Interesting that yesterday I posed a question to chatGPT, on Landauer's principle, and here today your article is presented in my feed :-) Thanks for this information!
My theme in Medium is pretty much entirely on the planetary energy issue, which to me looks much more acute and existential than the "Renewables" Industry would have us believe.
But there is a very clear way out, which is being obscured by the business of "Renewables".
Hence I have a poor opinion of the latter. (There is no such thing as renewable energy!)
It obscures and distracts from the real root thing of interest, imho - the energy accounting of Earth, meaning the history of all the Joules put to use on Earth, both by nature and us, when they were put in, and when they are taken out, by us.
When we look closely we see that in general our net activity is not to put Joules to use at all, but the opposite, we have consistently taken them out of use, throughout our existence on Earth to date. In other words, we have been busy increasing entropy, destroying everything on Earth.
Viewed like this, Earth is just a kind of battery, trickle charged by nature, bulk discharged by us.
Creation, is what nature does, putting the Joules from the sun to use, creating everything we know, all life on Earth, including us.
Destruction, is what we do, in the case of fossil fuels, by taking those materials that took nature millions of years worth of Joules to create, so as to get a few hundred Kwhrs from each gallon of fuel - enough to get us a few trips to and from our local supermarket.
This changes, fundamentally, when we move to using the Joules of energy received from the sun.
If we didn't use the solar energy landing on a panel, or solar farm, say by it landing instead on an area of desert, then a certain temperature rise would happen, as a result of the energy of the sun being absorbed by the land it fell on.
So when we put any of those Joules to our use, creating hydrogen, for example, it follows that at least some of these Joules did not create any temperature rise, therefore no increase of entropy.
So the net effect of using solar is a reduction of entropy.
This is the opposite of what happens by fossil fuels. Actually, no amount of poor efficiency in solar hydrogen energy chains can result in the entropy increase which would happpen naturally if we had not used those Joules. or worse, if we had done the work of creating hydrogen from energy extracted from fossil fuels, or actually by extraction of any other form of stored energy on Earth.
Taking this logic a step further, the more solar we can use, the merrier, it has the effect of recharging the battery of Earth, thus going towards paying back what is actually our energy deficit to Earth.
So on the subject of how much energy is dissipated by a particular computation, or algorithm, or any bunch of computing hardware, why would we worry, if the reduced efficiency resulted in us requiring more panels to drive the servers doing the calculations, actually we still wouldn't be discharging the battery of Earth, just recharging it a little slower, our net activity would still be mathematically positive.
Why I was asking about the Landauer limit, what I wanted ChatGPT to assist with, was in establishing a cryptocurrency algorithm with a known energy-to-information conversion rate. This would be very useful, for creating a currency with an intrinsic energy value, interchangeable with hydrogen fuel, so actually with similar value to hydrogen fuel per kwhr consumed. I think this would be useful to expand the concept of a money-fuel tree, described here:
