What would happen if we achived endless cheaply produced energy.

[Cerunnir]

Im guessing you mean perpetual motion which is impossible thanks to the laws of thermal dynamics

but if you did achieve that you would either receive a nobel peace prize, a bazillion amount of dollars, more fame than snookie and the queen of england combined OR you would prolly receive a bullet to the back of the head thanks to some oil tycoons paid assassin and your ideas destroyed

I went with the assumption the creator is unknown, and it just showed up one day on the internet and got spread to every country, and tens of millions of private computers. You cant "take it down" then, and you cant stop it since countries would immediatly start researching and building power plants based on this.

[Reeve]

believe it or not if we had free energy we would still need oil

dont quote me on this but only about 50 percent maybe less of a barrel of oil goes on energy the rest goes on all sorts of products like plastics Vaseline all sorts of stuff you take for granted

edit * i pulled those numbers out my ass but i do know out of a barrel of oil not all of it goes on gasoline or anything else that produces energy

If we weren't using the oil for energy, it probably wouldn't be practical to spend the money to drill new wells because you would never recoup your costs. Besides, a lot of the plastics and such that we get from oil can be produced by other means.

[Rukentuts]

Lots of issues with them, from maintenance costs to reliability to storage of hydrogen in the vehicle to production of the hydrogen.

Just sounds like the government just didn't want to make the switch to me. Hydrogen production is a lot cheaper than gas from what I heard. I cannot really nail out the "storage" issue without finding blatant propaganda from one side or the other.

[traen]

"Here we can see the ruins of famous Burj Khalifa, the highest ruins in the world. And this camel shepard to your right is sheikh Abdullah".

[Reeve]

"Here we can see the ruins of famous Burj Khalifa, the highest ruins in the world. And this camel shepard to your right is sheikh Abdullah".

Dubai would probably continue to be an important air transportation hub and port.

[Yunru]

If we weren't using the oil for energy, it probably wouldn't be practical to spend the money to drill new wells because you would never recoup your costs. Besides, a lot of the plastics and such that we get from oil can be produced by other means.

Its kinda posible too create mass out of energy.... we just need to find a way. E = mc2

[anveena]

It would mean the United States wouldn't have to waste money supporting dictators in the middle east for the sake of keeping the region stable.

[tigojones]

Corporations would still find a way to make money off it. Probably by creating a proprietary component, patenting it and spending money convincing people that you NEED that component to make it work (could be as simple as a licensing deal with various other manufacturing companies creating products that "need" that proprietary component).

Corporations are quite good at taking something freely available, making an expensive version (but not any better, really), and convincing people that only the expensive version is good enough and the free version is crap.

I mean, look at the desktop OS situation. For the vast majority of computer users and the vast majority of what they use their computers for, the freely available Linux is more than suitable. Yet, they still pay hundreds of dollars to use Windows. Why? Marketing. Microsoft's marketing has convinced computer users that they're the only good ones on the market, and they're making a fortune.


Likewise, if such an energy source existed, corporations would be all over it and race to be the first ones to find a way to make money off it. If not from the energy source itself, from the machinery and devices that convert it from whatever original source to usable electricity. And they'll all try to find a way to change something about it so they can patent it, become the exclusive supplier and convince everyone that only their version is good enough.

[Puremallace]

They are called Solar Panels.

My parents havn't had to pay a power bill in 3 years and as Australia has some of the highest energy prices in the world, they have more than made their money back already.

Basically this

It's not endless or cheap. The panels eventually wear out and have to be replaced, and they aren't particularly environmentally friendly. There are good uses for solar panels, but they aren't the solution overall.

Panels last for 25 years and are under Warranty from US manufacturers

http://www.saderpower.com/

^ congrats $50 a month never see another power bill in your life. If you pay more then $50 a month for power in Louisiana you are a flying fucking idiot to not do this.

Claim the 6,000 tax credit and get paid to install them lol

[Cerunnir]

Basically this



Panels last for 25 years and are under Warranty from US manufacturers

http://www.saderpower.com/

^ congrats $50 a month never see another power bill in your life. If you pay more then $50 a month for power in Louisiana you are a flying fucking idiot to not do this.

Claim the 6,000 tax credit and get paid to install them lol

Its endless, but currently its not possible to harness it well enaugh to supply the world. So, no it does not excist.

[Puremallace]

Its endless, but currently its not possible to harness it well enaugh to supply the world. So, no it does not excist.

China is sitting on enough stock of solar panels to power the world 10 times over. It is just stupid silly how under utilized this technology is.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/8579...-1?source=cnbc

Here is a bit of info

[Trotheus]

The middle east would devolve pretty quickly. Look how bad they are *with* trillions in oil money, imagine them without it...

[tigojones]

Its endless, but currently its not possible to harness it well enaugh to supply the world. So, no it does not excist.

You sound like my Uncle. "If it aint good enough to completely replace oil/coal TODAY RIGHT NOW it's useless and we shouldn't get involved with it. Fucking hippies."

The thing is, it IS being used quite a lot to supplement or even in some cases, completely replacing "traditional" power sources. Proper investment would help the technology mature to the point where it COULD replace traditional power plants for the vast majority of the world.

[Deleted]

A prosperous era of invention and advancement like we've never had before.
The closest we have to this is the work on a fission or fusion, I don't remember which is which, the opposite of what we are using now anyway in our nuclear powerplants. If we could contain the process, which creates immense amounts of heat, we would have almost limitless and great amounts of completely clean energy. It would be the greatest achievement since the first hominid started using fire.

[ptwonline]

Depends on what you define as "endless".

For example, the sun is (for all intents and purposes) and "endless" supply of energy, but we cannot get/use as much of it as we would like.

Now, I will assume that you mean a practically unlimited supply in terms of having as much as you want. In small terms--powering cars and homes etc--the effect would be very powerful and positive. But the big difference would be in much larger ideas, and those could range from incredible (you could fuse atoms to make almost any element in almost any quantities that you would want, and even have them assemble into items you want. Food production and fresh water would become non-issues) to the terrifying (you could develop weapons that make nukes look like cap guns.)

[Reeve]

Just sounds like the government just didn't want to make the switch to me. Hydrogen production is a lot cheaper than gas from what I heard. I cannot really nail out the "storage" issue without finding blatant propaganda from one side or the other.

Hydrogen is the most diffuse gas known. It takes a lot of energy to compress it down to a size that would give you usable quantities in a vehicle, and then you have an explosive gas compressed to explosive levels in vehicles that are known to crash. One of the best solutions I've heard for this is to put the gas into a solid state storage, but the problem is that the materials used for solid state storage right now are prohibitively heavy and expensive.

The production of the hydrogen in the cheapest way possible requires the use of Natural Gas, which means you're already going through all the effort of producing the natural gas before you even get to the hydrogen, and it's not particularly environmentally friendly. Better than current gasoline of course.

The membranes used for Hydrogen Fuel Cells right now are platinum, and extremely expensive. As they get used, the membrane degrades, and has to be replaced every couple years at a high cost. Also, as they degrade, the fuel cells lose power, so you get less oomph per hydrogen used over time.

These are things that can potentially be overcome, and there is still work being done to try to improve the technology, but it sure as hell isn't ready for even Chevy Volt-level public consumption.

[Puremallace]

The middle east would devolve pretty quickly. Look how bad they are *with* trillions in oil money, imagine them without it...

Want to laugh? Saudia Arabia is about to invest HEAVILY in solar so they can ship more oil to idiots who are not investing in solar. We deserve to be duped for being idiots.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment...shine-to-solar

The Saudis are raising $100 billion for solar-power development, which could ease its rapidly growing demand for electric power. Though natural gas would be cheaper, the Saudis may prefer solar.

[Rukentuts]

Its kinda posible too create mass out of energy.... we just need to find a way. E = mc2

It happens all the time, just in very miniscule amounts. The amount of energy needed to create enough meaningful mass is astronomical.

[Collegeguy]

We already had that. It was called the industrial revolution. Factories were running at like 1% efficiency to what energy they were using.

and there was still a massive profit even running at the low efficiency.

[Deleted]

Someone would come up with a way to monopolize it without failure.