The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.
Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth.
How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at around 15 billion. But continuing at its current growth rate (an optimistic assumption I think), gets us to about 150 trillion humans in 1,000 years.
And at 2% growth rate, each of those humans will consume 20,000 times more energy than a circa 2023 human.
Now state of the art technology wastes about 80% of the energy consumed, so this is equivalent to 100,000 times more useful energy consumed per human.
So the physics in this page is a good examination of the surprisingly large compounding effects of unchecked exponential growth.
Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth.
How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at around 15 billion. But continuing at its current growth rate (an optimistic assumption I think), gets us to about 150 trillion humans in 1,000 years.
And at 2% growth rate, each of those humans will consume 20,000 times more energy than a circa 2023 human.
Now state of the art technology wastes about 80% of the energy consumed, so this is equivalent to 100,000 times more useful energy consumed per human.
So the physics in this page is a good examination of the surprisingly large compounding effects of unchecked exponential growth.