Solving The World Problems

[Fake Messiah]

Just the other day I was talking to cleverbot when it asked me what do I think about the "World's Problems". So it got me thinking and considering we live in such profound world with advanced technology why wouldn't I come up with solutions to world's problems?

The biggest problem we have today, which could solve all other problems, is source of clean and plentiful energy. So what we need is a development of nuclear fusion. It only uses salt water so no waste or large mining and very minimal pollution.
Now I know what you're going to ask "Why can't we go with fission instead?" and indeed during 1950's it was planned that only in US there will be 1000 fission power plants and lots of breeders by the year 2000 and yet there is only 100 fission plants and no breeders. So what happened? The answer is bad reputation. Fission scares people, when the breakdown happens it is visible that people don't have any control over it's reactors, you can not shut them off. And it also it creates lots of garbage. None of that problems comes with fusion which reactors, that are basically hot plasma, just get turned off.
People would welcome fusion plants and desire them in their vicinity.

#2 world hunger
Once we have fusion reactors we will have cheap electricity and can build them all over the world, including deserts which could then be turned into food growing plantations. Imagine all those deserts terraformed! Plus, plants would also serve as additional carbon remover. We could have lots and lots of cheap food.

#3 gasoline price & wars for oil, oil spills, fracking
Again with fusion we can easily make artificial methanol and run existing cars on it. We would not need oil for it, even for making plastics considering we could take carbon and hydrogen from other sources.

#4 garbage
Lots of clean energy would mean that we could use it to destroy all kind of garbage disparting it on constitutional elements.

#5 global warming and ocean acidification
Even now we can build machines that could suck the carbon out of air and water, but the problem is they would need to use dirty energy to do it, but with fusion it would be a different story. Also read #2.

#6 population growth
Ok so some would say with cheap food people would start mating like crazy and have much more kids. But is that really a case? First of all we would have much more livable space for new people, second with lots of cheap energy and elements we could use 3D printers much more, that could even make more computers. Give everybody in the world few computers, games and internet and they will not want to have many kids because kids draw them away from games and computers. I mean rich people don't usually have more kids then poor one.

#7 religion
Certainly with using less and less oil lots of those religious dictatorships will be weaker since they are fueled by money from oil. Also as science progresses more and more even the more narrow-minded people will get their eyes opened. Lots of religious tempers are kind of based on despair and the fact that we are all fighting each-other for food and shelter, but if those things get very easy access then people will be more tolerant toward each-other. Why not create a world where no one ever needs to die because of hunger, thirst or lack of shelter? It is doable with fusion.

#8 animal endangerment
Well if you combine all of the above you solve this problem.


So certainly we should devote more time and money into developing nuclear fusion and people at ITER are doing it, but unfortunately very slow and they could do it much faster. Dr. Brian Cox, for instance, thinks there should be a Manhattan like project but for developing fusion.
So solving world problems is all on psychological level. We could do it, we are intelligent enough, but will we do it or surrender to destruction?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm not sure you grasp the problems inherent in fusion reactors.  All proposed designs (all of them) require more energy to contain the reaction than the energy produced by the reaction.

Your solutions seems to hinge on cheap, plentiful power (a position with which I do not disagree).  Fortunately, there's already a solution to hand - solar.  I mean, the sun is everywhere.  The cost of building and maintaining solar power systems is dropping like a paralyzed falcon, storage systems are improving and conservative estimates are expecting solar power to provide some 30% of the world's electricity needs by 2050 (I think that's what I read).

Don't mistake me - I'm not anti-nuclear power.  It just seems odd to support a power system that requires a pretty huge technological breakthrough over one that's already working.

Plus, if your solar panel breaks, you can clear it up with a broom - no HazMat suit required.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Noooo!! But I had it all planed out!! But Europeans are dumping 10 million Eros to make fusion work and in the year 2020 they will turn it on to see if it works.
Here take a look what Michio Kaku says about fusion and the drastic positive change in economy it will make (you have to scroll to 12m39s)
https://youtu.be/8dYuKXvsbXc?t

And you know I think that our civilization should have some plan for the future to inspire us. Like religious people have Doomsday stories to inspire their life to pollute and use this world because Jesus is coming to take them on a new planet, we should also have a scientific based vision of making this world a better place. Becoming type 1 civilization by making fusion and then centuries later type 2 civilization by harnessing power of the solar flares, by let's say making some sort of turbines that will store all that energy into antimatter so that it can be used.

But that's also a problem because scientists tend to disagree of what will be possible and what can be invented. For instance while scientists in US were developing fission those in Germany came to conclusion that it was impossible or so hard and clunky that you could never make a compact bomb to throw.

[Fake Messiah]

Fortunately, there's already a solution to hand - solar.  I mean, the sun is everywhere.  The cost of building and maintaining solar power systems is dropping like a paralyzed falcon, storage systems are improving and conservative estimates are expecting solar power to provide some 30% of the world's electricity needs by 2050 (I think that's what I read).

Plus, if your solar panel breaks, you can clear it up with a broom - no HazMat suit required.

Boru

Sorry I forgot to address this. You can't be serious? While solar is good help, it is not suitable as a primary central-station power source. Fifty years from now, only coal, fission, and fusion are capable of supplying the dependable, steady backbone power that the civilized world can count on.
1GW of electricity needs 50 square miles or to completely supplement all today's energy needs you would need area of United States all covered with solar panels.
The atmosphere absorbs part of the sunlight. The sun does not shine at night and does not rise high in the winter. There are cloudy and stormy days. There is little sunlight at high latitudes, where the power is most needed. Solar cells can capture only part of the solar spectrum and are not efficient at that. The peak efficiencies quoted apply only when the sun is directly overhead. The color of sunlight changes near sunset and no longer matches the color the solar cells are optimized for. Solar panels cannot economically be turned to follow the sun as it moves across the sky. We are lucky to capture a few percent of solar energy, but even that is a lot of energy that should not be wasted.

But sure there are solutions even today like Earthship - a house you can live in that you don't have to slave to pay the heating bills, cooling, electricity and even food is free if you are a vegetarian.

[MTL]

Just the other day I was talking to cleverbot when it asked me what do I think about the "World's Problems". So it got me thinking and considering we live in such profound world with advanced technology why wouldn't I come up with solutions to world's problems?

The biggest problem we have today, which could solve all other problems, is source of clean and plentiful energy. So what we need is a development of nuclear fusion. It only uses salt water so no waste or large mining and very minimal pollution.
Now I know what you're going to ask "Why can't we go with fission instead?" and indeed during 1950's it was planned that only in US there will be 1000 fission power plants and lots of breeders by the year 2000 and yet there is only 100 fission plants and no breeders. So what happened? The answer is bad reputation. Fission scares people, when the breakdown happens it is visible that people don't have any control over it's reactors, you can not shut them off. And it also it creates lots of garbage. None of that problems comes with fusion which reactors, that are basically hot plasma, just get turned off.
People would welcome fusion plants and desire them in their vicinity.

#2 world hunger
Once we have fusion reactors we will have cheap electricity and can build them all over the world, including deserts which could then be turned into food growing plantations. Imagine all those deserts terraformed! Plus, plants would also serve as additional carbon remover. We could have lots and lots of cheap food.

#3 gasoline price & wars for oil, oil spills, fracking
Again with fusion we can easily make artificial methanol and run existing cars on it. We would not need oil for it, even for making plastics considering we could take carbon and hydrogen from other sources.

#4 garbage
Lots of clean energy would mean that we could use it to destroy all kind of garbage disparting it on constitutional elements.

#5 global warming and ocean acidification
Even now we can build machines that could suck the carbon out of air and water, but the problem is they would need to use dirty energy to do it, but with fusion it would be a different story. Also read #2.

#6 population growth
Ok so some would say with cheap food people would start mating like crazy and have much more kids. But is that really a case? First of all we would have much more livable space for new people, second with lots of cheap energy and elements we could use 3D printers much more, that could even make more computers. Give everybody in the world few computers, games and internet and they will not want to have many kids because kids draw them away from games and computers. I mean rich people don't usually have more kids then poor one.

#7 religion
Certainly with using less and less oil lots of those religious dictatorships will be weaker since they are fueled by money from oil. Also as science progresses more and more even the more narrow-minded people will get their eyes opened. Lots of religious tempers are kind of based on despair and the fact that we are all fighting each-other for food and shelter, but if those things get very easy access then people will be more tolerant toward each-other. Why not create a world where no one ever needs to die because of hunger, thirst or lack of shelter? It is doable with fusion.

#8 animal endangerment
Well if you combine all of the above you solve this problem.


So certainly we should devote more time and money into developing nuclear fusion and people at ITER are doing it, but unfortunately very slow and they could do it much faster. Dr. Brian Cox, for instance, thinks there should be a Manhattan like project but for developing fusion.
So solving world problems is all on psychological level. We could do it, we are intelligent enough, but will we do it or surrender to destruction?

All excellent....except terraforming the deserts.

The deserts may seem like wasteland, but in the global sense, they apparently serve a purpose in regulating the Earth's systems;
I watched an excellent documentary about how Antarctica, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Sahara desert combine to regulate the ebb and flow of things like the Gulf Stream, etc.  Can't remember what it was called, but if I find it, I will post a link....if that's allowed.

[Excited Penguin]

Most of these are a joke and I expect it's because you have no idea what you're talking about except for this energy I never heard about(maybe). And concerning the energy : what about the f---ing sun? When did that become plan B?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Fortunately, there's already a solution to hand - solar.  I mean, the sun is everywhere.  The cost of building and maintaining solar power systems is dropping like a paralyzed falcon, storage systems are improving and conservative estimates are expecting solar power to provide some 30% of the world's electricity needs by 2050 (I think that's what I read).

Plus, if your solar panel breaks, you can clear it up with a broom - no HazMat suit required.

Boru

Sorry I forgot to address this. You can't be serious? While solar is good help, it is not suitable as a primary central-station power source. Fifty years from now, only coal, fission, and fusion are capable of supplying the dependable, steady backbone power that the civilized world can count on.
1GW of electricity needs 50 square miles or to completely supplement all today's energy needs you would need area of United States all covered with solar panels.
The atmosphere absorbs part of the sunlight. The sun does not shine at night and does not rise high in the winter. There are cloudy and stormy days. There is little sunlight at high latitudes, where the power is most needed. Solar cells can capture only part of the solar spectrum and are not efficient at that. The peak efficiencies quoted apply only when the sun is directly overhead. The color of sunlight changes near sunset and no longer matches the color the solar cells are optimized for. Solar panels cannot economically be turned to follow the sun as it moves across the sky. We are lucky to capture a few percent of solar energy, but even that is a lot of energy that should not be wasted.

But sure there are solutions even today like Earthship - a house you can live in that you don't have to slave to pay the heating bills, cooling, electricity and even food is free if you are a vegetarian.

-Actually, you can generate 1GW from about 3.2 acres of PV or CSP facility.  Since you're off by a factor of 10 000, you'd only need to cover 1/10000th of the US with solar panels.  Pick a few states you don't need, and go to it.

-Yes, the atmosphere absorbs sunlight, but no one's claiming that we need to capture 100% of the sunlight to make this work.

-The sun shines all the time, just not everywhere at once and not with the same intensity.  What of it?  The heat generated from solar power is storable. 

-As for the power being most needed at higher latitudes, - you're aware that electricity is a transportable commodity, correct?

-Solar panels only need to capture part of the spectrum, and they're efficient enough for their purpose.

-Erm...the sun is always directly overhead, and yes, you can indeed track panels to follow the sun's path.  A lot of solar plants do exactly that.

But the best argument for solar over fusion is that we already know how to do it.  What you're suggesting boils down to investing billions in money and years of research (how many years? 5, 20, 30? - fusion power always seems to be '30 years away) in a technology that may or may not pan out. 

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Oh you're talking about solar thermal plants and yeah they do show more promise and certainly should be pursued. Even in the new "Cosmos" series they were presented as a clean alternative future imagined, I presume, by Ann Druyan who wrote the show. Still you have to consider the amount of material used in building the installation and the energy used in mining, refining, and transporting each type of material. More energy is used in constructing and installing the mirrors, the buildings, the heat storage equipment, and the electrical generation plant. Gas and electricity from conventional sources are used in operating the plant. Decommissioning includes tearing down the plant and returning recyclable materials. This usually nets a negative energy cost. The bottom line is that  plants will have an Energy Payback Time of 12.5 months.

Also they still need lots of ground area. A normal coal or nuclear plant produces 1,000 MW (which amounts about 100 homes), 20 times that of the parabolic mirrored (more expensive and harder to make) plant. 1,000 MW would require 40 km2, an area two-thirds the size of Manhattan Island in New York!
Nonetheless there have been dubious pronouncements that 9% of the area of Nevada could provide enough solar electricity to supply the entire USA. Still it's electricity is still more expensive then for conventional power.

And although it could work for US and some other countries like Mexico there are still lots of countries that it couldn't be comprehensible like Japan or most of Europe. There is even a company in Germany that is advertising the idea that 1% of Sahara under solar thermal plant could supply whole world with electricity. But how realistic is to haul electricity from Sahara to Japan or even Europe?
Also we constantly have to rely on Sun but sometimes stuff happens like volcanoes erupt that fill the atmosphere with dust and decrease the amount of rays that come to us. Now that didn't happened since 19th century but if you had society totally dependent on solar and something like this happened it certainly would not be pretty

So what makes fusion so much better then solar and other? Well you can build it practically inside of the big city because it's clean and safe. It doesn't exist yet but listen in this video what Michio Kaku says to those that are constantly saying "Fusion is decades away" (scroll to 1m36s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gRnezJNFro

Achieving fusion energy is difficult, but the progress made in the past two decades has been remarkable. The physics issues are now understood well enough that serious engineering can begin. An Apollo 11-type program where we mobilize our scientific talent can bring fusion online in time to stabilize climate change before it is too late.

And when you talk about the cost consider that whole ITER costs like 1 month of war in Iraq and yet no one complains about it's cost that does not solve anything and yet fusion will solve oil dependency, CO2 problem, wars for oil and many more. I mean what is a greater danger death by terrorist or by global warming and pollution?

Also fusion technology would open outer space for us. Deuterium is five times as common on Mars as it is on Earth, and thus could provide a plentiful energy source to space pioneers possessing fusion technology. Fusion rockets could theoretically produce exhaust velocities of 8% or more the speed of light. Since rockets can be engineered to achieve about twice their exhaust velocity, such systems could make interstellar travel within a human lifetime possible.

[dyresand]

Science and education are the only things that are going to solve the worlds problems religion isn't going to do that.

[ignoramus]

I've always been fascinated with tidal energy generation.
The ROI may result in expensive end user pricing though. At least it shouldn't take up prime real estate.
(Do it in shitty coastal areas.)