Reply To: What are you doing to promote Focus Fusion…

[Rezwan]

Again, “Once the device is demonstrably showing…” – I think we need to focus more on the disputability THIS side of the experiment. That the device will demonstrably show…. is the question now, and the only way to address that is to do the experiment. However, with focus on the speculation of what will happen AFTER, it makes it seem like a done deal and sells the current effort short. It gets people into fantasy mode rather than responsibility mode.

Brian H wrote:
No, Eric. I think there will be waves of fear and exaltation that sweep through various sub-sets of scientists and administrators and others. One such sub-group is the large and largely MSM-excluded community of AGW skeptics, who above all do not want the world to buy a carbon-control pig-in-a-poke on the basis of extremely dodgy science and grotesquely incompetent computer modelling. Having a prospect like FF which renders the entire issue moot, and does so by means of a back door opened by human genius, will make them (us) very, very happy.

To me, the issue isn’t who is going to be thrilled AFTER it’s figured out – it’s who can we find to materially support it BEFORE, while proof of concept is ongoing.

If you can get your AGW folk to fully fund the project up front, carte blanche, beforehand, now – that’d be splendid. (Heck, we can then merge this back with the thread on documentaries from whence it came. AGW’s funding an obscure fusion project that ends up working and saving the world? Decades of gloating ahead! Classic Doc!)

Otherwise it’s all a bunch of speculators, sitting there, waiting to be made happy – loquacious, yet ultimately passive. Spectators in the unfolding drama with no greater claim to its realization than any other spectator.