No. of Recommendations: 16
"Yes, the amount of money and land and resources (electricity, water for cooling etc) is staggering."
Imagine there was a structural engineer who lived around 1900 just when cars were starting to become a thing. Most roads were little more than dusty cart paths. Sure there were some bricked in roads in the fancy parts of cities, but most everything else was just mud and dust. Then someone then teleported you to 2024 and you saw the road infrastructure then. All of the concrete and paved roads. Expressways with huge cloverleaf interchanges where they intersected with other highways. Some with interchanges off the ground where lanes were 100s of feet in the air. Not only the roads themselves, but the other infrastructure that went with it. Sewers and drainage systems to insure rain and runoff would keep the roads clear. Electricity to power all of the stoplights and streetlights to keep drivers safe. All of the signage, the glow in the dark lane markers, the guardrails, sensors in the roadway, etc.
It would all be staggering to such a person. He would go back and calculate how much steel, concrete, and asphalt it would take to build the future and the amounts would be incomprehensible to such a person. The energy required to make the steel, concrete, and asphalt would be incalculable. He would take the biggest steel plant at the time and realize it would take orders of magnitude more of such steel plants to make all of the steel. Where would all of the ore come from? Same with the manpower required. Then look at the land required. and so on and so on.
The amount of money, land, manpower, and resources would all just be absurdly huge, incomprehensible numbers to such a person.
The reason is that the person is trying to calculate how much it will take to get to the future point in an instant. The thing is, it isn't going to happen in an instant. It is going to happen in small steps. Right now, people are building computers that are sucking up ridiculous amounts of electricity and throwing off tons of heat. Electricity is relatively cheap so that is the way to go. Eventually if electricity is in so much demand the price of it will rise and some of the projects going won't be worth the cost. Then we (humankind) will figure out how to get cheaper electricity. We will figure out new ways to do the computations more efficiently. Humankind will encounter obstacles (such as a lack of enough electricity) and they will overcome those obstacles. That is how humankind progresses.
As an aside, people look at the allure of fusion energy because they see unlimited (i.e. cheap) energy and think of free electric bills for their house and car. Thinking they can transport stuff super cheaply. All of that is true, but to me the real allure of the unlimited energy from fusion power will be near unlimited computing power at mankind's fingertips. With near unlimited energy, mankind will be able to build huge computer centers that are many orders of magnitude bigger and more powerful than we have today.
