Reply To: Global Warming

[AaronB]

Maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but I think the NIF guys will reach “real” ignition pretty soon. It is easy to be critical “based on current understanding and models”. Progress happens when we build on the past and expand into the unknown. Naturally, you can’t ignore the laws of nature, but you can look for stepping stones through them. Airplanes and space travel were impossible until we built the tools to do them. Modifying DNA was impossible until we built the tools. Elements were considered immutable until we mutated them with atom smashers. When one hundred approaches fail, the combined lessons learned plus a new idea will lead to success. It’s technological evolution, and in this case, there are intelligent designers all over the world working on it. Time, effort, money and brains will make it happen. I don’t know how, but it will.

For about four years, I was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, which houses the Air Force’s Flight Test Center. They have a great museum that shows the history of flight development. It wasn’t a perfect process, and it had many setbacks and deaths. It takes a special kind of person to strap themselves into an untested aircraft and see what happens. You have to be willing to break things and suffer disasters when you’re involved in cutting-edge research. It just happens, but if you watch carefully and study the wreckage, you learn the limits and then find a way around them.

So, whether it is our project or NIF’s, the evolutionary curve will continue to grow, and eventually someone will figure it out. Then, over the next 50 years, we’ll probably see the same kind of development that happened in the aircraft industry.