Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1]

We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).

[1]: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026



Yes and no.

If GDP is as tightly-coupled to energy use as data suggest, and we presume, say, 4% annual growth rate, then we have a slight issue.

10,000 times is just over 13 doubling periods' worth of growth. And 4% annual growth rate means doubling every 13.3 years, roughly.

In which case, humans would cut into that 10,000-fold margin in slightly over 230 years.

Which suggests that there are in fact limits to growth.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: