alt Hacker NewsEvery step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or economic systems will survive the death of scarcity.
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> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.
Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
> The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy[.]
Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.
Unless cold fusion allows everyone to literally pull infinite energy out of thin air with no maintenance or labor costs, I don't buy that premise. Many other utilities are effectively free already in some places, but you still need metering to deter bad actors, which is what money is. Otherwise I'm going to take all available cold fusion capacity in existence and use it to build my own artificial sun with my face on it.