What can I do? How to help focus fusion and enhance your earthly immortality at the same time!

[Lerner]

I want to start a new thread that connects a bit to two other threads on this forum. One thread, titled ” immortality” is really not about that, but about extension of human life spans and how that relates to the need for aneutronic fusion. But we all now posses a form of earthly immortality, because the effects, bad and good, of what we do in our lives on after us forever—as long as human life exists. That is most clear in the case of those who have kids, or write books or make some discovery, but for everyone, almost your every act affects others in ways that ripple down through all of time.

Another thread is about FFS’s new mission Statement, which has the following phrase in it: “The mission of the Focus Fusion Society is to bring people together to pursue the dream of safe, cheap, clean, unlimited energy from aneutronic fusion, to ensure that the ensuing technology is made available to everyone, and to foster a pro-research ethic and pro-fusion culture?” A forum participant wanted to know how someone not actually doing the research can help to “pursue” fusion.

I want this thread to help answer that question—what can you do to make aneutronic fusion a reality and thus at the same time enhance your immortal effect on the world?

Focus fusion needs advocates, not fans. We need people to help vastly raise our visibility—the number of people who know about this work—and our credibility—the proportion of those people who know us who think our work is worthwhile and goes in a good direction.

The number of people in the world who have ever heard of focus fusion or aneutronic fusion is probably, generously, in the hundreds of thousands– putting together everyone visiting our sites, reading articles in the mass media, visiting wiki articles, etc. There are billions of people who should know about it. If more people know about it and more think it is a good idea a lot of good things will happen. Some will decide to support the effort financially by contributing to FFS so it can do a better jobs educating people and bring them together—a self-sustaining reaction. Some will invest in the research directly. As more and more people get together, support can be mobilized to demand that government start funding aneutronic fusion and alternative routes to fusion power.

The idea that focus fusion will automatically be triumphant if there is success in the laboratory is just wrong. No technological shift as big as a change in energy supply has occurred without a struggle against those who benefit from earlier technology. The oil and gas companies are no buggy-whip lobby. Eventually huge numbers of people will be needed to organize to ensure that this technology is developed, implemented and benefits everyone. Alliances will have to emerge with those advocating related policies.
(This introduces the thread–my suggestions follow)

[Lerner]

How can each and every person on this forum help? First by raising focus fusion, aneutronic fusion, DPFs and alternative routes to fusion in every discussion you see on the web about energy alternatives, safe energy, cheap energy, the economy, everything our work can affect. Raise it on Facebook chats, on forum comments in environmental web sites, on comment pages of news media sites (you get a lot of feed back there.) People can start getting together in person through websites like Meetup. (We already had a successful fusion Meetup in New York City)

FFS has started some competitions and I suggest there be a competition for who can get focus fusion or related subjects on the most discussions. We can give out certificates for getting on 5, 10, 20 forums. We can have special prizes for the most forums in given category—environmental forums, news sites (one comment on New Scientist site probably got us hundreds of new visitors to our website.) We can give extra points for those who get responses to their posts. Maybe every three months the all-around leader in starting discussions can be given a tour of LPP’s lab—in person if you are close or by webcam in you are not. (Come to think of it, maybe we can get the Las Vegas and Warsaw DPF faculties to give tours once or twice a year too.)

We also need your ideas on how to get the word out more effectively and answer peoples concerns and confusion. Maybe we need prizes for idea generation too.

How does this affect your earthly immortality? Your post on a forum, for example, reaches some editor who decides—”this is being talked about a lot—now I’d better cover it”. A big article might reach some government decision maker. Enough articles, people get talking—”why isn’t this being funded?” Enough talk, organizing pressure, and maybe we get a crash project to get it done—all from your post. How’s that for an effect on the endless future?

[Rezwan]

Thanks Eric! Well put!

[zapkitty]

Now Lerner-hakase is taunting me… 🙂

Lerner wrote:
FFS has started some competitions and I suggest there be a competition for who can get focus fusion or related subjects on the most discussions. We can give out certificates for getting on 5, 10, 20 forums. We can have special prizes for the most forums in given category—environmental forums, news sites (one comment on New Scientist site probably got us hundreds of new visitors to our website.) We can give extra points for those who get responses to their posts.

Recipe fpr disaster… if not handled correctly.

Forget the contests… you’ll appear to have both co-opted the shill techniques that the plutocrats have adopted and, if things work out with that particular plan as I suspect they will, you’ll have rendered “FoFu’ers” into the new “Paulites” or “Obots” of the blogosphere.

Can forum outreach be done without such drawbacks?

Certainly.

I’ve engaged in a bit of it myself… but placement, timing, and suitability are everything.

More after I finish dinner…

[Lerner]

No doubt we will run into problems as we get bigger. But right now we are not in the same ball park with Ron Paul. His wiki entry gets 10,000 vists per day, aneutronicfusion gets 100. If the problme arises, we can deduct points for obnoxiousness, not knowing your material, etc.

[Rezwan]

I agree, the prize thing is too much like gamification. You have to think this through.

What I like about this post is that it is about getting people to realize they have a role in getting fusion to happen. It’s not just the researchers in the lab.

In general, that’s great. When it gets down to specifics, things get sketchy. So we still have a bit of homework to do before some sort of mass mobilization can take place. It’s got to be part of a coordinated campaign. And it has to be genuine. Ethical. Logical. Obvious. “Well, of course I’m for that!”

It helps if the message is developed with the larger fusion community – adds to the coherence and credibility. Good news on the larger fusion community – I feel we’re making progress towards a more inclusive, constructive common story. And I think once the fusion community starts to circulate a more adventurous, alternatives-inclusive message, it will give many more people the confidence to build on the sentiment.

More on the emerging fusion framework in another post one day 🙂

Also, I think a big objection people might have here is that they don’t want to be “believers”, or to oversell, or promise something that may not be delivered.

Thus, again, message is important. Stripped of all hype, what does the message come down to?

For me, it is that the pursuit of aneutronic fusion is important, no matter the outcome.

It has intrinsic value, and if it’s at all possible, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to try and make it happen. Especially as the pursuit doesn’t consume a lot of resources.

Also, to me, pursuit of aneutronic involves support of fusion in general, and may end up leading to a concession to thorium and/or conservation other things for the duration of the time we can’t get it to work. I.e., I don’t like to be limited to aneutronic, even though I’m pursuing it.

OK, keeping it simple:

Aneutronic.
Aim high.
Post often.

[jamesr]

I will try and be a bit more active on other websites, but I think the biggest impact I could achieve at the moment is convincing the rest of my research group, and anyone I meet at conferences, that it is worth taking seriously.

For those that don’t know I am currently studying for a PhD at the Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics at the University of Warwick, UK. The group is split roughly in 3 with a third working on solar plasma physics (mainly oscillations of coronal loops and turbulence in the solar wind); a third on laser plasma interactions ie. inertial confinement fusion; and a third on magnetic confinement fusion. My work is on the effect of resonant magnetic perturbations on the turbulence at the edge of tokamaks & stellarators

I gave a talk last year about focus fusion to some physics postgrads, which was received pretty well, but I have held back from giving a presentation to the academics – partly because I needed to make some progress on my own research, but also because I wanted to be more confident in the theories behind it.

Now I have some solid results in my own project (will be submitted to PRL next week), and some of your latest figures of neutron counts look encouraging. When seminars restart in the new academic year I’ll ask to give a talk to the group and see if I can win any of them over.

[TimS]

Cool!

When taking action, one of the first things is to gather or build resources.

We need some kind of wiki so we can can compile resources for outreach efforts. Perhaps there already is one in this website. It would be useful if every regular on this website was pointed at such a wiki, with a summary of Eric’s initial statement, welcoming them to use it and contribute to it.

Resources I have in mind are:

1. Color graphics we can print and put up as posters, bumper stickers, etc. This gets people interested.

2. Animations, like animated gifs. Not just large ones to explain things, but small animated gifs for people to use for sigs and avatars. It would be very useful if people could easily create their own custom ones, but then put them back in a library on this wiki for other people who come along to modify. I particularly like stylized versions of the reactor animations, with maybe thunderbolts of power coming out. Many people are afraid of “nuclear”, and so showing p’s and B’s colliding might be a little negative.

3. Target pages for links embedded in comments we make that are tailored to particular subjects. Maybe one for comments on environmental sites, one for alternative energy sites, one for unconventional energy sites, one for economic sites, … These would probably be highly graphical, to get peoples attention.

4. Bulletted factoid lists, with relatively less or no graphical content. This is more for our own knowledge.

5. Campaign organization documents, such as ideas on specific sites to go to, any e-mail campaigns people have done with samples (but I do NOT recommend us amateurs starting email campaigns), lists of work to be done on the wiki, etc. This would include pages for particular campaigns, as well as pages for organizing the goals and techniques of the entire outreach campaign itself.

6. Gosh knows, tons of more stuff on the wiki I just haven’t thought of!

I agree with Rezwan, we must go out of our way to be true, honest, and authentic.

A few months ago I was a thorium fanboy, for about a day and a half. Then I started checking real sources instead of Wikipedia, and I found out that the glory of thorium as described on WP was not entirely accurate. I’m not a regular WP contributor, so I started pinging the thorium wikipedia discussion page, pointed out that their “facts” were mostly from pop-tech magazines, started some discussions, and linked to some reliable sources. After a couple of times doing this, someone eventually changed the article. Now, whenever I see someone repeat anything incorrect that was in the WP page, I go out of my way to reply with a comment on what I found out, with links, and usually not phrased in the most supportive language.

I think it is essential that this outreach effort be done in the spirit of spreading accurate understanding of the potential benefits of DPF and aneutronic fusion, which makes number 4 in my items above perhaps the most important and most immediate. This also means not turning it into a game; I have worked in marketing situations, and it can get ugly out there once people became competitive like that, even just for games. How about if we ALL get an online tour of LPP once we are successfully working together on this as a team?

[jamesr]

TimS wrote: so showing p’s and B’s colliding might be a little negative.

But they’re both so positive 😉

[dennisp]

The Obama campaign used gamification to great effect on their website. Users got points for fundraising, canvassing, telemarketing, and holding neighborhood meetings. The site provided assistance for all these…a telemarketing interface with interactive script, setup for small online fundraising groups, etc. (Not that these particular activities are appropriate for FF advocacy.)

[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.

[Rezwan]

dennisp wrote: The Obama campaign used gamification to great effect on their website. Users got points for fundraising, canvassing, telemarketing, and holding neighborhood meetings. The site provided assistance for all these…a telemarketing interface with interactive script, setup for small online fundraising groups, etc. (Not that these particular activities are appropriate for FF advocacy.)

What was their budget for setting up the telemarketing interface, interactive script, online groups, point tracking and awarding, etc.? Is there off the shelf stuff we could use on our site to get that to happen?

I suspect political campaigns spend a lot of money to get that sort of thing to happen. It makes sense for them. You spend a lot of money to make even more money. The fundraising itself doubles as PR (the people are telling folks about Obama at the same time they are asking for money/commitment). And surplus $ goes to buying ad time, etc. More PR.

[dennisp]

No idea what their budget was. Given their scalability requirements I suspect it was fairly high, but on the other hand I think it was mainly one guy who built the initial site.

Don’t know of anything off-the-shelf for this sort of thing. Wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate anyway…eg., it’s hard to imagine broad telemarketing or neighborhood canvassing being effective. Better would be to target specific groups involved in related issues, like environmentalism or energy independence. Also, networking in the silicon valley startup culture, and among physicists and engineers in related fields.

[Rezwan]

dennisp wrote: No idea what their budget was. Given their scalability requirements I suspect it was fairly high, but on the other hand I think it was mainly one guy who built the initial site.

How much do you think that one guy would charge for the initial site?

Better would be to target specific groups involved in related issues, like environmentalism or energy independence. Also, networking in the silicon valley startup culture, and among physicists and engineers in related fields.

How much do you think specifically targeted networking might run? What would be the budget for that?

I’m assuming this doesn’t happen by itself. You have to ID prospects, make calls, write letters, follow up, visit, schmooze, do lunch, etc. Probably a lot of travel and expense. I’m doing some of this already, but just barely scratching the surface.

I’m asking for #s because we are putting together our strategic plan, and we’ve got a lot of ambitious ideas, but no resources yet to carry them out. Budget is always on my mind. Other organizations seem to spend a lot on this sort of thing.

These strategic scale measures require coordination and specific personnel (people that the “targets” in those circles will listen to, relationships) and a budget, which is a separate (ongoing) discussion – links to come when we unveil the strategic plan.
[em]
What we’d like to focus on here is what individuals can do within their own circles.[/em] Encouraging conversation, and reminding people that it counts. The long tail adds up.

We want to use this forum to figure out ways to support that individual, local scale action.

[Mike Weber Goodenow]

Are there eight audiences?

1. Scientists and engineers.
2. Potential investors.
3. Electric power companies and other providers.
4. Policymakers.
5. Environment, energy, fiscal and economic policy, and other policy-influencing groups.
6. Foundations and other nonprofits that provide funds and influence policy.
7. Media.
8. Public.

[Author]

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