Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

chasonreddit t1_j0ea706 wrote

Reply to comment by TouchCommercial5022 in Nuclear fusion breakthrough: A physicist answers three vital questions by FarmhouseFan

> Humans are myopic. They forget that not long ago reaching space was impossible. Going at the speed of sound was impossible etc..

While I agree with the sentiment, it's not really universally applicable.

The time between the first human flight, the Wright Bros. and the first lunar landing was 66 years. The first human initiated fusion reaction was over 70 years ago. ie. Space flight is doable. We know that.

I'm pretty old, I'm a science geek and have been reading my entire life that fusion is 20-30 years away. It is with luck. It may always be. It's more than just an engineering problem, I firmly believe it will take a fundamental breakthrough to solve if it is possible at all.

What I always have to ask is why? There is a huge fusion reactor not that far away, but far enough that it poses only minimal danger to us here. All we need to do is to collect the energy. Why re-invent the sun wheel?

The fuel is plentiful you say. All it needs is Hydrogen. Well really Deuterium. Well in this case Tritium which is much more rare than uranium. So even if we spend the billions trillions to build fusion plants we face an energy shortage.

I realize I am a Debbie Downer on /r/Futurology . But let's focus on what we can realistically do. There is power a plenty right out there. A very small fragment hits earth, yet that is what we are pinning a lot of hopes on right now. We should throw resources into space launch, SPSS, who know what else. We are limited to Earth resources, but not technically limited to Earth.

As I believe Jerry Pournelle once wrote: "It's raining soup out there and we are using spoons to catch it."

0

dillrepair t1_j0ez93o wrote

Yeah… it would seem a good plan to continue to push for fusion energy hard … but solar energy harvesting harder.

2

Nimeroni t1_j0gutaf wrote

> What I always have to ask is why? There is a huge fusion reactor not that far away, but far enough that it poses only minimal danger to us here. All we need to do is to collect the energy. Why re-invent the sun wheel?

  1. Most of the Sun's energy is lost due to the atmosphere

  2. Solar panel don't work during night

1

chasonreddit t1_j0h4m1a wrote

To both of those: only on Earth. Put it in orbit (SPSS I guess the preferred acronym now is SBSP) and no atmosphere, no night.

1

Nimeroni t1_j0h4xvb wrote

Bringing anything up there is hideously expensive.

1

chasonreddit t1_j0h6w3z wrote

Yes. It's a capital investment and bootstrap problem. But once you build enough infrastructure, you can build from materials already up there. Kind of like the proposed Mars missions. Lifting out of Earth's gravity well is a huge problem.

My point is solvable with current technology. Land based fusion is simply not at this point. Not after Trillions in investment in research units which will never produce power. You can throw a lot of stuff into space for that money. Unless you know of materials that can resist 15M degrees Celsius.

1