Ugh. For sixty-odd years somebody gets a freshman thermodynamics class, finds a paper about the Karkashev scale, and freaks right the fuck out.
A couple of things: First: by switching to renewable energy, we cut the “deep heating” by about two thirds. Burning things to make electricity is the worst from an efficiency standpoint. Even if you ignore the energy required to make the fuel in the first place. Second, his time scale is off (mostly from a poor understanding of the former point). I calculate that it will become more of an issue in 2-3 centuries. I suspect we will have created (and solved) several issues in the meantime and may have pushed the deadline out even further.
What pisses me off about these nihilists is that they don’t have any solutions. At best they are whining. Pointlessly. At worst, they are encouraging people to give up on solving our current situation.
My own theory is that well before we reach 0.25 on the Kardashev scale, we will have perfected brain virtualization and we can move off-planet. That should give us several centuries of expansion. And once you have established on Dyson-sphere-like level of energy capture, it should be feasible to move on to a neighboring star.
Awesome article! I have being forming the same opinion for over 20 years. I think this really covers the high level truths And is the more true than we realize. However, we will have to see how things materialize.
Didn’t read the article, obviously, but without excessive GHG concentrations won’t we just be able to radiate away the heat produced from everything?
And at some point, with enough solar energy harvest, we should be able to tune GHG forcing to dump/retain heat as we like
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Ugh. For sixty-odd years somebody gets a freshman thermodynamics class, finds a paper about the Karkashev scale, and freaks right the fuck out.
A couple of things: First: by switching to renewable energy, we cut the “deep heating” by about two thirds. Burning things to make electricity is the worst from an efficiency standpoint. Even if you ignore the energy required to make the fuel in the first place. Second, his time scale is off (mostly from a poor understanding of the former point). I calculate that it will become more of an issue in 2-3 centuries. I suspect we will have created (and solved) several issues in the meantime and may have pushed the deadline out even further.
What pisses me off about these nihilists is that they don’t have any solutions. At best they are whining. Pointlessly. At worst, they are encouraging people to give up on solving our current situation.
My own theory is that well before we reach 0.25 on the Kardashev scale, we will have perfected brain virtualization and we can move off-planet. That should give us several centuries of expansion. And once you have established on Dyson-sphere-like level of energy capture, it should be feasible to move on to a neighboring star.
Awesome article! I have being forming the same opinion for over 20 years. I think this really covers the high level truths And is the more true than we realize. However, we will have to see how things materialize.
Didn’t read the article, obviously, but without excessive GHG concentrations won’t we just be able to radiate away the heat produced from everything?
And at some point, with enough solar energy harvest, we should be able to tune GHG forcing to dump/retain heat as we like