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BearStorms t1_is2fs88 wrote

What about the bottleneck of natural resources and environmental damage though? Although I expect we will have much better recycling systems with more advanced AI and robotics and I've even heard about proposals to "mine" existing landfills, etc. But it will still be a bottleneck.

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civilrunner t1_is2le30 wrote

Much of the technology we're creating today and in the future are increasing efficiencies dramatically to reduce foot prints rather than increasing them. For instance vertical farming and lab grown meat is promising for dramatically reducing the foot print taken up by agriculture which is the largest land user by far.

Beyond that Nuclear Fusion makes desalination and pumping for water distribution pretty straight forward so that we don't have any water restraints.

There are some rare earth materials that could act as bottle necks, but I would assume by the time we have that level of automation we will both have substantially better recycling (as you state) and asteroid mining as well as more economical refining and processing due to much cheaper (and abundant) energy.

Tritium (powering Fusion) seems like it may be a bottle neck for fusion, but moon mining could provide plenty of that and we should be able to make more of it within a reactor. If we also develop higher temp super conducting magnets then other fusion reactions become available at 10X the energy levels which don't require tritium and also don't create any radioactive byproduct.

If we create the holy grail of material science aka the room temperature super conductor then we should be able to generate magnetic fields strong enough to use this type of reaction in a portable fusion reactor that has an arc radius as small as 2 inches. That would be able to power everything from buildings to larger flying vehicles to space craft (that energy could likely propel a craft to escape velocity without rocket fuel and then switch over to an ion-drive while in space). A miniaturized fusion reactor could bring forth the flying car and do away with the needs for roads and surface infrastructure such that all cities are simply connected by the sky. This amount of energy combined with automation could make it so carbon super materials become the building material of choice and since we have an absurd amount of carbon (4th most abundant material in the Universe) and said materials are absurdly strong we would likely never run out if we can mine it from space.

Ion propulsion while being fairly weak today, could also power flying vehicles in the future if combined with a portable fusion reactor to do away with props or jet engines. Though personally I'm hesitant to suggest we'll do away with all land based travel given that I can't imagine a bunch of high speed thrust from flying vehicles all over the place being that great within cities, perhaps within cities we'll just have more and more subways and trams and stacked infrastructure.

The combination of abundant clean energy with lab grown meat, vertical farming, automation that removes limits from productivity, and more makes us be able to live in a rather small and sustainable foot print even if we do something like reverse aging we would still be rather sustainable for centuries just on earth without moving out to other planets and while conserving far more natural environment than we do today. All of this would also allow us to begin to control the climate since we'll have access to those levels of energy and technologies like carbon capture would enable us to maintain a certain optimal zone for ppm of carbon where we prevent global warming and ice ages. That and we'll be able to rapidly respond to things like forest fires with automated response drones within minutes due to satellite monitoring to ensure they never get out of control and forests are maintained with less destructive methods thanks to automation. With such unlimited productivity we would be able to easily invest into things we simply can't afford to today to allow us to more be the keepers and protectors or our climate and environment and planet rather than the destroyers of it. We wouldn't think twice about putting up a fence along a highway along with nature bridges to prevent collisions with wild life because it would simply be cheap to do so. These energy levels would also allow us to cancel out tornadoes and well computer simulations combined with such high energy levels may even allow us to control severe weather events.

With all that being said, the one issue I could see running up against is literally using so much energy that we heat up the planet. We would therefore need a way of basically removing energy from the closed system of earth like a planetary heat sink.

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BearStorms t1_is332cy wrote

Beautiful vision of a possible future!

>That and we'll be able to rapidly respond to things like forest fires with automated response drones within minutes due to satellite monitoring to ensure they never get out of control and forests are maintained with less destructive methods thanks to automation.

I was thinking about this and there are no technical limitations on doing this today. Yes, it may need some investment, but seeing what a huge problem this has become in the Western US why is there not a lot more investment into much better wildfire management? It surely must cause damages in order of 10s or even 100s of billions of dollars every year, especially if you calculate all negative externalities like impact on health due to air quality, etc.

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civilrunner t1_is3l0mn wrote

Rapid response technology is close but not there yet. It would require constant satellite surveillance for heat signatures (which we either have the capacity to do today or will within 5-10 years). Beyond that you need a swarm of autonomous heavy lift drones that can fill up and actually carry enough water which likely requires better batteries to be economical since today's best heavy lift drones are limited to a few hundred pounds. I do expect it to be something we're close to having though. Beyond that ideally you would want some form of AI to check to make sure it is the start of a forest fire and not something else (this should be pretty easy given burn bans and fire spreading and such) If we could respond to forest fires really quickly they become a lot less of a problem and it would allow us to grow forests again to help with carbon capture (forest fires release all the carbon captured from said forest).

I suspect once its feasible it will be done fairly quickly because as you said forest fires are becoming extremely expensive and well life altering so the economics and demand are definitely there.

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BearStorms t1_is3xvu6 wrote

>Beyond that you need a swarm of autonomous heavy lift drones that can fill up and actually carry enough water which likely requires better batteries

Why not use hydrogen fuel cell or even gas powered drones for this?

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civilrunner t1_is3y5ju wrote

Honestly I'm not sure and have been curious about that myself. It could just be that all the other technologies aren't reliable enough yet as well.

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