I guess the conversation I would like to have is, are we ready? Do you think we have had advancements withheld and held back and is the economy more important than the planet? Personally I feel like everything comes back to monetary wealth getting in the way of global happiness. Star Trek really got that right.
When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.
However, we’re absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn’t muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we’re looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It’s so tricky we’ve been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn’t feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we’re using now that it’s practically free. It’s the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don’t exist.
Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven’t finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)
As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.
There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it’ll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.
The reason we haven’t seen a lot of results in fusion research is mostly because we haven’t spent a lot on it. Here’s A Slashdot article from a long time ago. The spending chart hasn’t changed much until about the last decade, where we’ve finally seen some advances.