Kevin, in principle I can't really say that I disagree with your comments in that thread .. that much.krfkeith wrote: Essentially it's a question of how you build a star on Earth. And I guarantee that won't be solved by one person, even if he or she has $100,000 or $100 million dollars.
However, I feel that several of your pronouncements in that thread are expressed in such decisive and absolute terms, but yet unsupported and unsupportable, that it seems you are being no less reckless with predicting the future as the fusion protagonists whom you appear to be talking down for much the same thing.
No-one can guarantee what the future road-map for controlled fusion power will be. There is nothing that can be particularly criticised in looking over the history of fusion power research and concluding that after so much effort towards fusion that it is nothing more than an alchemists dream.
Yet here we are at a point in history where we can, now, change base metals into gold.. and by nuclear processes, no less!
There are so many examples of future technology leaping well beyond the wildest dreams and imagination of contemporaneous nay sayers that it would be very foolish to make such hard and fast claims about what is or is not possible to liberate that oh-so-difficult nuclear energy from light isotopes.
Humans will never sail around the flat world, fly or have use of flying machines in warfare, ride in a carriage at more than 20mph without suffocating, control electricity, build a computer, have need for more than 6 computers in the whole world, launch into space, land on the Moon, &c., &c.. It seemed very sensible to say these things at the time, and there is nothing unwise about holding or expressing a 'reserved opinion', but it is foolish to discount the seemingly impossible when one may not have any conception of what the future form of a thing might be. You are insistent that the future of fusion has to be 'big' if it has any chance at all. Your claim might be right, but I don't think you're right to insist on it.
You should read the opening page to Appendix E of Todd Rider's PhD thesis. He started out looking at fusion, concluded in his own PhD it had little future, and dropped the subject in its entirety as a consequence of his own conclusions and moved on to bio-physics! However, even Todd was sensible enough to leave ajar a modicum of recognising it is the unexpected that is the future, and still sought to lay a few 'seeds' for future folks in that Appendix.
The future is never what you think it will be. That is the only truth about the future you will know.
.. and, an act of science that might bring such a revolution around ? ... science is knowledge, and all knowledge starts with an idea which people go and test. Sometimes, no-one else wants to test someone's hypothesis, so they do it themselves. For sure, developing applied science through to engineering of benefit to mankind is almost always a team effort (though even that has exceptions), but science begins with an individual with an idea. Two or more people cannot somehow put their brains together to create an idea that is bigger than either one can imagine - the idea, the flame that sparks an original hypothesis, always springs from an individual. Of course the future of controlled fusion energy may come down to the work of one person. Chances are it won't, but that's the thing about the future - if you knew what was coming, it wouldn't be the future!
Fusion is the future, but the future is never quite what you expect and is often a big surprise when it arrives earlier than expected ! ...
