Energy Concerns

As technology advances, the need to power that technology increases. This is becoming more concerning as we're running out of our chief energy resource: oil.

Now, of course, it's not possible to for any energy source to last forever. Delta S > 0. Even the stars will die. But, hey, a billion year fix is better than a hundred year one.

So, what other options are there? What will keep our technological society chugging along?

Well, there's ethanol.The idea makes sense. By far, the best solar cells known to man are contained in plants. Chlorophyll converts the energy of sunlight into the more storable and transportable form of sugar. Then we can process that sugar and make fuel we can run our cars off of. The problem is, raising crops isn't that easy, and requires us to put our own energy into it, in the form of fertilizers, harvesters, etc. That's true of any means of acquiring energy, but in this case, we put in more than we get out. Ethanol isn't feasible as an energy source even on a short term basis.

There's coal and natural gas. There's still plenty of that left, at least compared to oil. But that's hard to get out of the ground, and it's horribly polluting.

And then there's the nuclear option. Although nuclear power plants have their dangers, most of them are exaggerated. While there is the possibility of a meltdown, modern nuclear power plants are extremely well shielded. You wouldn't be exposed to significantly more radiation standing right outside of a nuclear power plant that was melting down than you would anywhere else. And nuclear power plants are well protected against external threats as well.



The only real concern about nuclear fission is the waste. Radioactive waste will stay radioactive for millions of years. What do you do with it? Right now, our best solution is to bury it deep under mountains. But that's not terribly secure. I haven't seen these ideas anywhere else, and they're probably not feasible, but the best I can think of is to either bury them deep under a subduction zone or launch it into space.

But anything we do now, is really just tiding us over until we can harness the power of the sun directly, either with extremely high efficiency solar panels, or fusion power plants.