In the very, very long run wouldn't it be preferable to retain as much energy within the earth system as possible, instead of letting it float off into space and difficult to ever recapture?
I've never heard that argument. It certainly sounds very cold hearted, at the very least.
No it wouldn't. The Sun has many billions of years left to go before its red giant phase, and in its red giant phase the problem will be way too much heat, not too little. And anyway, heat is lost in timeframes much shorter than billions of years. The Earth is warm now because of radioactive decay on the interior and sunlight shining on the exterior.
It was actually just a question to illicit imaginative thought, it wasn't seriously intended to garner a yes or no answer.
In the Kardashev scale a Type I civilization is able to harness the total energy of its host planet. A Type II civilization can harness the energy of it's neighbouring star.
Some scientists believe that we may be able to reach Type 1 status in a couple hundred years.
>The Sun has many billions of years left to go before its red giant phase, and in its red giant phase the problem will be way too much heat, not too little.
Not necessarily. If we continue to advance technologically the only limiting factor besides scientific progress may likely well be how much energy we can harness and the age of the universe.
Your response is just so out of place in this discussion though. One single second of the Sun's total energy output is enough to fuel the United States' entire annual energy usage for nine million years. Lack of energy is not a problem, and even if it were, worrying about stockpiling energy on Earth right now in such low amounts to survive the heat death of the universe is like the equivalent of giving a few molecules of water to someone in the desert who's dying of dehydration. It's so many orders of magnitude below significance that it's laughable.
We are facing the very real existential crisis of potentially destroying our civilization through climate change before we can even get off this planet. The heat death of the universe untold billions of years in the future doesn't matter one whit if we don't survive to witness it, and anything we do nowadays won't matter at all towards that end anyway.
I just told you that it wasn't a serious question, just one designed to facilitate interesting thought. You missed the point though, the energy posed in the question was not posed as a remedy to survive the end of the universe but to reach Type II civilization. I would suggest you should calm down and let your mind enjoy a little bit of adventurous thought and stop freaking out about the media scare on climate change. The whole climate change business has become like the War on Poverty -- doing more to preserve itself than to actually affect the future for the better.
That's not the problem right now. The problem right now is that either we have too much energy and we can't get it off the Earth fast enough, or we have too little/exactly enough energy but its distribution is so suboptimal that the best we can do is throw the excess into space because the buffers are full.
I've never heard that argument. It certainly sounds very cold hearted, at the very least.