Physicists make 'tractor beam' in water

[Scootaloo]

4. part of me doesn't mind

it's a cynical part of me that says, if we could tap the limitless energy of our star... we'd probably just use it to get every scrap of coal and petroleum out of the planet's crust.

it's sort of like in the Civil War. Both sides had automatic guns, weapons that could mow down entire platoons... but the tactics of both relied on charges across the battlefield. This was still a problem all the way into WW2, when the Polish cavalry met the German Wehrmacht on the field and was simply annihilated. or like today's battles, where weaponry and tactics designed for battling another superpower is poorly fitted to fight guerrilla movements.

Basically, we generate technology faster than we can adapt our cultures and practices to that technology. We're just now getting more than our toes wet with the internet's potential. if we had essentially unlimited energy, i imagine we'd probably do some pretty horrible and destructive things with it before we got the hang of it - "Now we can strip the tropics even faster!"

But like I said, it's a cynical side of me. This same side of me also says it's pretty muuch too late to actually transition to solar on any meaningful level, and we'll end up back in village-oriented agricultural societies in roughly two hundred years, never to touch high technology again.