumers in rich-countries say, in between their 3rd baconcheeseburger of the day, in between driving a ridiculous truck 80km between their mini mansion heated by a coal plant & working for SuperEvilMegaPollutoCorp Jr., and back ..

'just let nature take it's course with the diseases and droughts and famines and civil wars.. problem solved.. then the rest of us can keep on doing what we're doing'

"What? you want to put carbon labels on beef? petrol? tax SuperPollutoMegaCorp? tax Billionaires? give their billions in subsidies to renewables and greenhouses and metro-lines? You want to build apartments over the grocery store?

no way.. this is an outrage, tyranny, stalinism.. the problem is too many people in africa & too many people in africa getting microwave ovens .. let them die or sell them AK47s.. problem.solved. "

and so on.

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_iwizxj1 wrote

There are more rich interested in selling to Africa than there are in making people more racist or something, from what I see all this panic about Africans comes from redditors and little else, but no you just must blame every little Ill of the world on some invisible, formless group of evil “elites” who have almost infinite power according to people on Reddit.

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Nieshtze t1_iwiixg6 wrote

I would imagine that there are 'weaker' versions of the Malthusian catastrophe argument. For example, in most of the western world, population growth is negative (and is low enough to present significant problems). US, for example, sustains its population through immigration, as the locals aren't having enough children. Similar story for recently developed/developing countries like China and India where the population growth rate has dropped significantly.

What if the resource in question isn't food, but something like cost of housing?

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WikiSummarizerBot t1_iwi3j6w wrote

The Population Bomb

>The Population Bomb is a 1968 book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich. It predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the mid-20th century baby boom years, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience. The book has been criticized since its publication for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions.

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