My understanding is that here is enough energy generable via fusion that if you did as much fusion as possible on earth, the oceans would boil. Or more minimally, earth would be uninhabitable by humans living as they currently do. I think this holds even if you just fuse lighter elements which are relatively easy to fuse. (As in, just fusing hydrogen.)
Of course, it would be possible to avoid doing this on earth and instead go straight to a dyson swarm or similar. And, it might be possible to dissipate all the heat away from earth though this seems hard and not what would happen in the most efficient approach from my understanding.
I think if you want to advance energy/compute production as fast as possible, boiling the oceans makes sense for a technologically mature civilization. However, I expect that boiling the oceans advances progress by no more than several years and possibly much, much less than that (e.g. days or hours) depending on how quickly you can build a dyson sphere and an industrial base in space. My current median guess would be that it saves virtually no time (several days), but a few months seems plausible.
Overall, I currently expect the oceans to not be boiled because:
It saves only a tiny amount of time (less than several years, probably much less). So, this is only very important if you are in an conflict or you are very ambitious in resource usage and not patient.
Probably humans will care some about not having the oceans boiled and I expect human preferences to get some weight even conditional on AI takeover.
I expect that you’ll have world peace (no conflict) by the time you have ocean boiling technology due to improved coordination/negotiation/commitment technology.
I don’t know of an existing citation.
My understanding is that here is enough energy generable via fusion that if you did as much fusion as possible on earth, the oceans would boil. Or more minimally, earth would be uninhabitable by humans living as they currently do. I think this holds even if you just fuse lighter elements which are relatively easy to fuse. (As in, just fusing hydrogen.)
Of course, it would be possible to avoid doing this on earth and instead go straight to a dyson swarm or similar. And, it might be possible to dissipate all the heat away from earth though this seems hard and not what would happen in the most efficient approach from my understanding.
I think if you want to advance energy/compute production as fast as possible, boiling the oceans makes sense for a technologically mature civilization. However, I expect that boiling the oceans advances progress by no more than several years and possibly much, much less than that (e.g. days or hours) depending on how quickly you can build a dyson sphere and an industrial base in space. My current median guess would be that it saves virtually no time (several days), but a few months seems plausible.
Overall, I currently expect the oceans to not be boiled because:
It saves only a tiny amount of time (less than several years, probably much less). So, this is only very important if you are in an conflict or you are very ambitious in resource usage and not patient.
Probably humans will care some about not having the oceans boiled and I expect human preferences to get some weight even conditional on AI takeover.
I expect that you’ll have world peace (no conflict) by the time you have ocean boiling technology due to improved coordination/negotiation/commitment technology.
Build enough nuclear power plants and we could boil the oceans with current tech, yeah? They’re a significant fraction of fusion output iiuc?
Not quite, there is a finite quantity of fissiles. IIRC it’s only an order of magnitude of energy more than fossil fuel reserves.