Hi all, I’m Vlad, 35, from Romania. I’ve been working in software engineering for 12 years. I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Physics.
I’m here because I read “What we owe the future”, after it was recommended to me by a friend.
I got the book recommended to me because I had an idea which is a little unconfortable for some people, but I think this idea is extremely important, and this friend of mine instantly classified my thoughts as “a branch of long-termism”. I also think my idea is extremely relevant to this group, and I’m interested in getting feedback about it.
Context for the idea: Long-termism is concerned about people as far into the future as possible, up to the end of the universe.
The idea: …what if we can make it so there doesn’t have to be an end? If we had a limitless source of energy, there wouldn’t have to be an end. Not only that, but we could make a lot of people very happy (like billions of billions of billions …..of billions of them? a literal infinity of them even)
It sounds crazy, I realize, but my best knowledge on this topic says this:
We know that we don’t know all the laws of the universe
Even the known laws kind of have a loop-hole in them. Energy is supposed to be conserved, but we don’t necessarily know how much energy exists out there—if an infinite amount exists, we can both use it, and conserve it
I received feedback from a few physicists already, none of them said that infinite energy is clearly impossible—just that we don’t know how we could get it
So my conclusion is: some amount of effort into the topic of infinite energy should be invested.
Is anyone interested in talking about this? I can show you what I have so far.
P.S. fusion is not a source of infinite energy, but merely a source of energy potentially far better than most others we know
P.P.S. I created this website for the initiative: https://github.com/vladiibine/infinite-energy
This book contains studies of poor people, how they spend their money, and what could help them the most: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10245602-poor-economics?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3qdox2Dpdo&rank=1
FYI