Say energy is truly too cheap to meter (through nuclear fusion or whatever), and so alchemy becomes practical in reactors. What might we do if rhodium (or palladium or whatever) could be made as prevalent as we wanted?
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I propose we all drink from rhodium cans and use palladium to preserve vegetables, but especially beans
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Is it fair to simplify as, "if we had near free, sustainable* energy?"
Huge bump in computational output, manufacturing/production, faster + continuous + extended transit options, paradigm shift in agriculture (e.g. UV lights), shipping (e.g. water, food)
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Yes, all those things—but I'm asking specifically about transmutation! What would we *do* with a surfeit of currently-rare elements?
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A bunch of different responses will happen as I think of them.
No more charging batteries (and no more plugs for many appliances) -- you could just have radioisotope built into appliances permanently
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Many catalysts would be much cheaper so there would be a number of secondary effects
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A huge amount of organic chemistry research is directed to replacing those with cheaper metals for catalysis. Redirect that effort to other endeavors.
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My guess is that many of the rare elements have uses that haven’t been explored because they have always been prohibitively expensive.
He-3 would be one of the easiest new species to produce in reactors, and it would lead to cheap cryogenics below 1 K.
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This and *so* many other possibilities with cheap energy! Grow almonds in the sahara with desalination. Turn landfills back into raw materials. Pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
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Not your question, but energy is unlikely to be too cheap to meter any time soon. Like asserting in 1970 that compute in 2020 would be free, due to Moore doubling...
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I suspect energy could go down in price by a factor of a million... and we’d just find new uses for lots of energy!
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