Thought Experiment: Free Energy

[Kyle]

Let's assume that I've invented a device, and published the instructions on the internet for anyone to use, that can be made for under $1,000, and that device will produce enough clean energy to power an entire city of 1 million people for a year. It doesn't wear down, so if you used it just for your house it would last your entire life. It's made of mundane, common materials. It's the size of large book. Thus, it can go in cars or anything else that needs power without the need for having bulky batteries. When the item is broken, expended or whatever, it just becomes inert matter.

So my question is this- assume this becomes a widely available technology for under $1,000. It's in cars. It's in every house and building. It's in anything that needs any type of significant power. What are the effects of this on the world? The petroleum industry would evaporate. As would solar farms, wind farms, water electricity generation. Large batteries are obsolete.

But then... what else? What are other effects would this have on society writ large? If the cost of energy becomes zero- both in the out-of-pocket costs and the environmental costs- what effect does that have?

[Mike]

Everything I can thing of is so utopian, it's like a dream. Suddenly every scientific endeavor can be pursued. Space exploration. Unlimited computing power. Huge building projects. Cleaning up projects. Regreening the earth. Socialist, anti-capitalist paradise.

But also, a total implosion of the world economy as the price of everything is under pressure to drop like a rock. Weaponization of this power makes for planet-busting capabilities. The people who already control all of the world's resources will use these factors as justification for draconian measures to clamp down on creation/use of the new power source so that they can monopolize it to maintain their power. I don't know that they can be successful, but they might.

[Kyle]

Yeah so think of it in Long Earth style. So the plans get dropped on the internet and anyone can make it with approximately $1k. Using materials like iron, aluminum and glass. Who knows. Not the point. So let's say that happened. What's the first major shift we see? I agree it's some form of government control across the globe. But how? Initially there's going to be a run on the basic materials. Does our government shut down the sale of aluminum to control this? And how do they justify it? Or do they bother?

[Tahlvin]

The government’s slow to act (see cryptocurrency regulation, or lack thereof). But there’s a damn big lobby for existing energy concerns that would react to the threat to their power.

[Kyle]

Okay, and I'm not trying to be pedantic here, but how would they react? What would Big Oil do about this? Or Tesla for that matter?

[Tahlvin]

Tesla would love it as a new energy source for their vehicles. It’d be weird because Big Oil and Big Solar would find themselves in the same boat, but big oil has more years of bribing, or rather lobbying, experience to pull from. This is life and death for them, so they’d go scorched earth (literally?) to discredit it, sabotage it, convince politicians to regulate it and try to keep it from getting broad public adoption and keep it a fringe, hippy tech.

[Mike]

Just a note that seeing "Big Oil" and "Big Solar" side by side like that made me queasy, knowing that if Big Oil wanted to they could buy out all of the solar industry using one half of one percent of their annual revenue. But that's just a me thing and irrelevant to the discussion.
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So I'm trying to work out some implications, and if I were writing this into a story, I think I have an explanation of where the energy comes from that sounds plausible enough. And there's no reasonable way to make this energy source safe from people determined to turn its capabilities towards destruction, but I have mechanisms that I would include as an author to that would allow anyone to make a powerful bomb out of one, but making them into serious WMD would be impossible for anyone but the most powerful governments and corporations. But in general the units would be safe in the hands of anyone not actively seeking to cause harm.
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These plans hit the internet, and within a few days, we have all kinds of people making up units at home. Shortly after, we'd see also sorts of "too good to be true" reporting, warning their viewers about minor accidents and injuries. Oil industry plants will be calling the new tech a disaster waiting to happen. Then before things get too out of hand, there will be a major accident involving lots of property damage where people are injured and several sympathetic innocents are killed. This will be staged, but it will work. Fear mongering will lead to bans on the tech until it can be properly vetted. Police will crack down on unauthorized power cells to ensure public safety.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, especially less developed areas, the process will be embraced and will be revolutionary. China will jump right in, seeking to be the world leader in the field, but it will be India that truly masters the chaos of the moment and eventually will emerge as the first of the new world's leading nations.

There is absolutely a run on the materials involved in making the power units. Africa is the key to the needed resources, and the traditional corporate stranglehold over African resources and labor finds itself on unstable footing as the worldwide economy is turned on its head and the needs of the populace shifts dramatically.

All of this spells the end of the U.S.A. as a world leader, and as a democracy, and ultimately as a nation.

But all of this is just the beginning. This crackdown and attempt at maintaining governmental/corporate control over energy will see initial successes, but will eventually crumble as there are just too many examples worldwide of how well this "free energy" works. And so here is where we start to realize the potential of truly free energy for all. The Netherlands and Norway will become the first national to implement post-socialist utopian policies in which all citizens are provided for and working is purely voluntary. They're not perfect, but the potential and appeal are apparent to all.

I've gotten beyond myself. This is a barebones framework and some of it is cliched tropes from other futurist speculations. More than anything though is I've only focused on a couple basic aspects of this scenario. People need to work on other pieces... consequences for travel, shipping, the environment, computing, terrorism, agriculture, robotics and automation, communication, specific nations and entities that I know nothing about but that could be consequential... etc. Then we take all those and weave them into the framework and see how they change the overall narrative.

[Mike]

Okay, you twisted my arm.

The dippy boxes tap into quantum effects that draw off energy directly from the expansion of space-time and convert it to electrical power (or whatever). So technically, every all of the energy created is slowing the local rate of expansion of the universe, but A. it's a negligible amount compared to the overall energy of the fabric of the universe, and B. the rest of the universe "tugs" at any even slightly drained portion and evens it out over time.

It's effectively free energy, and even though the boxes wear out over time, they can be almost completely recycled and reused. Waste is minor and non-toxic.

Ultimately, dippy boxes are scalable. But you don't need a super large one to power almost anything. Eventually, technology will develop smaller versions that can power personal items, but that's a couple decades off.

The limiting factor in weapons applications turns out to be the converter hardware that pumps the energy out in a usable form. Even a small dippy box can be "opened up" pretty wide, like turning on a massive faucet. And the energy can get very destructive very quickly, but the process relies on sensors and microchips that act as "phantom observers", that effectively guide quantum state probabilities. Open up that faucet too wide and you burn out the phantom observers and render the box inert (if the box survives). So careful tinkering allows people to create very unstable and powerful weapons. Not nuclear weapons powerful by any stretch, but if done right, potentially more powerful than similarly sized conventional explosives.

[Kyle]

So how does free energy affect agriculture? Can we set up free energy hyrdro farms? People complain about the use of scarce land to create farms, so they become vertical? Initially in large, automated structures like skyscrapers, but then also underground facilities as well.

How does free energy affect our water resources? With the ability to desalinate water for the cost of time and basic equipment, can we solve drought and water shortage issues?

[Mike]

So how does free energy affect agriculture? Can we set up free energy hyrdro farms? People complain about the use of scarce land to create farms, so they become vertical? Initially in large, automated structures like skyscrapers, but then also underground facilities as well.

How does free energy affect our water resources? With the ability to desalinate water for the cost of time and basic equipment, can we solve drought and water shortage issues?

Pertaining to division of resources, the cost of transportation is now reduces to time plus the cost of building and maintaining vehicles, and the cost of the vehicles is also greatly reduced because eof the free energy.

But as to your questions of food and water... we actually have the technology and resources NOW to solve those issues, and it is only greed that stops us from doing so

The real question is: if energy is basically free, will humanity have the will to end world hunger? The will to provide clean water for all? The will to make sure that no one goes without shelter or proper medical care?

The people who profit from artificial scarcity will continue to try to create that scarcity in order to exploit it. So will they be able to maintain that advantage in a world with negligible energy costs?

If you were the bad guys wanting to profit off of this, what would your long term plan be?

[Kyle]

So what happens to the governments/corporations that are trying to crack down and control it, when you have "Free Energy Havens" like the Scandanavian countries, or I could even see South American countries trying to attract business/tourism/industry by offering free energy everywhere all the time.