Tuesday open thread: Utopia?

I don't normally write about the same topic two days running. But today's announcement by energy secretary Jennifer Granholm about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research is just that important.

Our Churchlady posed this very salient question last night:

On the global climate change front, this is possibly an amazing answer to the problems. On a 'treat Mother Earth kindly" front - maybe it's the death knell. If we have clean energy of that magnitude, what's stopping us from expanding, sprawling, being entirely indifferent to other impacts our presence has? Not sure this is a blessing or a curse.

This is a very good observation, and these are thoughts I had. And this was my response:

Nuclear fusion would not just provide energy for the planet. It would also fuel our expansion into the solar system. No need to mine minerals on Earth when you can do so in space, where they are orders of magnitude more plentiful. And ships powered by cheap energy would make that economically feasible.

But, more to the point, cheap, limitless energy would completely upend our economics. So much of it revolves on acquisition of energy sources. With that out of the picture, you'd see an entirely different economics, and relation to the planet.

I know, utopian. But that's how big a fucking deal this is. We might very well turn out to be Star Trek, and not Alien.

Now, I know I'm guilty of getting carried away with the promise of technology. But for the past century, the locus of humanity's strife has been over energy resources. Medieval Middle Eastern barbarities, and medieval Russian dictatorships, have the outsized power they have because they're fortunate enough to sit on most of the world's energy reserves. Take that away, and you'd see a tectonic shift in geopolitics, and, I say, for the immeasurable better.

Plentiful and cheap energy would transform our economies. It would, I argue, bring down, if not eliminate, the earth's despoliation. Without the need to extract energy resources, that would take away a major driver of human expansion into now-pristine regions. So, no oil and gas exploration in, say, the Arctic Circle, which is the next arena of energy competition.

And then there's that intangible: What happens when you have a paradigm-changing technology? Does that rewire our thinking? Does that reorient our priorities?

Of course, humans are perfectly capable of screwing things up. But we're no longer in the Neolithic. We have millennia of philosophical and religious traditions which call for the stewardship of this earth. But we've never had the technology. Now we're on the verge of taking off the table the greatest contributor to environmental damage. How will that change us in fundamental ways? I don't know. But, as a glass-half-full kind of person, I'm ever hopeful.

For years, I've said that we hairless apes are clever enough to save ourselves. We've done it again and again. And it seems like, in the moment of ultimate peril, we shall finally draw a line under our long adolescence and reach for things greater than we have ever imagined. I hope to live long enough to see wonders and marvels.