Why we have to start living more like the Na'vi now

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Hey, stick it in New York and it wont disturb the wildlife much at all. Or Los Angeles.

The hypersonic booms would be a noise and air traffic control hazard, unfortunately.

I was more making a bit of a joke - imagine some other civilization would have dumped their waste like that - tens of thousands of barrels and one of them happens to cross our solar system and is detected - maybe in 50 years when telescopes easily spot such objects... Obviously the likelihood is minute, so take it as a joke or fiction scenario.

As well as the fact that space is so incredibly huge we could dump kilotons of the stuff into orbit around the Sun and not notice for thousands of years.

Protected as a strategic target. If someone sends bombers into a country that has nuclear power plants running or reprocessing plants - guess what will play out then.

Not a lot? Radiation shielding works both ways, after all. Conventional bombs don't do much against metres of solid concrete. Fukishima would have worked perfectly had there not been a tsunami. It was correctly designed to withstand an earthquake of that size, and bombs are a lot smaller than earthquakes.

[citation needed]

Unfortunately I can't find a specific one, which is rather annoying. Have a general article on it instead. Considering there's redundancies on top of redundancies in an almost Yo-Dawg fashion, it certainly looks secure enough for almost everything except the perfect disaster.

That is because average solar energy hitting Earth already includes the term "average" - which in my interpretation now would mean that it includes an averaging of day and night and probably also clouds.

I calculated it using average solar output; it was the maximum possible energy falling on Earth.

But it does not always play out like it was envisioned. No one was thinking of telephones that can be used to play games but rather flying cars - so anything one can make up now may or may not pan out, most likely something entirely different will happen.

It almost never works as it is envisioned; it usually works better. Nobody would have imagined the Internet in 1950, but that's because it was so ridiculous as to be inconceivable, not because it was too short-sighted.

Another problem seems to be the ratio of neutrons emitted in fusion and neutrons captured by the lithium. It seems that the lithium bascially would have to catch all the neutrons of the reaction to produce enough tritium to fuel the reaction again...

Self-fuelling reactors are hardly necessary. We can get plenty of fuel out of the sea. (And I don't know where you'd get the idea that it fuses lithium, since that'd be very much harder than fusing deuterium.)

I think this is a very very very good reason. Actually it is a knockout reason... After all we depend on Earth and certainly will do so for the next decades.

Type I civilisations don't. To the future?

Efficiency alone does not solve it - because all too often, more efficient and cheaper energy production means just lead to an increase in consumption. At prices and availability and efficiency of coal fired electricity in the 1920ies, no one would really just leave the TV running when going to the supermarket unless one is rich enough. All too often, it is not demand that pulls availability after itself, but it is the other way round - if you make abundant cheap energy available, people will find ways to use it (for often senseless and wasteful purposes)

There's a limit to the amount of energy people will use.