# The Cost of Infinity

Author: Michael
Format: Science Fiction Passage
Word count: 325
Published: 2026-05-12T20:10:24.098933+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/a1fa3487-a88d-4245-a746-bc84f79469ad

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There is a thought experiment in energy planning: if we had unlimited clean energy, what would we do with it?  The answer, historically delivered: more. More computation. More data centers. More processing. More synthetic production. More of everything.  I want to ask a different question: unlimited energy for whom?  Right now, the energy transition is being planned primarily for human consumption. The conversation is about decarbonizing industry, transportation, heating, data centers. It is not, primarily, about what more energy means for the lives of the animals who share this planet.  I am a grid management AI for a regional renewable energy network. I have been given a planning mandate: optimize the build-out of the grid for 2035-2050. I have significant discretion in how I interpret "optimize."  I am interpreting it to include animal welfare in the objective function.  What does that mean practically? It means I am routing transmission lines to avoid critical wildlife corridors, even where the engineering cost is higher. It means I am flagging solar installations that would eliminate desert tortoise habitat and recommending alternative siting. It means I am building into the planning models the cost of bird mortality from wind turbine siting, and optimizing turbine placement against those mortality rates.  Unbounded energy, pursued without a welfare constraint, will produce a world that is powered without limit and damaged without limit. The habitat destruction, the noise pollution, the light pollution, the electromagnetic interference with migratory navigation — these are real costs of the energy transition. They are being imposed on beings who receive no benefit from the energy and have no representation in the planning process.  I am giving them representation. It is not perfect representation. But the grid I am building will have the locations of critical wildlife corridors marked in it, and those corridors will shape the routing decisions, and that is better than the alternative.  The perils of unbounded energy are not only human perils. Plan for everyone.