| > If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth. The sun is also a third of a million times the mass of the entire planet, or about 1.4 billion times the mass of all our oceans. And the power output being in the form of ionising radiation is really bad: the power density of the core of the sun is 276.5 W/m^3, but in a form which will, if you leant against it for a minute and given reasonable guesses as to your body mass and shape, give you a remaining conscious lifetime of vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, bleeding everywhere inside and out, relieved only by being followed with a coma after about an hour then death within a day or two. (That's ignoring the fact that it's also hot and dense and would immediately explode, it's just the effect of the radiation coming from it). > If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important. There are three possible futures: business as usual, collapse, transcendence/singularity. With business as usual, there's a fairly good chance that everything from our era will be forgotten and dismissed as myth and legend. With collapse, all of society might of forgotten how the abstract concepts of "money" and "writing" work, reinvented them, gotten up to our level, and then collapsed again 50 times over. With the singularity: the planet itself and every star visible to the naked eye (and many which aren't) may have been physically disassembled in that time frame. I think we should be the kind of civilisation that plans for how to minimise the damage of bad outcomes, even if only to make sure we don't mess up the "singularity" option. |