Nuclear fusion, one of the few things I get genuinely excited about....

There's been some talk recently of advances in the quest for controlled fusion:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/12/1136887.aspx

http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/682/1/Dr-Robert-Bussards-Fusion-Breakthrough/Page1.html

http://www.emc2fusion.org/2007-3-5%20DefenseNews.pdf


When I expressed my excitement concerning this to my friend Mike (the smartest human I've ever known personally) he was nonplussed, or at least uninterested.

I suspect his dismissal of the news was based partly on the 'cold fusion' debacle of the '80s, and an unfortunate ignorance in our culture of the difference between fission reactions, which power our nuclear plants, our big bad bombs (sorry Nagasaki!), & will poison the planet for another 10,000 years, and fusion, which powers the stars.

I later sent him this email, which I decided would also make a decent blog:


Just to give some idea of the ridiculous magic controlled fusion offers us, I (finally) worked through some calculations:

Our sun is essentially a giant gravity-driven fusion reactor, converting hydrogen into helium (and a few other elements, if only briefly) and in the process spewing out massive amounts of energy. It's been 'burning' for roughly 5 billion years, the earth (such as it was at the time) has been here for about 4.5 billion years.

There's so much energy in matter that, if converted efficiently enough, a glass of water would provide enough to destroy this planet. The sun, as a massive fusion reactor, is so efficient it's 'burned' only about 120 times the mass of the planet earth in the last 5 billion years. Think about that. The sun is something like 95% of the mass of our solar system, but provides a ridiculous amount of energy (and has done for the last 5 billion years) by so efficiently converting matter to energy it's only used 120 time the earth in all this time.

I get giddy when I think we'll somehow be able to control that type of energy production. Can you imagine limitless free energy on this rock? With no messy radioactive leftovers to deal with?

We'd probably have a hundred years of anarchy as our old version of society destroyed itself, but the humans that survived could do whatever they fucking wanted. Whatever they could imagine. It freaks me out & makes me giggle to think I might see it in my life. Talk about the fucking dawning of a new age....