Reply To: Space Fountain

[Warwick]

The role of industry in government has not been beneficial up until now. In a democracy, governments are there to reflect the will of the populace and use their power to control and influence industry and finance. In some countries there is now a significant reversal of that, and the results are not good. Going with this backflow, and hoping for good results, is not the only solution, or likely to succeed, in my opinion. I’ll stop short of saying that you want to give the ring to Galadriel :-). I’d also challenge why you would want to focus much on the developed world in the first place – is that really what you want?

It’s understandable that we live in desperate times that seem to call for desperate measures. What hope of a sensible, democratic future when there are ‘developed’ nations where more people profess to believe in ghosts than in global warming? But I think there are many ways that development of a revolutionary power source would make a difference. It would make a political difference, because in the long term it would get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, and in the short term, use up all their resources fighting its ascendancy. It would also make a political difference if the amount of crony capitalism and market power in the world could be reduced, if the largest corporations owned less of the world economy. Bilderberg is going to be a verbal bloodbath, make no mistake!

I think government ought to support focus fusion manufacturing. Large-scale availability of sophisticated components is far from a given. Of course it’s possible to envisage a plant that builds FF units from raw materials, in the same way it would be possible to have a factory to build solar panels from raw materials, yet one does not exist.
I was reading this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/16/death-solar-power-solyndra
which imputes the large fall in costs per kW of solar to a change in the silicon market. For a long time there were only a few “solar grade silicon” suppliers and they were exploiting their market position. Addressing bottlenecks like that is one way that government support can help to get an industry going. (I haven’t found out what led to the situation changing in the case of the silicon market. Maybe someone else knows.)