We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?

Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.

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chrystalkey a minute ago | parent | next [-]

What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?

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adrianN 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

	▲	neutronicus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree. I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion. But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.

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diarrhea 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> upgrade civilization to the next level

Why?

	▲	someonebaggy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.

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Zigurd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.

Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

	▲	zahlman 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
	▲	rayiner 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book. My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
	▲	31aHgd an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.

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Hikikomori 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?

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dguest 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.

Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.

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rayiner 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.

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31aHgd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.

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vrganj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Star Trek is a socialist society.

Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.

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rayiner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.

It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.

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vrganj 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.

I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.

You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.

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rayiner an hour ago | parent [-]

Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.

	▲	43187 44 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer. All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons.
	▲	someonebaggy an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What's my life worth now?

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vrganj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> upgrade civilization to the next level

What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?

Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?

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wat10000 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.

I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.