Honestly? A major breakthrough in fusion, or to a lesser extent, any other clean energy. We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile, but there’s a strong financial incentive that politicians are vulnerable to protecting oil and gas, slowing down further decarbonisation. Batteries and supercapacitors also could do the trick.
I don’t think fusion would be as useful a technology as it would have been a few decades ago. Now renewables (wind, solar, hydro) seem like more and more as the clean and cheap energy of the future. The biggest problem of storage is rapidly being solved with batteries springing up everywhere.
The real problem with fusion is that even if it worked, the plants would be very complex and expensive. It would be much cheaper and reliable to build solar, wind and batteries instead.
Having operational fusion reactors would be cool as hell, but it wouldn’t have that much impact on our lives in the end.
Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.
As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.
Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.
If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.
Fusion is likely the end-game power gen tech for humanity, assuming no new physics (and excluding Dyson structures). For the long term, it likely will be the most useful way of generating mass amounts of electricity you can get, and access to more energy enables more possibilities of all sorts of things, enabling even things that are extremely impractical today due to their energy needs
For example, carbon capture becomes a possibility, and stuff like mass desalination. And then you could, in theory, go even more extreme with stuff like terraforming mars at human timescales, with enough energy. Of course this depends how practical and efficient fusion reactors actually would be, but with enough energy you can do so so much
If we have a lot of cheap energy, we might be able to do industrial-scale carbon capture.
While I agree with what you’ve said, I’ve always felt fusion and other such tech is the future of long distance space travel, not Earth based energy use. Wind and hydro are useless in space and solar has issues with power accumulation the further away from a star you go. We will still need some kind of “fuel” based energy source if we’re ever to enter deep space and cross the gaps(unless battery tech increases much further to the point that a “battery” lasts a significant portion of the vehicles lifetime). Even then, you’d need recharge stations at each end or to park by a star to refuel in between.
We have fusion/fission now. That kind of battery tech is still a ways off. Feels shortsighted to ignore nuclear now just because it’s not perfect in this specific environment. After all, name any vehicle not powered by nuclear that can run for 20-30 years before it needs to refuel/recharge. No battery tech can even come close currently.
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I don’t think it’s gonna get cheaper than renewables, they’re literally using free energy without needing any human intervention aside from inspection and repairs. The issue is the oil and gas companies paying the politicians. Also right-wing parties that do everything they can to keep emissions up just cause. No new technology can fix those issues.
We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile
Unfortunately, things like AI continue to fuel our hunger for power, preventing fossil fuels from being phased out… and as such, CO2 production continues to accelerate uncontrollably.
Yes, atmospheric CO2 production continues to accelerate. It hasn’t even begun to slow down, much less reach a steady state or reverse.
And this is excluding the feedback loops (arctic permafrost, methyl hydrates, etc.) that are now beginning to cook off in nature.
We are still solidly on the “business as usual” path towards civilizational collapse by some point in the 2050s, and functional extinction by some point between 2100 and 2200.
The large storage batteries that use sodium ion. They should be able to get like 5,000 full cycles before they degrade and can be buried or stored outside. That and a solar array on a roof should let most anyone be completely off grid. Full solar house that should last for 15 years before the system needs replaced. The batteries will last longer and be cheaper than lithium. Solar panel prices are consistently getting cheaper.
I think in 5 years time there will be a lot of the electrical grid system (for most who will be still attached to the grid) just getting power almost completely from solar, and storing enough in these batteries for the nights and cloudy days.
Nuclear is going through a breakthrough and it’s coming along at a neat net zero.
In a breakthrough experiment, nuclear fusion finally makes more energy than it uses
Sort of. It made more energy than the lasers that actually caused the reaction. It still used vastly more energy than that to actually power those lasers. We are still far off but it was a major stepping point.
Scalable, lab grown meat operations.
Came here to say this. The implications for food security would be massive, but it would also have an enormous impact on climate change, cutting GHG emissions by one-third.
I came here for this one.
I don’t follow news on alt-meat super closely, but I thought the scalability thing was not much of a concern, and I thought we were mainly at the steps of raising demand and meating or beating price parity with the real thing.
Something like an alt-meat only fast food spot or something trendy that can only be done with lab created protein could be all it takes to cement its place in society, so I feel we’re just waiting for that tipping point due to product that mainly already exists.
meating
Nice one
I knew you guys would pick up on that one!
The spell checker really did not want me to make that little joke, but I knew it would be appreciated.
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I thought it was a good gag, but I didn’t want it to sound like meat beating. 😜
Everybody is going to groan, but solid state batteries. That would be a huge sea change, not just for cars, but also air travel.
I have good news for you, then. We’re now past the “discovery” phase and we’re at the implementation phase with solid state batteries, as you can actually buy production models: https://yoshinopower.com/
Yeah but they’re not there yet in terms of mass deployment and that’s still going to take some more technical breakthroughs. They’ll get there eventually but there might be some new discovery any day that would greatly speed up the process.
Yes, it’s brand new, but the mass manufacturing difficulties have been resolved. We might not have whatever future iteration of the technology you’re looking for, but it is unquestionably here and future developments are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary.
I don’t know about air travel. For comparison, Li batteries are about 200-300 Wh/kg, with solid state reading 3-4x that.
Jetfuel is 11000 Wh/kg. Hydrogen is 39000 Wh/kg.
By volume they might have an advantage but planes tend to care more about weight
MRNA vaccines for cancer, HIV and others. Moderna clinical trials have been real good.
Imagine getting a cancer diagnosis, then 30 days later getting a tailored treatment that eliminated the cancer.
Also vote. Because one party system has decided to side with anti vaxxers. The other has not. Cancer numbers have been steadily rising, second only to heart disease as a cause of death. There is a solid chance you’re going to get cancer.
Voting is mandatory here. So no need to tell me to vote.
And I’m not sure which party is anti Vax.
Do you know about preferential voting? It makes the 2 party system not so bad.
Solid state batteries are just starting to hit the market but are still fairly comparable to lithium. In theory the mature tech is more energy dense, more thermally stable, charges faster and may be less environmentally damaging.
Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.
A room-temperature superconductor.
It’s gonna be something we slap our foreheads over. Like if you twist the hell out of bronze, or put a microprocessor in a vice.
Shit there’s like 3 other people saying that hours ago.
Seconded, because that would likely make fusion practical which would lead to effectively unlimited clean energy.
More efficient or even lossless, sustainable energy storage.
Lossless is impossible, as
heat is produced and loses energyengineers will always put blinking LEDs on the batteriesThis is true. You only have to deal once with a device that doesn’t have a light or something to realize just how essential indicators are. I have sworn to the electronics gods to never to make a device without at least a power led.
Room temperature superconductors. Those things are insane, but by now, as far as I know , the only way to create them is with extremely low temperatures.
Considering this one makes several of the other ones listed here more viable, I think it would have the most impact.
A big difficulty is that between the scientific discover, and the application years or even decades can occur. Look at how supra conductor have been known for 100 years and still have very few real life usage.
My thoughts tough
- Life on Mars. I don’t talk about Martian, but if we find remain of bacteria it would be a major breakthrough in biology
-physics beyond the standard model at LHC, no impacts for commoner, but would really help physics to understand our universe
More on technology/applied science
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Next generation cures against cancer with high efficiency/specificity. I think about targeted alpha therapy and immunotherapy. If these get real, a cancer isn’t 6-12 month of painful treatment for followed by a year of recovery, but something a single injection can cure.
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Male birth control, would give men a better control of their own fertility and give one more option to couple where the woman can’t use birth control
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high temperature supra conductors, by high temperature I mean anything above 100K in normal pressure, high current, high magnetic field. Would allow to use way more super conducting magnet than today. Imagine a world where quenching a MRI doesn’t turn off the machine for 3 months.
I agree, but MAGA might have other plans? Lost lots of sleep about this overnight. Science is doomed.
the most likely thing to cause a large impact to me is the continued advancement of crispr for gene therapy but it will not be a discovery at this point as much as just it becoming common and cheaper.
Yeah… I’m not going to tell intelligent sea mammals where pollution comes from.
Or how delicious they are.
High temperature superconductors.
Specifically anything above commercial / household freezer (-18C); but if we could get to ~105C (above water boiling) it would change literally everything.
Electric motors become more efficient over a much greater RPM range.
Superconducting magnets become much easier to construct and run, this gives us a much better chance at fusion.
Transmission lines themselves are pretty efficient as it is, but all of the associated switchgear at the conversion points all gets really warm, this could be virtually eliminated.
The conductors on circuit boards, and potentially inside microchips. This reduces heat loading and thus makes all computing devices more efficient.
The conductors in batteries; enabling these to be smaller and thus increasing battery energy density.
Finally making super-capacitors actually viable as longer term energy storage.There are so many aspects of life that would be impacted by this one breakthrough, that it is probably the most important thing that will happen this century (scientifically speaking). It would be almost as revolutionary as when electricity itself became widespread.
For everyone? Nuclear Fusion is on the cusp of reaching net zero emissions. Meaning we can create massive amounts of clean energy. Right now, we use nuclear energy off of Nuclear Fission creating hazardous waste and resulting in excess heat/waste
Nuclear Fusion would allows us to create clean energy with the goal of being net zero
Nuclear Fusion and “net zero emissions” doesn’t really make sense.
What I think you are trying to say is that fusion is nearing the point where net energy is possible (that is getting more energy out then the amount of energy put in to create the reactions in the first place). Fusion is not practically close yet, but there are tantalizing hints that we are close.
See this from 2022; the national ignition facility produced more energy that was impacted on the target (2MJ in 3MJ out), but this doesn’t take into account the huge inefficiencies in the laser generators to produce that 2MJ laser pulse.
There are a bunch of fusion experiments that are hitting massive temperatures (120 - 150MK) which is starting to get into the range where practical fusion could occur, the center of the sun is approx 15MK but also has massive gravity to encourage fusion.
So fusion is still a decade away at least, but we understand the science much more completely now. We know the problems (well a bunch of them) and it is mostly now a very difficult engineering problem rather a problem of understanding the science.
Yes. You are correct. Thank you.
Nobody’s talking about this one, but if NASA is able to confirm even the slightest degree of lab-scale spatial warping we’d be in for a huge sea change in potential futures.
APM (Atomically Precise Manufacturing)
