KeithPickering wrote:

As for the thread concept I, myself, find it pretty meaningless. The X megawatts for X persons for X aeons is too displaced and too subject to gaming.
…

And the answer will be measured in MW per person per millennium.

I hereby call this number the Zap.

I like it! The Zap. Has an electric feel to it as well.

Now to get widespread use of the metric.

Oh, if only you had been minding your units. Watts already has a time element in it (Joules per second). So should a Zap should really be one MJ per person per millenium? But that works out to a measly 3 x 10^-5 Watts per person!

So how about a Zap is 1 MW per person, period? Or a Zap is 1 megaWatt-millenium per person? The first being a unit of power, the second being a unit of energy.

🙂

… more seriously, I was thinking that if we can’t safely set up a better and longer lived power source in any given thousand year period then there’s no hope for us at all.

We could double our population and go all-solar and still provide megawatts per person… if we could buy ourselves a few centuries to build the proper orbital infrastructure.

Of course the population could easily more than double in a century, much less a millennium, but leaving the projected population undefined gives too much slack in the concept for my taste so doubling the current population would seem to be a good marker.

So slightly rephrased:

“Can we, acting in an environmentally responsible manner, safely get enough energy from a given source without shorting ourselves in its other uses to see double the current population through until the next, longer lived, energy breakthrough?”

“environmentally responsible” and “safely” should have been factored in under “sustainable energy” but the thinking behind that concept is actually more tilted towards renewables at the moment and isn’t set up for aneutronic fusion yet… but it’s the closest to what we seek, I think.

And so, more formally. the Zap would measure how much energy a sustainable source can provide for double the current population, from birth until death, for 1000 years and it would be measured in megawatts.

… and an average of 1 MW per person would basically solve all current energy and material resource issues.

As an example in the U.S. an average of 1 MW each for the current population would mean a total available energy budget of 308 terawatts. We could get some things done then…

… that is, if the ruling plutocracy is not allowed to lock it down “for our own good.” And they will try. Having openly seized power they will not give it up willingly. After all, why should they?