That does seem like a better idea, ignoring issues of price setting. Unfortunately, nation states are extremely bad at game theory, and it’s difficult to achieve international agreement on these issues, especially when it will impact one nation disproportionately (China would be much harder hit, economically, by cap-and-trade legislation than the US).
I’d disagree pretty strongly with the energy issue, at least for now—but that’s a discussion for another time. In politics, as in fighting couples, it is crucial to keep your peas separate from your pudding—one issue at a time.
Without wanting to start a fight, which half do you disagree with? The Moore’s law or the nuclear estimate? I’m personally more confident about the first than the second.
Regardless of OP’s objection, there’s a strong counter to the assertion of solar power following a Moore’s Law trajectory. Solar irradiance at ground level has a fairly hard limit of < 1200 watts/m^2. Even in the upper atmosphere it’s not much more.
So solar cells may get more efficient, but their output isn’t going to get exponentially greater over time. They may also become considerably cheaper, but the price of land isn’t going down, and will remain a non-reducing term when calculating implementation costs.
It could be that you’re referring to some other feature of Moore’s Law I’m not considering, but in the intuitive sense of “my phone has more computing power than the whole of the 1960s”, gains of that magnitude are simply not possible.
That does seem like a better idea, ignoring issues of price setting. Unfortunately, nation states are extremely bad at game theory, and it’s difficult to achieve international agreement on these issues, especially when it will impact one nation disproportionately (China would be much harder hit, economically, by cap-and-trade legislation than the US).
I’d disagree pretty strongly with the energy issue, at least for now—but that’s a discussion for another time. In politics, as in fighting couples, it is crucial to keep your peas separate from your pudding—one issue at a time.
Without wanting to start a fight, which half do you disagree with? The Moore’s law or the nuclear estimate? I’m personally more confident about the first than the second.
Regardless of OP’s objection, there’s a strong counter to the assertion of solar power following a Moore’s Law trajectory. Solar irradiance at ground level has a fairly hard limit of < 1200 watts/m^2. Even in the upper atmosphere it’s not much more.
So solar cells may get more efficient, but their output isn’t going to get exponentially greater over time. They may also become considerably cheaper, but the price of land isn’t going down, and will remain a non-reducing term when calculating implementation costs.
It could be that you’re referring to some other feature of Moore’s Law I’m not considering, but in the intuitive sense of “my phone has more computing power than the whole of the 1960s”, gains of that magnitude are simply not possible.
The Moore’s law seem to be in cost, not in efficiency (though efficiency is also improving): http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/
And if we get to the point where land is the bottleneck, well, I’d say we’d be doing fantastically well at that point :-)