Honestly? A major breakthrough in fusion, or to a lesser extent, any other clean energy. We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile, but there’s a strong financial incentive that politicians are vulnerable to protecting oil and gas, slowing down further decarbonisation. Batteries and supercapacitors also could do the trick.
I don’t think fusion would be as useful a technology as it would have been a few decades ago. Now renewables (wind, solar, hydro) seem like more and more as the clean and cheap energy of the future. The biggest problem of storage is rapidly being solved with batteries springing up everywhere.
The real problem with fusion is that even if it worked, the plants would be very complex and expensive. It would be much cheaper and reliable to build solar, wind and batteries instead.
Having operational fusion reactors would be cool as hell, but it wouldn’t have that much impact on our lives in the end.
Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.
As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.
Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.
If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.
Fusion is likely the end-game power gen tech for humanity, assuming no new physics (and excluding Dyson structures). For the long term, it likely will be the most useful way of generating mass amounts of electricity you can get, and access to more energy enables more possibilities of all sorts of things, enabling even things that are extremely impractical today due to their energy needs
For example, carbon capture becomes a possibility, and stuff like mass desalination. And then you could, in theory, go even more extreme with stuff like terraforming mars at human timescales, with enough energy. Of course this depends how practical and efficient fusion reactors actually would be, but with enough energy you can do so so much
While I agree with what you’ve said, I’ve always felt fusion and other such tech is the future of long distance space travel, not Earth based energy use. Wind and hydro are useless in space and solar has issues with power accumulation the further away from a star you go. We will still need some kind of “fuel” based energy source if we’re ever to enter deep space and cross the gaps(unless battery tech increases much further to the point that a “battery” lasts a significant portion of the vehicles lifetime). Even then, you’d need recharge stations at each end or to park by a star to refuel in between.
We have fusion/fission now. That kind of battery tech is still a ways off. Feels shortsighted to ignore nuclear now just because it’s not perfect in this specific environment. After all, name any vehicle not powered by nuclear that can run for 20-30 years before it needs to refuel/recharge. No battery tech can even come close currently.
I don’t think it’s gonna get cheaper than renewables, they’re literally using free energy without needing any human intervention aside from inspection and repairs. The issue is the oil and gas companies paying the politicians. Also right-wing parties that do everything they can to keep emissions up just cause. No new technology can fix those issues.
We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile
Unfortunately, things like AI continue to fuel our hunger for power, preventing fossil fuels from being phased out… and as such, CO2 production continues to accelerate uncontrollably.
Yes, atmospheric CO2 production continues to accelerate. It hasn’t even begun to slow down, much less reach a steady state or reverse.
And this is excluding the feedback loops (arctic permafrost, methyl hydrates, etc.) that are now beginning to cook off in nature.
We are still solidly on the “business as usual” path towards civilizational collapse by some point in the 2050s, and functional extinction by some point between 2100 and 2200.
Nuclear is going through a breakthrough and it’s coming along at a neat net zero.
In a breakthrough experiment, nuclear fusion finally makes more energy than it uses
The large storage batteries that use sodium ion. They should be able to get like 5,000 full cycles before they degrade and can be buried or stored outside. That and a solar array on a roof should let most anyone be completely off grid. Full solar house that should last for 15 years before the system needs replaced. The batteries will last longer and be cheaper than lithium. Solar panel prices are consistently getting cheaper.
I think in 5 years time there will be a lot of the electrical grid system (for most who will be still attached to the grid) just getting power almost completely from solar, and storing enough in these batteries for the nights and cloudy days.
Scalable, lab grown meat operations.
Came here to say this. The implications for food security would be massive, but it would also have an enormous impact on climate change, cutting GHG emissions by one-third.
I came here for this one.
I don’t follow news on alt-meat super closely, but I thought the scalability thing was not much of a concern, and I thought we were mainly at the steps of raising demand and meating or beating price parity with the real thing.
Something like an alt-meat only fast food spot or something trendy that can only be done with lab created protein could be all it takes to cement its place in society, so I feel we’re just waiting for that tipping point due to product that mainly already exists.
Everybody is going to groan, but solid state batteries. That would be a huge sea change, not just for cars, but also air travel.
I have good news for you, then. We’re now past the “discovery” phase and we’re at the implementation phase with solid state batteries, as you can actually buy production models: https://yoshinopower.com/
Yeah but they’re not there yet in terms of mass deployment and that’s still going to take some more technical breakthroughs. They’ll get there eventually but there might be some new discovery any day that would greatly speed up the process.
MRNA vaccines for cancer, HIV and others. Moderna clinical trials have been real good.
Imagine getting a cancer diagnosis, then 30 days later getting a tailored treatment that eliminated the cancer.
Also vote. Because one party system has decided to side with anti vaxxers. The other has not. Cancer numbers have been steadily rising, second only to heart disease as a cause of death. There is a solid chance you’re going to get cancer.
I second the lemmy saying there is a considerable gap between discovery and implementation.
But to answer your question, I believe we are due some major breakthrough regarding psilocybin and other psychedelic substances which have been banned since the 60s. Research is well underway and with our current technology + knowledge in neuroscience we’re due to catch up quickly, unless everything gets tangled in too much red tape.
Improvement in mental health has a pretty immediately impact in our lives after all.
