All of AnthonyC's Comments + Replies
Strictly speaking, Kardashev level 1 requires control over a whole planet's energy budget such that we are capable of using it. It says nothing about what we do with it. "Choose to not use it and leave some spaces wild, when we could easily choose otherwise" seems like a perfectly valid way to meet that criterion (that we don't yet meet).
Right now land costs are on the order of $1k-$2k/acre/yr (1 acre ~ 4000m2, but I find it a convenient metric because an average acre receives an average of just over 4MW of sunlight if you spread it across the full 8760 hours in a year, which gives an average of ~1MW output at current efficiencies if you had 100% panel coverage). and with current efficiencies in typical regions that's something like 2000-8000 MWh/yr depending on local weather and panel layout, so <$1/MWh. If we move towards tandem or other multijunction cells (which seems plausible in t... (read more)
This idea makes a lot of sense, after you've decoupled health from age to a much greater degree than today. However, at that point I think the better idea would be "There is no longer a compelling reason for retirement or long gaps between jobs to be a matter of public expense at all, unless you're doing it for some set of purposes the public cares about." I think we need to normalize the idea of years-long gaps on resumes, among other things. But I don't feel compelled to share the expense of different people's career paths and life choices.
The reason we ... (read more)