Hey Guy, thanks for your feedback.
I might be wrong on this, but the way I understand probability to work is that, generally:
if event A has probability P(A)
and if event B has probability P(B)
then the probability of both A and B to happen is P(A) * P(B)
What this means, is that technically:
The existence of supernatural beings, with personalities, and specific traits AND the power “to do anything they want” is at most equal to the possibility for an endless source of energy to exist
simply on the basis that more constraints make the probability of the event smaller.
The interesting point however is that I have found (so far) no physicist that says this is not possible.
I have also not found anyone yet who knows how to estimate the effort so far.
I would be very interested however if there are arguments against this position.
And I’d be even more interested in people who want to help me with this initiative :D Arguments are nice, but making progress is better!
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