[amalantony06]

Given that Solar power is the fundamental source of energy leading to petroleum based energy (starting with photosynthesis), it's surprising that we still rely on petroleum to the degree we do today. In 100 years this would perhaps be something people would find shocking (like how we are shocked today at how mainstream slavery used to be 150 odd years ago).

Solar Energy is unlimited, cheap and clean. My guess would be that energy will eventually end up being near free.

[angli]

It's not as surprising as you'd think. The basic problem is energy density and availability.

Human beings don't directly photosynthesize for clear reasons. Solar power isn't available constantly and is too diffuse to power us in real-time. Instead, we eat plants (or animals, which is just another layer of indirection) that have photosynthesized over time and stored up that energy - we then convert that energy so we can metabolize it as needed.

The same thing is happening with petroleum. It's denser and more flexible than the sun. These are real constraints that have led us to use these sources of energy and prioritize them. They're not insurmountable - I think as prices fall we'll see more research into storage, I believe panel efficiency is going up - but the path of least resistance is a powerful force.

[toomuchtodo]

> Human beings don't directly photosynthesize for clear reasons.

I've always wondered why humans did not evolve to photosynthesize, and am interested if they could be permitted to evolve to using CRISPR.

[icefo]

Photosynthesis is terribly inefficient, something like 5-6% of the light is actually used to make glucose out of CO2 because the process is quite complex and humans don't have a huge skin surface.

That's my opinion

[WillAbides]

> humans don't have a huge skin surface

That's easy to solve. We just start growing leaves.

[toomuchtodo]

Remember, it doesn't need to be terribly efficient. Just efficient enough. I agree that its probably 100-200 years off though (if it can be done at all).

[beat]

150 years ago, slavery was much more economically viable - a lot of industrial-scale farming and mining was still purely manual labor. Machinery replaced most of the jobs once done by slaves.

Likewise, for the past century or more, fossil fuels were the cheapest source of concentrated energy by far. That's about to stop.

[thrownaway2424]

That's an interesting interpretation. Historically didn't mechanization increase the demand for slaves? The relevant example would be the demand for slaves in the American south after the invention of the cotton gin.

[beat]

The cotton gin is what made a large-scale cotton industry viable at all. Picking seeds out by hand is so labor-intensive that cotton clothing was an absurdly expensive luxury before that.

But really, the growth of the South during the first half of the 19th century was largely due to immigration patterns. The plantation owner class was largely already-wealthy men from the British merchant class. Due to British class structure, they could never equal even the poorest, lowliest members of the aristocracy, despite their obvious superiority. Moving to America gave them a chance to treat business acumen and wealth itself as an elite class. Next down the list were the scots-irish indentured servants, mostly rebels and criminals and their families. England could either hang them, or sell them to the plantation owners to work off their fines and immigration costs. They provided supervision over the slaves. The slaves were brought over to meet growing labor demand. So it wasn't so much new tech as the colonization and working of large tracts of previously wild land. (Remember, slaves were brought from Africa around the same time to work the sugar plantations of the Caribbean as well - the economics were compelling)

[akiselev]

Is it really surprising that burning millions of years of conveniently stored, geologically formed chemical energy is easier than harvesting solar power using complex semiconductor tech? We've been burning things for energy for hundreds of thousands of years. We've had semiconductors for less than a century.

[mjevans]

It is not unlimited.

At the radius from the sun that our planet is, there is an upper limit to solar energy of about 4/3 Watts/(M^2) (projected across the curve of the earth during daylight... through atmosphere...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...

The most effective way of collecting sunlight is to use curved reflective surfaces and concentrate it on to points that generate useful work either from the heat or from the photon intensity.

Interestingly, such mirrors also offer anime/bond villain/scifi style focused energy delivery 'weapons'; which is why I am most surprised that the US space programs haven't put any in to higher orbit above the majority of the garbage floating about the earth.

It might also be possible to use the delivered energy from such a system to incite deceleration of existing orbital junk and force burn-up/re-entry.

[thrownaway2424]

Did you mean 4/3 kilowatts?

[agumonkey]

Because history made us build structures and lifestyles that require oil class energy density. We surely don't need it since we were born without. We don't need all of this. Not to that extent, we could cut worldwide transportation. We could eat less. Rethink housing. Even internet[1].

I'd like to see the time when energy will lack.

Sometimes I wonder how we could rebootstrap technology in a frugal manner. Have shelter, a bit of comfort, a predictable enough supply not to worry too much.

[1] just the other day I put a gif on imgur, 1Million views, a few TB of bandwidth.. I felt bad. So much for this. And that's not the most viewed, nor the longest. Imagine how much is used everyday.

[feld]

Don't feel bad. You did not waste any measurable amount of electricity. We constantly waste electricity by not utilizing the networks we have built to their full capacity.

(Ignoring that servers being busier without a good caching infrastructure tends to ramp up resource usage and pull more power)

[agumonkey]

Even considering end point caching I feel bad. Good point about networks being already on anyway.

[djrogers]

> just the other day I put a gif on imgur, 1Million views, a few TB of bandwidth..

Umm, exactly how big was that gif? One of those numbers doesn't match up with the other...

[agumonkey]

It's an imgur transcoded video into gif[v]. You made me doubt it was GB, but here are the stats they show:

Name: unknown Views: 1,773,652 Submitted: 2 months ago Bandwidth: 94.01 TB

http://imgur.com/k3nRmaM