A few weeks ago I wrote a post outlining a Star Trek Vision for the US. More broadly speaking, I believe that an agenda like this should be the vision for the world. One of the many inspiring aspects of Star Trek, the original series, was humans collaborating across backgrounds including race, gender and nationality. I am now turning my initial outline into a series of posts that explores each of the bullet points in more detail, starting with "energy too cheap to meter" (to illustrate that above is a picture of the engine room from the Enterprise).
Progress has in the past been driven by great breakthroughs in energy. At DLD earlier this year, I gave a talk on this precise topic.
Humanity's first big energy unlock came from figuring out how to make fire. Fire let us cook our food, which made meat more digestible, resulting in larger net calory uptake. This made bigger brains possible. The second big breakthrough was agriculture, which increased the food density of land by an order of magnitude or more. This made large societies possible. The third big break through were fossil fuels. This made larger economies possible.
We are now living through the fourth big breakthrough in the form of solar energy. Already today it is by far the cheapest form of energy when there is sun. Battery (and other storage) costs are declining rapidly. We still need to dramatically improve energy transport from solar. Some of this will come via high voltage DC transmission lines, some of it via making synthetic fuels and shipping those in existing infrastructure. In addition to this "remote fusion" we also have the ability to dramatically drive down the cost of nuclear and possibly unlock "local fusion." Further out there is the potential to generate heat through catalytic reactions, where AI might help us unlock the right catalysts.
When we put all of this together we can absolutely achieve a place where energy is so cheap that at the margin we will not need to meter its consumption. While this may strike some people as crazy because energy had always been comparatively expensive, it is worth keeping in mind that we all make use of sunlight everyday and nobody meters that.
As it turns we are desperately in need of this new energy breakthrough. There are at least three areas in which we need a lot more energy and need it fast.
1. Climate Crisis: Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are way too high resulting in rapid warming. We need to drastically reduce our emissions by switching away from fossil fuels and adding carbon capture. We must rapidly draw down some of the existing carbon. And we need to deal with the near term overheating through more air conditioning for humans and for agriculture. All of these require dramatically more energy. Important aside: we are so far behind that we may need to pull a temporary emergency break in the form of solar radiation management.
2. Artificial Intelligence: We are in the age of rapid breakthroughs in AI. These are making all sorts of fantastic things possible, such as autonomous vehicles. AI and robots/smart machines as its physical embodiment are far less energy efficient than humans and will remain so for some time being (it will take us a while to catch up on evolution). Using AI broadly thus requires massive additional amounts of energy.
3. Modern Society: This may come as a surprise to some, but markets, democracy, the rule of law, and effective bureaucracy also all require energy. These systems are expensive to operate and over time show diminishing returns. The terrific book "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter examines how these diminishing returns can result in collapse. He points out that the way to avoid this is to unlock a new energy "subsidy." Historically this was a euphemism for conquest and slavery. Today it is a rallying cry for producing nearly abundant energy.
So what does it take to get there?
We already have a ton of entrepreneurial activity driving down the cost of solar and of storage. But we need government to better regulate the grid. We must rapidly transform it from its existing structure to look a lot more like the Internet: a super high voltage DC backbone connecting different regions around the country (and even the world), combined with resilient regional grids that connect together a plethora of microgrids.
The second area where government needs to play a major role is in undoing fossil fuel subsidies. Since this has distributive implications that make it politically unpalatable, I would add a carbon tax on top and use the proceeds to prevent an immediate budget shock for commuters and others who will need an adjustment period. The current state of fossil fuel subsidies is delaying the adoption of much cheaper energy sources.
The third point for government is to help get nuclear on a learning curve by rapidly approving small reactors that can be factory produced. Along with this government should work on closing the fuel cycle. The incentives here are all wrong at the moment because government is absorbing the cost of storing nuclear waste.
Finally, government should fund promising research on nuclear fusion at varying scales and of varying approaches. That should include foundational research on the potential for catalytic fusion. While fusion is relatively unlikely to contribute to energy abundance in the near term, we will need a next unlock after this one on our way up the Kardashev scale (with kudos to Meltem and Kelly for this hilarious illustration from the Crucible Capital nuclear fuel report).
