A scientist made a tiny sun on earth a few days ago, and it took less energy than it produced. It’s been all over the news with good reason. It’s huge. Endless energy for everyone!
Well, maybe. Someday.
It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.
If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?
One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.
Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.
What does a world like that look like?
POWER INDUSTRY
I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)
TRANSPORTATION
What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.
ECONOMICS
Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.
But when we make our own sun?
Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.
This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?
But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?
LABOR
If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.
ART
Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.
All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.
POLITICS
The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.
The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?
HEALTH
Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.
MILITARY
Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]
TECHNOLOGY
Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.
SPACE
Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.
EDUCATION
This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.
INTENSITY
The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.
On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.
WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?
Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.
Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!
Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?
No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.
Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.