[ChuckMcM]

I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;

Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature.

Unlimited Biology - lets say we actually figure out how cells work, right down to every single chemical, its role, its action, its reaction. We gain the ability to arbitrarily rewrite every cell in our bodies, ok so perfect health for everyone, no more 'genetic disease', no more 'aging'. What is the world like in that scenario? Do we stay human formed? Do we keep our emotions? Things that we evolved for use as cave people, do they still serve us? Fight or flight instinct?

Its 'easier' in some ways to start from 'now' and delete things and write about their loss than to add new things. Its the latter stuff we don't see as much in SF.

[stcredzero]

I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;

    - Unlimited energy
    - Unlimited Biology

These both have big potentials for bad thing happening as well. I think Unlimited Biology has already been done a lot, however. I think it's so prone to weirdness that it tends toward dystopian visions. Also, a lot of this territory was covered in the 20th century.

Perhaps there's inspiration to be drawn from good stuff happening despite the tremendous potential for bad?

[ChuckMcM]

Perhaps the challenge then is to imagine the mechanism / property by which the bad thing is averted and the good succeeds. In a classical twist one would have the protagonist struggle against the bad thing, nearly lose, and then through a series of heroic actions over come to achieve goodness.

For me, that has been one of the interesting parts of SF is to see how people imagine we might over come either a temptation to do evil, or intrinsic evil.

[pjscott]

If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian.

[stcredzero]

What do you mean by "nigh-unlimited?" Even if you have a store of energy that doesn't run out, thermodynamics will bite you if you try to use too much of it at once.

planets become remarkably big targets.

Even 1970's tech has access to huge amounts of energy for targeting planets from space, if all you want to do is to destroy stuff.

And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian

"Burning Man in the Oort Cloud" has been done. There's still a lot of potential there, though.

[uvdiv]

"Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature."

This is the wrong question. Energy isn't limited any more than any other industrial product; the cheaper it is to manufacturer physical things, the cheaper it is to harness energy (and the cheaper it becomes). And conversely, in most uses of energy, you have a lot more "work" to do assembling whatever it is that uses the energy, than whatever harnesses it. It's really a problem of industry itself; and the more efficient that gets (in a fully-automated, AI-controlled industry -- many orders of magnitude), the more available it becomes. To get abundant energy you need industrial wealth (and vice versa); energy isn't an isolated problem and isn't the important one.

And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)

Sure, the fuel is "cheap and abundant" (if you fantasize D+D fusion becoming technically viable -- it's not so if you try the far-easier D+T using lithium-bred tritium) -- but that's exactly the wrong solution, because again, the costs are all elsewhere, on the physically-building-things part of the equation.

Heat rejection can be very serious. The current world looks like ~10^13 watts direct, anthropogenic heating (basically "energy use"), compared to a radiative forcing of ~10^15 W of anthropogenic global warming (closest figure of merit I believe) and ~10^17 W total terrestrial irradiation. (N.B. the greenhouse effect is a pretty huge "amplifier" of anthropogenic heating -- burning a ton of coal yields a certain amount of heat directly, but some 5 orders of magnitude more heat indirectly through AGW (if you integrate over the 10^3-10^4 year atmospheric residence time... don't quote me on this, I'm unsure)). Greenhouse heating is solvable, but at a couple orders of magnitude higher power consumption (say 10^15 W -- 100x present, think 10^10 people at 100 kW(th)), anthropogenic heating becomes a comparable climate issue. Approaching 10^17 W (think 10^10 @ 10 MW, if it goes there) you need geoengineering -- blocking parts of the sun (cliche), or increasing the emissivity of large swaths of the surface.

Beyond 10^17 watts you can't keep the earth anything like its natural state: even you completely block out the sun, you more than make up for it with the heat you generate on earth. The only way to dissipate heat from the earth ultimately is into space (forget ocean chillers at this point!), and the only way to do that is the way it's being done now -- radiatively. (Modulo material properties, emissivity/abosprtivity) the power you can dissipate per area goes as he 4th power of temperature (T^4) in absolute units (rel. absolute zero). So there's exactly two options: one, to drastically increase the surface area, which will look like "moving into space" -- creating a habitable world far larger in aggregate surface area than the earth (though not in mass). The other is fairly dystopian, to heat up the earth's surface beyond the habitable point -- e.g. moving into refrigerated underground cities (this is thermodynamically sound). With this insanity you could dissipate 10^22 W with a solid-carbon surface around 4000 Kelvin -- about 50,000x the current solar budget or 10 million times the current anthropogenic budget. Maybe you could still run computers at this temperature.

Anyway, 10^8 watts per capita => 10^18+ watts is no longer an "earth" solution -- you either push it off-earth, or alter the earth beyond recongition to solve heat dissipation.

(I'm actually not imaginative enough to figure out how to spend 10^8 watts. That's the order of the (average) power of launching a space shuttle once per day -- and you could probably fit a hundred people in something on that size, 1 MW per person. Even rocket-powered spaceplanes at Mach 20 aren't that costly...)

[ChuckMcM]

This is science fiction we're talking about here, keep that in mind.

I disagree with your assertion that unlimited energy is the 'wrong question'. Consider the scenario that energy is created from the destruction of matter (vs oxidizing it) and we switch the entire planet to that energy source, we eliminate all green house gases associated with energy production and a big chunk of those associated with transport (all cars/trucks/trains become electric, no more coal or fossile fueled power plants, we burn hydrogen/oxygen in planes perhaps. So on the climate change front at least we can revert the human contribution of CO2 back to prehistoric levels.

Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all.

See when you're writing science fiction you don't run into this bump:

"And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)"

You are extrapolating on existing fusion principles and getting stuck. Gene Roddenberry invented "warp engines" which provided the energy in limitless quantities, and then went on to think about "Ok given some reason why X is true, now what?" kind of stories.

My take on Stross' essay is that we don't really do enough of that. And that is in part because our technology is 'close enough' these days that writers fall into the pit that you just stepped in, reality, aka 'non-fiction.' (I really liked the cyberpunk examples in this regard) So getting one's thought process out ahead of that can be quite challenging. (Easier if your fiction it more fantasy oriented, since you make a hard break with reality)

[uvdiv]

"Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all."

Not on these scales. At 10^18 W (your 100 MW person * 10 billion people) -- about 5x the current solar budget or Kardashev I -- you could heat the entire oceans 10 °C in about a year, or the entire earth's crust 10 °C in about 100 years. (Oceans are about 10^21 kg [1], crust is between 10^23 - 10^24 kg [2]; I'm using the specific heat value for granite here [3]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust

[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-d_3...