[AnthonyMouse]

> At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.

This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.

What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.

But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.

We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.

[palata]

> We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.

Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.

[AnthonyMouse]

The end of fossil fuels seem pretty boring. The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear, which has costs on par with fossil fuels to begin with. If we're lucky some kind of cheap scalable energy storage tech is developed and then energy costs less than it did historically.

[palata]

> The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear

Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?

Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...

Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".

All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.

[zizee]

There are many nuclear powered ships. If the decision is between nuclear proliferation, or the end of the global economy, I'm betting we'll choose the former.

If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.

[palata]

> There are many nuclear powered ships

What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?

> If you have enough electricity

We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.

We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.

And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?

And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.

How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?

[bluGill]

> We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant

Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.

>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?

That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.

I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).

[AlessandroF6587]

Some reference material that can be helpful https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-3

[numpad0]

It doesn't take much time or effort to build nuclear powered anything if you were not concerned with bunch of turbojet Boeing planes circling above you. It takes centuries if you were.

[orbifold]

It is possibly to create synthetic fuel from coal. For usecases that absolutely require fuel we would be able to synthetically create it.

[palata]

It's not a question of what use-cases theoretically require fossil fuels. The whole problem is the scale.

We have to find a replacement for oil and get it to the scale of oil in a fraction of the time we had to get where we are now with oil. And getting there with oil was easier, because oil is extremely convenient.

It's a bit like saying "we need to rewrite the Linux kernel with a new language that we are yet to invent, and it has to reach feature-parity in 5 years". Sure, theoretically we know how to create a new language and how to write a kernel, but can we do both in 5 years? Ever heard of e.g. Fuchsia? And they didn't try to invent a language for it.

[bluGill]

The Germans were able to transition from oil to synthetic fuels while in the middle of WWII. South Africa used the same to provide their energy for decades when the world prevented them from getting oil. We know from those experiences that synthetic fuels scale.

We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.

[mensetmanusman]

Yes. With enough energy you can make anything.

[palata]

Exactly. The problem is that we live in a finite world, we don't have infinite energy. And one of our biggest problems right now is energy (together with the current mass extinction and climate change).

[mensetmanusman]

Population is crashing too fast for that to happen.

[overfeed]

> put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime

Data centers in space are a pipedream until we have a material-science breakthrough: radiating heat into space is too inefficient at rack-scale, let alone DCs.