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energy
by \| 05-11-2015 12:51 0
The laws of physics just don't allow the kind of speedy progress that information technology has seen. Processors have doubled in processing power every eighteen months (yeah, transistor count is not the same as FLOPS, I know...) for like five decades. Bits don't weigh anything and so things can scale up with breathtaking speed in the virtual world. Sure, the price of sequencing a genome has fallen exponentially, because it's information, not physical kilograms or joules. And so it's extremely frustrating when business consultants make plots like this: because real joules do not behave like bits of information. You can't just extend an exponential down as far as you like, because it's going to run into the actual cost of materials at some point. It's not like a computer chip where you can pattern finer and finer circuits with the same amount of material. The exponential might hold for a little longer but it's crazy to count on a "Moore's Law" of solar panel cost.

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