RadixJournal - Nuclear Fusion and The Last Man

00:00:00.000 Well, I'm happy to say that I am bringing you good news.

00:00:04.780 The nut of all nuts has seemingly been cracked.

00:00:10.440 Energy from fusion is coming online, maybe in our lifetime, maybe in the next 20 years, if not tomorrow.

00:00:20.880 We can create bounteous energy for the grid, for electric vehicles, electric trains, space travel, who knows, and more, through nuclear fusion without creating radioactive waste.

00:00:39.140 And by avoiding the costly and dirty fossil fuels that have been the backbone of industrial civilization for the last hundred years.

00:00:55.720 I'm not joking.

00:00:58.420 This story has been picked up, but I don't think it's been given the fanfare that it deserves.

00:01:03.920 It was first reported in the Financial Times, and I will just read a little bit of this, just to get you up to speed.

00:01:12.320 This reads like science fiction, to be honest, or a young adult fantasy novel.

00:01:20.140 Fusion energy breakthrough by U.S. scientists.

00:01:23.440 Boost clean power hopes by Tom Wilson.

00:01:27.220 U.S. government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.

00:01:45.640 Physicists have, since the 1950s, sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun.

00:01:51.260 But no group has been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes, a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels in conventional nuclear energy.

00:02:10.060 As an aside, nuclear energy operates through fission, that is, the splitting of the atom.

00:02:15.240 The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.

00:02:36.140 The fact that this includes the world's biggest laser is really the cherry on top of the sundae.

00:02:43.240 The fact that this is an amazing story, this is an amazing story, and I am very happy.

00:02:50.360 In fact, news like this almost kind of reverses many of the trajectories that I see for Western civilization.

00:03:00.340 It's worth revisiting this notion called a Kardashev scale.

00:03:14.560 And this is something that Carl Sagan spoke about.

00:03:19.020 Others have as well.

00:03:20.540 And it's basically, it came from a Soviet scientist in the 1960s.

00:03:26.760 This was a very, very big picture idea.

00:03:30.720 And it described three levels of civilization.

00:03:36.200 So level one in the original scale, it's been modified, but I'll stick with the original.

00:03:40.900 All the energy that reaches the planet from the sun is being harnessed or consumed.

00:03:47.440 Kardashev is basically measuring a civilization through the energy that it's consumed.

00:03:52.980 Now you could say, well, that's not really what civilization is about.

00:03:57.960 Civilization is about art and intelligence and culture.

00:04:01.760 And of course that's correct, but at least in the industrial age, we can measure a civilization

00:04:11.900 in terms of how much work is being done.

00:04:15.080 Now, what the value of that work is, is not a question that can be answered.

00:04:21.620 That is a value question that science in a way can't answer.

00:04:26.120 But it definitely does offer a good, you know, rule of thumb type measure for where we are

00:04:36.580 as a civilization.

00:04:37.740 You know, whatever debates we might have, certainly if energy consumption began to drop by 10% a

00:04:44.720 year and we were, you know, the world was going dark and so on.

00:04:50.600 I think everyone could agree that civilization was declining.

00:04:54.020 Now, it is interesting, we have not officially reached stage one.

00:04:59.480 Stage one would be harnessing all of the energy from the sun that is reaching the planet.

00:05:06.540 Now, you know, on some level, all civilization, even hunter-gatherer civilization, if you want to call it

00:05:14.760 civilization, is an attempt to do this.

00:05:17.620 It is an attempt to harness the energy given off by the sun, whether through gathering berries

00:05:25.180 that grow through sunlight and photosynthesis, whether it is hunting antelope that are also,

00:05:32.900 you know, on some root level based on the energy input from the sun.

00:05:38.920 But then you can take that up.

00:05:42.100 That would include, you know, developing fossil fuels, which is, of course, from the dinosaurs,

00:05:48.480 but are ultimately based on the sun.

00:05:51.540 It might include solar power itself directly, immediately harnessing it and other things like

00:05:57.600 that.

00:05:57.860 That would be a stage one civilization.

00:06:00.920 And we actually haven't quite reached that.

00:06:03.360 Now, a stage two civilization, you know, in this almost ridiculously big picture outlook is

00:06:11.140 capturing or harnessing the energy radiating from a planet's home star.

00:06:17.780 So this would be like creating a megastructure around the sun, a massive series of solar panels

00:06:25.700 where we are more or less taking all of that energy.

00:06:29.820 Again, for what?

00:06:32.420 We can't say.

00:06:33.800 But with that amount of energy, you could certainly imagine interstellar travel and so on.

00:06:42.160 And then not to be outdone, Kardashev really takes it to the limit and talks about a level

00:06:46.620 three civilization.

00:06:48.660 This includes harnessing all of the energy of a galaxy.

00:06:52.460 And when I hear something like this, I'm almost imagining the creatures or entities in Arthur

00:07:03.480 C.

00:07:03.760 Clark's book, 2001, and that are more mysteriously depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001.

00:07:11.520 Um, this, you know, intergalactic organism that can seed intelligence and unknown planets

00:07:23.540 and that can make plans on the timescale of millions of years, just really something else.

00:07:31.820 Now, let me talk a little bit about the implications, kind of more immediate implications.

00:07:40.100 This news has just hit and we should be cautiously optimistic or skeptically hopeful about what can

00:07:51.860 happen here.

00:07:52.880 I don't think the government is lying.

00:07:55.500 I don't think this is propaganda or anything.

00:07:57.560 I don't think they would have done that unless this potential is real.

00:08:02.880 That being said, you know, you're bombarding a pallet of hydrogen plasma with a giant laser.

00:08:12.060 We don't know how this can be made pragmatically useful or needless to say, be commercialized or

00:08:21.120 nationalized or anything like that.

00:08:23.300 Are we going to be able to harness this power in the next decade, in the next 25 years?

00:08:30.000 Is this, is this going to, it's taken us about 50 years of laboratory work trying to get to

00:08:37.200 a net profit energy in the laboratory.

00:08:41.700 Is it going to take us another 50 years where we can fuel a grid through the fusion process?

00:08:48.760 I don't know.

00:08:50.120 Again, um, this does fill me with optimism, but it's cautious.

00:08:55.360 But keep in mind that markets are forward projecting mechanisms.

00:09:04.840 That is, you are not buying a stock, for instance, due to its great performance in the past or

00:09:16.360 how this has been a great company for the last 50 years and you just want to own a bit of it.

00:09:21.140 That's nostalgia markets are always going forward.

00:09:25.020 The question is, what is this company going to be in the future?

00:09:29.000 And thus, can you sell it to someone at a profit?

00:09:32.880 So markets are forward looking.

00:09:35.340 And I don't know if anything has been affected by this news because this is very early, but

00:09:42.280 you could certainly imagine markets for fossil fuel companies and the like beginning to tank

00:09:51.320 on this news.

00:09:52.280 Now, I, again, I don't think it would happen that quickly, but as this is developed and as

00:09:58.260 there is a kind of timeline for, um, the, the commercial industrial, just practical application

00:10:06.020 of this, I could see that happening.

00:10:09.120 There could be a run out of energy stocks, conventional fossil fuel energy stocks in the

00:10:16.520 sense of we're not going to, we're not going to care about this stuff anymore.

00:10:21.100 We're moving on.

00:10:22.300 We're going to fuel the grid through fusion.

00:10:25.600 We're going to drive electric cars in the future that can be powered on the grid.

00:10:30.420 And, you know, with a mere glass of water, you could fund a million electric cars for a

00:10:37.500 hundred years or something like that.

00:10:40.400 Uh, this could be an extremely remarkable thing.

00:10:43.820 Now, another political implication that I think is going to come from this is that if this

00:10:49.740 is something very real, then there are going to be political forces funded by entities in

00:10:57.240 the Middle East that are going to try to talk everyone out of this because needless to say,

00:11:04.120 this reduces the power of the Middle East to a tremendous extent. 0.96

00:11:10.200 Some 50% of the world's oil reserves, and I think around a third of natural gas, is in

00:11:18.420 the Middle East, a ultimately small area on the globe that is immensely important.

00:11:26.000 And there are going to be clear geopolitical implications to fusion if it is practical.

00:11:34.100 I don't think getting our hands on oil was the sole reason for, say, the invasion of Iraq

00:11:43.880 or our United States' continued interest in the Middle East.

00:11:47.740 I think there are other factors at play.

00:11:49.600 There's Israel and its perceived enemies.

00:11:52.620 Um, there's, there are other things.

00:11:54.380 And we didn't just go in and conquer and take the oil.

00:11:58.900 Uh, it was done through other mechanisms.

00:12:01.880 But again, I'll grant you that oil, the presence of oil makes someone like Saddam Hussein much

00:12:08.520 more important and potentially dangerous to the U.S.

00:12:12.440 empire, uh, than someone out in a, uh, resource depleted place that we don't care that much

00:12:21.560 about because he couldn't, so to speak, turn off the oil tap at any point.

00:12:28.340 You know, I was thinking about this.

00:12:29.680 I wonder if they're going to even be religious implications to the ending of the Middle East

00:12:38.420 as a place of importance.

00:12:40.420 I think with Christian Zionism, American foreign policy and just the endless chaos and the Israeli-Palestinian 1.00

00:12:49.720 conflict, all of that tension and drama almost added to the religiosity of Christian Zionists. 0.65

00:13:00.360 You know, the Middle East and Jerusalem and the birthplace of their religion, it's, it's

00:13:05.720 also in the news.

00:13:06.920 And so you can kind of understand why they would have apocalyptic fantasies about the

00:13:10.980 Middle East.

00:13:11.660 If this changes and the Middle East becomes a backwater and we simply don't care about 1.00

00:13:18.740 Qatar or Saudi Arabia and the like, and we just simply move off it.

00:13:25.960 Uh, I, I personally think that would be an amazing thing, but I do think it would, it would

00:13:31.440 obviously affect geopolitics, but I think it might also affect Christianity in some profound

00:13:38.140 way.

00:13:40.560 Just a thought.

00:13:43.860 We could also discuss how something like fusion could be the beginning of a new civilization,

00:13:55.600 or it could be the end of civilization.

00:13:59.480 Now, I'll give you the hopeful view first.

00:14:04.020 Um, we spend so much of our lives running around, working hard, fretting, pulling our hair out,

00:14:12.240 just to basically survive, just to keep going, just to make sure that we can put enough food

00:14:22.340 on the table or fill up our, uh, our tank with gas or have enough money to fly, to fly in a

00:14:31.280 plane or go on a train and so on.

00:14:34.960 We put so much into the very basics and the rest of it is, you know, the icing on the cake.

00:14:46.120 Do you want to go on vacation?

00:14:47.940 Do you want to have, you know, buy a fancy dress or whatever?

00:14:52.780 It's something offered in addition to our basic living standards.

00:14:58.820 And if you just imagine what it would mean if those living standards become radically less

00:15:09.200 expensive, because that's at least the promise of nuclear fusion.

00:15:14.460 It's not just that we're going to pay 20 cents less a gallon for gas.

00:15:19.600 It's that you could run your car for a hundred years on a eyedropper worth of hydrogen.

00:15:29.020 I mean, it is an amazing prospect and energy would be so abundant.

00:15:35.260 First, I think it would probably be shared with the rest of the world.

00:15:40.500 There might even be a kind of lack of scarcity.

00:15:45.580 I mean, think about this.

00:15:46.480 You could, with that much energy, you could operate a robotic mining organization almost

00:15:57.260 endlessly digging for stuff.

00:16:00.500 Now, I know that things have value because they have value in our heads.

00:16:05.320 They don't, I'm not a Marxist.

00:16:07.240 I believe, I don't believe in a labor theory of value where the cost of labor is what sets

00:16:12.440 the price.

00:16:13.780 Ultimately, I don't believe that.

00:16:16.160 I think our subjective viewpoint sets the price.

00:16:21.600 Nevertheless, the idea of having a robot that could endlessly dig for gold all day, all

00:16:33.240 night, nonstop, and we have enough energy to do it for a hundred years.

00:16:38.080 It's just a remarkable thing to think about as it could radically end scarcity of things

00:16:49.420 like gold, as I used it in this example, something you have to dig out of the earth, but also food

00:16:55.540 production and all sorts of things.

00:16:57.360 What is our consciousness going to be without the scarcity?

00:17:02.260 But I also think that two things need to be taken in on this.

00:17:12.880 Civilization really can't be estimated on the basis of energy consumption because it's avoiding the value

00:17:21.080 question of what are you ultimately trying to do or achieve.

00:17:25.040 And there has to be a new vision that accompanies this miracle.

00:17:35.980 It's, of course, not a biblical miracle.

00:17:38.440 It was done through decades of hard work, but you understand this miracle gift.

00:17:42.420 This is ultimately nothing without a vision.

00:17:46.420 Economies and scientific organizations don't just operate on their own momentum or according

00:17:55.360 to their own logic.

00:17:56.220 There has to be people operating these organizations or super organisms, you could say, operating towards

00:18:05.760 end goals.

00:18:06.740 And there has to be people setting those goals.

00:18:08.600 There has to be a concept of, we are going to use this miracle to explore the universe.

00:18:14.540 We are going to use this miracle to get to a point where we can more fully harness the power

00:18:20.960 of the sun in order to, again, terraform Mars, go to other galaxies, unlock the secrets of the

00:18:31.480 universe, et cetera.

00:18:32.440 You have to have that will and that vision to actually make this into something worth having.

00:18:41.300 Otherwise, it's just going to simply be a nightmare.

00:18:45.800 We could be in a scarcity-free or experience radically reduced scarcity at the very least and

00:18:54.580 decide that utopia is really here at last and we don't have to work very much at all.

00:19:05.240 You can experience Karl Marx's idea of paradise, you know, be a fisherman in the morning and

00:19:11.400 a poet in the afternoon and a piano teacher at night or whatever he suggested in that way.

00:19:19.180 We can end the division of labor, have robots do most of the work, and we can, I don't know,

00:19:27.860 sit around and improve ourselves or something like that.

00:19:30.780 But I think most people would sit around.

00:19:33.780 This does remind me a little bit of the UBI concept and one of the most compelling criticisms

00:19:40.720 of UBI, that is universal basic income.

00:19:42.920 The criticism is not that it's not feasible, it's that it would ruin something important

00:19:50.180 about humanity in the sense that you get your thousand bucks a month and you just simply 1.00

00:19:55.640 sit on your ass. 0.99

00:19:56.780 You're not going to go start a new business or go back to school or something. 1.00

00:20:02.640 You're going to play video games or much like in the movie Inception, go to some opium den

00:20:10.080 and go to another world through the power of recreational drugs.

00:20:17.520 So there has to be a vision for what we're going to do with this new power.

00:20:24.560 And simply offering humanity radically less scarcity, I think, could actually turn into

00:20:32.700 a nightmare.

00:20:33.520 There have been some books that have, and films that have examined this.

00:20:37.820 I'm, you know, we could talk about Brave New World, but I was actually thinking about

00:20:41.900 the really good Pixar movie, WALL-E, where people were in this techno paradise and they

00:20:49.180 ultimately abandoned Earth, which had been polluted beyond repair.

00:20:54.660 And we're just these obese blobs flying through space on a pleasure cruise.

00:21:00.120 That's not really what we mean by exploring the universe.

00:21:02.940 It's the last man imagined by Nietzsche Fukuyama on steroids or made obese.

00:21:10.260 It's a horrifying image of humanity.

00:21:14.860 We should remember that we are evolved for scarcity.

00:21:20.600 We didn't become who we are through civilization and free market economics and luxury goods at

00:21:33.840 a reasonable price.

00:21:35.620 No, we evolved into who we are through fighting and scratching in many ways, through a willingness

00:21:45.220 to cooperate in order for the tribe to be successful.

00:21:49.600 And keep in mind that the success of the tribe often meant conquering other tribes.

00:21:56.720 And the best one wins.

00:22:00.600 We evolved through sexual selection.

00:22:02.840 That is a kind of scarcity of mating and breeding and men and women. 0.76

00:22:08.300 And thus we evolved to value certain traits in the sexual game so that you could win out and have more children.

00:22:18.220 That's how we evolved to who we are.

00:22:20.040 We don't know who we are, really, as a species living in a world without scarcity.

00:22:28.320 But I think we might soon, maybe within my lifetime, have to figure it out.

RadixJournal - December 14, 2022

Nuclear Fusion and The Last Man

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