this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
I'd even say that it would make it "easier" to generate elements that are rare on earth for aplication purposes.
The first example already sort of feasible is production (and storage) of Helium.
And if we master (in the far, far future) both fusion and fission, then we can make almost any element "with ease".
Basically we would be able to do what the alchemist dreamed and be able to "turn stones to gold".
But nowadays, one of our "new gold" are rare earth like Neodymium for making magnets
And there are other elements that are even rarer and would have massive applications only if they were little bit more abundant than they are now
Now, again, that would be only true in a far, far future if (and a big if) we can truly master both fusion and fission (what I actually want to mean is that my comment is basically an "hallucination" similar to those on r/futurology)
I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.
Take neodymium, your example. That's pretty abundant in the Earth's crust. It's just that it's energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it's still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.
I kinda agree with you tho. It is way more realistically to have asteroid mining facilities before what I said in the previous comment
(And of course, earthly mining already exists and will get more efficient in the future anyways)