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[Soadreqm]

How true. Even by then, the earth will have been drained of most, if not all resources and will just be a population and maybe manufacturing center.

Oh, there's plenty of resources if you know where to look. Dig deep enough, and earth is basically a big ball of iron. Assuming our mining equipment keeps improving with the spaceships, the only think we'll run out of is energy.

What do you think it'll be? Proper fusion? Planet covered in solar panels? Geothermal boreholes? I think geothermal boreholes sound cool.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If memory serves, the energy output of a single Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Reactor could power the entire Earth, if you could connect it all well enough. That isn't feasible, but shows what we can do with the only fusion reaction we have marked success in creating. I think that nuclear fusion is most certainly the future.

Mass solar panels will be alright, but not for a while. The best solar panel on the market only boasts a 24% collection rate, and those will set you back about 16,000$ per photovoltaic cell.

Geothermal boreholes do indeed sound cool, but we need to be very careful with it. I doubt sucking out precious heat from the mantle will have any real effect on Earth's tectonic activity, but it's worth being wary about.

[Earthquake Damage]

If memory serves, the energy output of a single Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Reactor could power the entire Earth, if you could connect it all well enough.

A single coal power plant could do the same.  It just needs to be very, very large. 

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Coal plants don't run on somthing we can effectively produce indefinitely. Nor do they leave almost nothing that would harm the enviorment.

[Earthquake Damage]

Coal plants don't run on somthing we can effectively produce indefinitely. Nor do they leave almost nothing that would harm the enviorment.

Point:  "Just one could power the entire planet" is true for any sufficiently large power source.  's all I'm sayin'!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yes, but the reaction doesn't have to be very large at all. We are talking about absurd ammounts of energy from the currently existing prototypes. No way to harvest said energy at the moment, but it's there.

This isn't like a huge orbital solar panel or atmosphere killing super coal plant. Any fusion reactor could do it. Every single one.

But as I said, you would need a stupid complicated infrastructure to make one work for the planet. Better to build many of them.

[Nikov]

This isn't like a huge orbital solar panel or atmosphere killing super coal plant. Any fusion reactor could do it. Every single one.

I think you underestimate the planet's ability to normalize itself. Besides, we already have a huge coal plant powering 40% of the world's electrical supply, its just been broken down into about ten thousand individual sites and scattered across the planet.

Although I normally don't like to "knock" coal (I think its a perfectly good fuel source and the pollution stigma is undeserved) its worth nothing the usual efficiency of a coal plant is 30%, so there's certainly room for something more efficient, or less efficient with lower input or operating costs, to take over. However for people living in river valleys with coal mines in their own county and no real alternative power source save an evil nuclear plant, people naturally choose to work with what's most efficient and practical for them.
 
Well, I hope that post didn't throw us off track like a 1.5 kilogram charge tamped on the inside of the outer rail in a high speed blind curve.

EDIT: Oh, and the planet won't run out of resources. We would almost have to deliberately sabotage it. Consider; mine an ore, refine a metal, make a product, use a product, discard product, landfill product. Thousand years later? Mine a landfill...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The planet can indeed normalize itself to deal with our coal plants, because they are spread across the whole thing. Even with that air quality has been falling since the industrial revolution, but those two aren't directly related for some time, so I digress.

The theoretical coal plant I am speaking of would be a monsterous supercomplex, using all the world's coal and feeding out all the energy it needs to power the planet. This would do very, very bad things to the surrouding atmosphere that the Earth would not be able to regulate out. All non-oceanic life would be killed off by an encroaching cloud of death. Followed shortly after by most oceanic life. Kind of like a  supervolcano going off, except much worse. But all of this is insane to do, and never would be.

So, go nuclear fusion.

[sneakey pete]

Yes, but the reaction doesn't have to be very large at all. We are talking about absurd ammounts of energy from the currently existing prototypes. No way to harvest said energy at the moment, but it's there.

This isn't like a huge orbital solar panel or atmosphere killing super coal plant. Any fusion reactor could do it. Every single one.

But as I said, you would need a stupid complicated infrastructure to make one work for the planet. Better to build many of them.

Proof or... well get some proof. Your basing what your saying off "i heard someone say that a single reactor could power the planet. From what I remember, the energy of that reaction isn't earth shatteringly huge, and you'd need a lot of plants to make it work.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Alright, so perhaps saying "any" fusion reactor could do it is a total fabrication on my part, but look at what experimental reactors are churning out:

As of July 2010[update], the largest experiment was the Joint European Torus (JET). In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1 megawatts (21,600 hp) of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10 MW (13,000 hp) sustained for over 0.5 sec. In June 2005, the construction of the experimental reactor ITER, designed to produce several times more fusion power than the power put into the plasma over many minutes, was announced.

That's what we get from a experimental reactor running for half a second. I can't even fathom the output we'll get from a finished reactor used to power a large city. This is what we need to look into for future power sources.

[sneakey pete]

Hate to burst your bubble, but the average coal powerplant has 2-6 steam turbines producing about 600MW each. Also note that, for the JET's test, they had to put in over 20MW of power, to make 16MW. they lost power. With those reactors, even if they can get a reasonable sized one to produce, say, a Gigawatt of energy, they might need to still use 500MW of that just to contain the plasma field (and that'd be the good case).So they need to get their fusion reactors about 100-200 times as powerful and much more efficient with input power before they could even consider surpassing single coal power plants. Then of course you have the fact that a single coal powerplant really isn't very much in the scheme of things for a city.

Consider the size of the one you quoted. They are not producing absurd amouts of energy for their size. Yes, the offer the potential to create clean energy from abundant fuel, but they are not that space efficient, and to be honest, i can't see them being very cost efficient for a long time.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

They aren't prepared for being a useable energy source yet. It'll still be a few decades before the first working ones come online, and further beyond that for them to be common. And once ITER is finished in 2018, we will see that power can be gained with fusion. They will also have the potential to become smaller as we get better at making them.

[Soadreqm]

Also note that the energy requirements of the whole world will most likely get larger, by orders of magnitude. And I though nuclear fission was already in the gigawatt range.

Nikov: Well, mineral coal and oil are finite, and we'll use them up eventually. You also can't recycle nuclear fuel indefinitely, but there's probably a lot more of it, and it has way better energy density. And everything else is going to become harder and harder to find near the surface, making the mining and recycling operations require more energy. That won't be a problem, of course, if any of these future energy sources actually work.

[Astramancer]

I don't think any of these are the actual reasons for lack of air piracy. Cars don't pose any of these problems, yet we don't see much road piracy. My theory is that there's something wrong with modern-day rum. And who's to say that rum won't get better again by the time we get to commercial space travel?

Just had to chime in here:

Auto theft, carjacking, break ins.

We do have road piracy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Just had to chime in here:

Auto theft, carjacking, break ins.

We do have road piracy.

It's supposed to be pretty bad in South Africa, to the point where some guy invented a anti-carjacking flamethrower.