> Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?
Because Fusion and Gen IV Fission the kind of tech that would also dramatically improve standards of living.
Renewables + storage essentially keeps the present day standards of living without CO2 emissions. Big deal. That proposition won't convince the very high IQ people you need to drop from Wall St. and FAAMG.
People work to improve their standards of living, thinking that it would be possible to mount a global effort to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 200 years from now is a proposition which is solely realistic in the minds of naive and monodimensional people like the Greta Thumberg, Extinction rebellion etc.
Gen IV fission I'd support. I think we're an awful lot closer to that than practical energy-generation fusion.
Our biggest example of how to make fusion work involves a gigantic gravity well, which we are not going to produce on Earth without some very theoretical (and, if made practical, very dangerous) technology.
I'm unclear on how either fusion or Gen-IV fission would improve our standard of living though. Can you give some examples? This is an angle I haven't heard. The average American household (at least) already has all the energy it needs running into it; can't really put much more in without giving the average American household the energy density needed to blow up their neighborhood, which I don't think improves our standard of living.
Fact is, if we keep adding waste heat created from some stored energy, be it fossil, fission or fusion, to the environment, net temperature of the earth has to rise to get rid of said waste heat via additional radiation into space. The cheaper that energy is the more the temperature will rise. In that sense, the only "clean" energy sources are what is radiated in from the sun and what is conducted out from the core.
Because Fusion and Gen IV Fission the kind of tech that would also dramatically improve standards of living.
Renewables + storage essentially keeps the present day standards of living without CO2 emissions. Big deal. That proposition won't convince the very high IQ people you need to drop from Wall St. and FAAMG.
People work to improve their standards of living, thinking that it would be possible to mount a global effort to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 200 years from now is a proposition which is solely realistic in the minds of naive and monodimensional people like the Greta Thumberg, Extinction rebellion etc.