scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2ljonu.md

[MK] [BST] Exploit "perfect" work (challenge)

Post:

Say we could do perfect work. Thermodynamically perfect, the amount of energy we put in is exactly the amount of energy that is put out. So if we burn a pile of wood, we can retrieve the energy in the entirety of the heat that was expelled in the reaction, but nothing more: no extra energy is created.

Basically, we have ideal machines. They can do work "magically", so we're not limited to just moving things, but any sort of labor such as heating another thing up, charging a battery, and more.

How do you exploit this? Is there anything that breaks the universe/makes everything post-scarcity as soon as an intelligent person looks at it? Or do we have a stable world in which civilization progresses at a slightly faster rate than ours?

Comments:

• u/ulyssessword:

  Assuming that they are versatile and powerful enough, it would almost instantly boost humanity to Kardashev Type II level abilities (i.e. able to harness the power output of a single star).  Because of mass/energy equivalence, this is practically unlimited free energy.
  
  Want some gold?  Grab a lump of dirt and throw it into the machine.  100 kg of dirt has the same energy as 100 kg of gold so you don't need to add any external energy.
  
  Want something accelerated?  A 10 ton spaceship at rest has the same energy as a 9.999 ton spaceship moving very fast.
  
  As soon as you can freely break down matter to do work, you're practically done climbing that branch of the tech tree.
  

  • u/6340:

    We only have human levels of technology. Once the hypothetical civilization reaches the point where they can freely break down matter for energy, it hardly matters whether the work is 100% efficiency or not, you're going to be nigh-omnipotent anyway. I probably should have clarified that the "magical engine" can't break anything apart, except as the "output" of its reaction.
    
    Is there any fast way to break down matter to energy using simpler rules? Maybe you could throw a baseball, and convert that baseball's kinetic energy to the kinetic energy of a hydrogen atom in a fusion chamber...
    

    • u/PeridexisErrant:

      It could however fuse anything up to Iron, or down, with net energy output.
      

      • u/6340:

        I see, once we start off a reaction, we could keep it going with the base energy retrieved from previous ones, while profiting the excess. Meanwhile, civilization advances from the free energy...
        
        How much energy exactly will it take to start off a cascading fusion reaction?
        

        • u/PeridexisErrant:

          Enough to fuse exactly two atoms, since with perfect efficiency you don't have to worry about critical mass.  If it's above zero Kelvin and composed of anything but pure Iron, you can get nuclear power out.
          
          Meanwhile, all this energy can be used to power our other magical not-machinery...
          

          • u/6340:

            Don't we usually talk about critical mass with fission reactions? Though we would still need a constant supply of new fuel to put the output energy back into.
            
            Moreover, what is the minimum atomic number past which fission is viable?
            

            • u/PeridexisErrant:

              Yep, usually you need critical mass to pass the problem of energy loss... which is instead bypassed by perfect efficiency.
              
              Fusion is net energy-out up to iron (#26 protons), fission afterwards.
              

• u/PeridexisErrant:

  For micro-scale stuff, you can suddenly build microchips that use the fundamental minimum amount of energy to do a calculation.  Heating is no longer an issue.  Expect a revolution to bump computer performance a few orders of magnitude, in the short term.
  
  Macro-scale, I think the 'magical completion of work' bit is equally useful.  For example:  (at perfect efficiency) something rising takes work, falling yields work, and hovering at constant altitude is work-less.  Boom, everyone can fly horizontally without effort.  And you basically just invented a space elevator everywhere, so expect a space revolution too!
  

• u/None:

  Dude, you basically just eliminated most energy-shortage problems.
  

• u/Shadawn:

  If i understand correctly, the only way you can "perfectly burn" a pile of wood is by violating Second Law of Thermodynamics somewhere. And if you can do this, it's unlimited energy from, for example, all the air this machines cool to 0 K and transform into useful work.
  

• u/Charlie___:

  Any time entropy is a problem, this is a solution. Electronics will look different and ridiculously better. Everything will run at 0 degrees Kelvin, because why not - cooling it down actually liberates energy. Quantum computing was a trivial engineering problem as soon as it was proposed.
  

• u/IX-103:

  Couldn't we use these machines as analog computers with infinite precision and accuracy? It seems possible that one such computers would have the same processing power as a cluster of infinitely many digital computers. With these things you could brute force any encryption with O(N) operations (as opposed to O(2^N)), breaking any encryption scheme but the one-time pad. This could also be applied to protein folding, climate modelling, finite element analysis, etc. This would basically allow you to perform most scientific computing calculations in days instead of years (with one computer instead of thousands). You could also use these computers to perform perfect correlation and combining of large data sets, allowing you to meet the information theoretic bounds of any system. This effectively allows you to pull any signal out of the noise given enough independent samples. Look for massive improvements in wireless communication speeds with significant reductions in power consumption (though the number of antennas on each device would sky-rocket). Look for imaging systems capable of taking 3D pictures with nearly perfect accuracy from almost arbitrarily far away (and do similar things when sensing with sound, magnetism, gravity, etc). 
  
  In short, humans would no longer need to guess anything. Everything would become observable, and we would be able to test theories against observations as fast as we could come up with them. Whether this would increase or decrease the rate of scientific progress is an open question. All the theories men have ever made are wrong (i.e. there some observation that they contradict), so I'm not sure how fast things would progress when the people setting forth theories know exactly in which ways those theories fail to match observations. It could be that all of the pure scientists would have nervous breakdowns from trying for perfection, and only the more practical, engineering-minded folks would continue.
  

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