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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Big star object provide energy for everyone for most of day, it s possible now to make it available for entire day with battery tech, affordable with less waste and risk than old fossils energy. Sounds good and should applied to all of place asap.
I have been do disenfranchised with this world.
I had a private education and strong interest into alternative fuels and power. I was so happy to learn about hydrogen fuelcell cars, solar, and wind energy.
I really thought we were all collectively passionate about saving the planet, back when I was 14 and learning about this stuff in grade 7.
Now, 25 years later and its a joke. Billionaires are going to burn up the world.
Same, friend.
You could see it in things like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted about how awesome the future was going to be.
It only takes a few of these guys to throw all of humanity in the shitter too. I mean, there's the people that put them into power and all that, but it is the key people were people seem to love a charlatan.
The majority of human history was solar powered. It took fossil fuels to allow us to reach 8 billion with our current level of resource use.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
We didn't have means to convert it into electricity for the majority of human history or machines to run with that electricity that made it possible to produce enough to support all those people. We're able to do a lot of shit with just electricity now that used to require engines running fossil fuels
Because you're ignoring the hugely inefficient baseline of how much sunlight we have historically been able to harvest.
From this page, sunlight-to-biomass efficiency of wild plants is less than 1%. For crops specifically bred over thousands of years to grow as much useful biomass as quickly as possible in each season, the number ticks up to 2%. But even that number also fails to account for the periods in which fields lay fallow between seasons, or for crop rotation.
Then, once you have that biomass, converting it into a useful form of fuel for burning, or food for biomechanical energy, has huge efficiency losses along the way.
Meanwhile, solar panels achieve approximately 25% solar efficiency.
That's how we can collect far more energy from the sun today than at any point in the past. Biology is inefficient compared to photovoltaics.
Best to think of fossil fuels as a shot in the arm of the development of human civilization. On that timescale, It was always going to be temporary, whether due to climate change or simply the limits of availible fuel. We were always going to need to use it to bootstrap onto something else within a couple hundred years of the invention of the steam engine. The math is reasonable and yes, total solar power isnt a problem (storage and distribution is, but total availability isnt hard).
Who said we need to sustain it? Personally, I think we should reduce our energy use. Fewer private vehicles and more public transit, for example.