Reply To: Space Fountain

[Rezwan]

LOL! (both positive)

Jamesr and TimS, glad you covered the two important angles.

Jamesr – the first side of the equation is the fusion research community – getting them to find alternative explorations worthwhile. From my conversations with fusion researchers, most would really like to pursue a broad range of things, or see them being pursued. I get the impression that it’s the money thing that makes the community conservative.

For the most part, they have no objection to trying the science, but because they see a direct connection with limited research dollars, and the viability of a program they may be part of, or because they worry about giving advice about something when a person could lose money by investing in it – they tend towards conservatism.

I get the sense that finance folk have intimidated them. Or something. It’s that constant tension between results and exploration. And our mission is to make sure physicists feel they have permission to explore. Blank check : ) But don’t worry, physicists in pursuit of fusion alternatives are a cheap date. It’s the military industrial folks you need to worry about.

TimS – have you considered being on the board? You’ve just succinctly outlined (with improvements!) our fusion outreach campaign.

Note, we’re talking to folks at PPPL about setting up a joint fusion community wiki. We do have a wiki right now , not linked to because I thought we would soon switch to a mediawiki platform. Something that would be more easily extracted and used in other venues. I suppose for now, we could use the existing wiki, as a sandbox. Later copying stuff into the broader wiki. I am strapped for time, so I don’t like to do things twice, but this is about the community doing stuff, so it’s not as much work if you look at it that way.

Yes, we have some materials, and would love to improve them and develop more. Here are the links:

Here are posters to kick off fusion conversations.

Here’s the Focus Fusion Flyer.

And here’s another very cool poster by Sascha Becher.

Some animations exist (I have yet to set up a web landing page that links to all of them. You can see them all on Youtube), and we did have a call for more films to be made, but only got one submission. FYI, our counterparts at ASP (another organization that has a pro-fusion agenda, but prefers to work with the “grass tops” and takes a more mainline approach) said:

We discussed doing the same here – but due to the lack of basic eduction and community base, we decided that such videos may have the basic science wrong and so be misleading. It’s something we may take up in year three or four – once we have a common understanding.

They have considerably more resources than we do, yet they realize this is a long term project. FYI, the “common understanding” I think he’s really referring to is getting the fusion research community to have a more robust story (back to Jamesr’s angle, and more on that in a further post).

Also on our to do list, website improvements so that the information is easier to find. These are all multi-faceted, multi-task jobs, by the way. The educational materials you describe are not trivial. We’ve had one proposal on developing them – the estimate was around $100,000. My favorite model is the Khan Academy. We’d like to develop a comprehensive series that covers all you need to know about fusion in that way. But that’s going to be a lot of videos, a lot of planning, a lot of testing to see if it really works to explain the material. Education is an art. And we don’t have much in the way of resources. So the board and I have been working on the strategic plan and fundraising first to make sure we have the resources to do a good, thorough job of this.