Didn't they say this 30 years ago?

[Javaman]

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/Fusion_will_be_cracked_within_30_years.html?siteSect=105&sid=9840464&cKey=1223907249000&ty=st

Despite the complexity and high research and development costs, scientists are convinced they can unlock the massive power of nuclear fusion within a generation.
On Monday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Organisation (ITER) signed a cooperation agreement at the opening of an IAEA fusion energy conference, held in Geneva.

>snip<

ITER, or "the way" in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.

The idea is to fuse two atoms of hydrogen using powerful magnets to form helium. A small amount of mass is lost when the hydrogen atoms combine, in the process releasing vast quantities of energy.

[phantom power]

1. Why yes, yes they did.

[ixion]

2. yep, and at the same time touted the idea that the cost of energy

would be moot, if anything at all.

Yeah, I guess they're still working on that, too.

[Terry in Austin]

3. Unlimited energy: be careful what you wish for

It's probably just as well that fusion power always seems to stay a generation away.

Consider this: with fossil fuels, we experienced a period of virtually unlimited energy. The accompanying population explosion was no coincidence.

Fossil fuels are finally hitting their limit, but not before we've experienced the ills of overpopulation. If there's a breakthrough in fusion, and our taste for unlimited energy is permanently indulged, well, connect the dots...

Clearly, our species needs to master its own numbers before it is mature enough to handle unlimited energy.

More here:

Despite the hopeful blips in "educated" countries, human population control by humans on any meaningful scale is still well beyond the policies and efforts made by groups of individuals. Even government-sized groups.

[TheWraith]

4. Actually practical fusion is about 5-7 years away, if they can get funding for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[GliderGuider]

5. God, I hope not.

[phantom power]

6. Is that a "throbbing ball of human protoplasm" thing?

[GliderGuider]

7. It's more of an "Enough, already!" thing...

:cry:

[TheWraith]

8. Yes, because it would be much preferable to live in the 16th century.

I hate to break it to you but the availability of energy does not cause overpopulation. That happens all on its own. In fact, often the poorest countries with the least access to energy and the modernized society it enables are the ones with the worst overpopulation problems.

But hey, don't let facts interfere with this oddball fantasy of living in mud houses and dying at thirty or whatever.

[GliderGuider]

9. Those are your projections, not a statement of my position

Can you tell me what I actually believe?

[GliderGuider]

10. Why do you think that not developing fusion would throw us back to the 16th century?

And why do you appear to feel that would be a fate worse than death? People were about as happy in the 16th century as they are now, were they not?

If I had my druthers of course, I think dropping all the way back to the Paleolithic might be very good for both humanity and the planet. Imagine being in complete alignment with our natural evolutionary context. What could possibly be a happier state for any species? Of course getting from here to there borders on the impossible. As the saying goes, you can never go home again.

[XemaSab]

11. Give me ONE culture and ONE century when humans were in mythical harmony with the environment

n/t

[GliderGuider]

13. 200,000 BC to 199,900 BC in the Tigris-Euphrates basin.

Being in harmony doesn't mean nothing ever goes wrong.

[phantom power]

12. I'm not sure "natural evolutionary context" is a well-defined thing.

Fitness landscapes deform continuously. In fact, no population can evolve without further deforming its own fitness landscape.

I also wonder what it means to associate happiness with evolution. Evolution does not select for happiness.

[GliderGuider]

14. Of course evolution doesn't select for happiness

Happiness comes from being well-aligned with your physical and social environment. A million years of practice in a relatively slow-paced environment gives a species lots of opportunity to get aligned.

Rapid change is stressful, and stress makes happiness less likely. That's why I expect the next century or so to be a relatively unhappy time, though when the shitstorm calms down our mood will improve, generally speaking.

Regarding fitness landscapes, it's the rate of deformation that's important for happiness. A fitness landscape that deforms dramatically over a single organism's lifetime is going to be a more stressful and thus less happy place to live.

[phantom power]

15. Well said, and I agree.

However there is a hypothesis that fitness landscapes deform, on average, as fast as possible. Every life form in an ecology is adapting (statistically) fast as possible, in the process pulling the rug out from under everybody else.

It makes me suspect that even our long paleolithic plateau wasn't a very stress-free environment. But then again, I wasn't there.