[Aeronaut]

Dr_Barnowl wrote: Heh, it’s “like taking candy from a baby” ; something that’s easy (but probably not very nice). Usually attributed to stereotypical villains in comic books!

The “cub scouts” are a boys club ; leading boys to a candy store is easy because the contents are so appealing. The analogy is that FF is so appealing compared to Big Fusion, for all the reasons we’re familiar with.

Giving candy to a baby? You’d be fought off by paranoid mothers afraid that it contains LSD or warfarin…

You almost have it, Doc. FF isn’t fighting the plasma’s natural tendencies like our competitors are. I have what I think is an easier to grasp page all the way through.

My main question at this point is if the calls to action are crystal clear and compelling to the average person, since the copy is slanted heavily to inducing corporate greed.

[Aeronaut]

I was thinking the Cub Scouts were more universal. I’ll replace cub scout with 7 year old boy. Somebody who wants to go to the candy store but simply can’t stay still for 5 or 10 minutes. 😆

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:
:cheese: That would be “explicitly”, unless you just want to imply stuff! :cheese:

Right toe, old chop!

There was so much implied to so many target audiences that I’m glad I don’t sell securities, lol. Anyway, it grew long enough to show me a much better line. Now we’re leading a cub scout to a candy store, while the rest of the fusion community is trying to get the child to stop fidgeting.

[Aeronaut]

Brian,

Excellent points about the spinoff effects of electricity becoming the preferred energy source, and the manufacturing shift that will follow. I’ll make it a point to spell it out much more implicitly today. The sidebar starts right off distinguishing between fission, fusion, and anueutronic fusion before nailing down what makes FF1 the obvious choice. (losers use superconducting magnets).

I’ve seen guestimates of $10G to $50 for the SE. I wouldn’t really be surprised to see deployed and staffed hardware running at least $100G, since what I saw was several years ago.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

@Aeronaut: I think your page 3 in particular, is an excellent draft for the “Why we are writing you today” portion of a viral marketing effort on the part of FFS. After that page, however, I would go directly into some detail about the science and engineering of the FFS project and make an appeal for both: one, the support of the effort/join FFS non-profit; and two, a specific ask for a small contribution, 100% of which would go directly to funding the research.

I think you could more effectively leverage FFS as the political agent in any political effort FFS wanted to undertake, but VASTLY more importantly, the tax-deductible small contributions go to fund the FFS grant(s) to the DPF research. Like you, Aeronaut, I am firmly of the opinion that a direct appeal to a large micro-contributor market will be the quickest and most likely route to assure funding for DPF “proof of concept”. (And by “proof of concept” I mean that we have experimentally demonstrated less expensive “to-the-grid” power.)

I am very glad to see the many active and thoughtful contributors on this site; I think we are beginning to see the right assembly of resources to see cocncrete results.

Respectfully,
Kyle

FFS has been a tax-exempt receptacle for donations to the research for years, and has generated very little. Why would this be different?

@Kyle, Sounds like you’re reading the pdf, but thanx for reminding me of the “Why I’m writing you today”. It was proven back in Elmer Wheeler’s day, but it caught me off guard and still seems to work, lol.

Long story short, I just posted a few edits plus the sidebar I mentioned earlier today with fresh (but not really complete) content at http://energymadecleanly.com. Adding the picture of FF-1 made an incredible difference in its impact.

@Brian, we got a new decade to work with.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Great points, Brian. When I make it crystal clear, it’s going to sell energy sector and manufacturing jobs to most readers, and aneutronic fusion powerplants to most of what’s left, and maybe, just maybe, get at least one credible corporation onboard with not just confirmation science, but a seamless transition into a parallel production engineering program without waiting for the niceties of peer-reviewed confirmation.

Carbon, greenwashing, don’t matter what you call that existing market force, since I ID’d the PR value of creating a Genuinely Negative Carbon Footprint in the current world. 😉

After all, Wiki’s aneutronic fusion article makes D-T look extremely difficult, therefore pB-11 must be a nm or two short of impossible.

FF would make the “carbon footprint” issue/standard irrelevant politically and economically. In truth, it already and always is scientifically. As for PR value, it repels me to lie down with the AGW crowd for any reason, even their money. Except insofar as using it to render them obsolete and silent appeals to my sense of ironic justice!

Wiki’s write-ups are entirely from the point of view of sustained/steady-state fusion. I agree that human-scale steady-state is out of the question, though of course PolyWell is determined to achieve it. We’ll see! (Example of problems it faces.)

I cite Wiki mainly because of all the cross-linking of their DPF and anuetronic articles, but I doubt the majority of my readers will take any of the Wiki links. I’m after a ‘market’ that hopefully we can make extinct over the course of this year. Unfortunately, the business community operates under the cloud of carbon taxes in various forms, which reduce to their energy consumption in most cases. Thus all the greenwashing in the business press advertising and too much editorializing. I’ve considered titling the page “Beyond Greenwashing”, but might be able to title the call to action section with that. I’d also like to work in the tax incentives of job creation. Even if it lacks subtlety, it’s likely to really stir up controversy- and that guarantees it goes viral.

Please note that I referred to the AGW gaggle. I’m about to change that word to cult. I’m also going to introduce a numerically-oriented sidebar that will be titled something along the lines of “A philosophical difference, by the numbers” for potential investors, licensees, and their end users (the market). I need to go over the thermal and electrical budgets again before I dare put that up in it’s entirety.

The main thrust of the numeric section is going to be that winners pick pB-11 but ditch the electromagnets through elegant design, resulting in vastly superior field strength and inherent extra safety of pulsed operation- a feature exclusive to DPF designs. I should have it posted early tomorrow.

[Aeronaut]

Great points, Brian. When I make it crystal clear, it’s going to sell energy sector and manufacturing jobs to most readers, and aneutronic fusion powerplants to most of what’s left, and maybe, just maybe, get at least one credible corporation onboard with not just confirmation science, but a seamless transition into a parallel production engineering program without waiting for the niceties of peer-reviewed confirmation.

Carbon, greenwashing, don’t matter what you call that existing market force, since I ID’d the PR value of creating a Genuinely Negative Carbon Footprint in the current world. 😉

After all, Wiki’s aneutronic fusion article makes D-T look extremely difficult, therefore pB-11 must be a nm or two short of impossible.

[Aeronaut]

@JShell,

I just finished the rewrite. It’s no longer a PDF, but the entire page at http://energymadecleanly.com

What think?

Thanx.

[Aeronaut]

Excellent points, JShell. I just copied them into a new Word doc so I can make it short, sweet, neat, and complete. Hopefully 5 pages or less. I’m trying to transcend my internet marketing traing, lol.

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote:

if we put $10 million into something, well in a couple years they’d need another $50 million, and a couple years after that they’d need another $200 million and so on.

You could cap it at 10 million. That would definitely cover LPP’s experiment with enough room for contingencies. Then you could see if it needed more. This is an opening avenue of fusion research – a bold attempt at a new approach, and with a superior fusion fuel.

There is the thrill of science here! Boldly exploring something new.

What is it that people want? Spending millions on lunar landing prizes so that rich tourists can visit the moon. Does that affect all of mankind? Wouldn’t some work on fusion – which could potentially supply the energy for everyone to visit the moon or at least have decent lives be a priority?

Somehow we have to make fusion – and for now the very impossibility of it – sexy.

Now is the time to kick some “impossible” fusion butt, not to wuss out. Pathetic.

I just devoured a book called Viral Loop, which is the story of viral idea spreading. Some interesting facts I picked up were that the Twenteens- essentially high school and college age demographics- are the early adopters that will spread an idea with no marketing or advertising expenses whatsoever.

What seems to be hidden out in plain site when we discuss funding and site appeal is that we’re targeting people who decided at least a decade ago that fusion energy was never going to pan out. I’ll call this the Billionaire idea. The mainstream media and search engines reinforce this due to all of the “authority” stemming from having a dot gov or dot edu domain and thousands of documents in their keyword silos.

If we were able to seed a viral campaign to get a million or more people to each contribute $1 (vote with their wallets), and it took 10M uniques to do that in a month or less, would we crash the server? Also, how much extra would that cost us in bandwidth? The early histories of Ebay, PayPal, FB, etc. all revolve around keeping the server from crashing due to volume, and to monetize faster than bandwidth fees can bankrupt the company.

Assuming only 10% click through from the main index page, it may be time to consider making it an HTML page with only a few links to the EE components. I just wrote a draft Special Report that you can download at http://energymadecleanly.com/Vol1.pdf

I’m open to suggestions on how to improve it. Most of this I wrote off the top of my head over the past 48 hours. I expect to have a much more polished version posted late Monday, and begin promoting on Tuesday.

[Aeronaut]

Flawed science has been taught as fact throughout history. And if something appears to violate the laws of physics because the first few sentences in a proposal or personal comment weren’t tweaked to that judge’s prejudices, of course we’re not going to get a fair hearing. Just the way it goes.

On the bright side, though, ten years from now there’s a very good chance that Google data centers the world over will be FF powered. Along with government buildings such as the DOE and all of the National Labs, of course.

Speaking of cold fusion, I get the distinct impression that the research that gets funded is the research that doesn’t threaten anybody by using the C letter- change. “Don’t rock the boat” and that sort of thing.

[Aeronaut]

Excellent thread, Kyle. Don’t worry about length- some of these threads wander all over the solar system.

I like the idea of the FFS grant(s) to LPP to keep things straight regarding equity. As for risk, nothing succeeds like success. We need to target the Twenteens- those in high school and only a few years out in order to get a true viral campaign. Truly viral means spending little to nothing on promotion, since each of these early adopters would spread the word to an overall average of hopefully at least 2 more people. Some may get 1 or none to look us over, some may get 100 or more. As long as the overall average is 1.0 or higher, the campaign is viral.

Colleges and universities are the best places to seed viral movements, due to the localized society and the physics departments. And these societies’ members are in touch with those of other schools. This is how FaceBook got started. The viral campaign would have two major purposes, imo-

1. Get every candidate in the 2010 and 2012 elections to justify his/her energy positions and policies due to recognition of a wildly spreading public movement.

2. Bring in a manufacturer with the balls to invest $20M in a license and perhaps $100M total across a year or three (probably more counting engineering the X-ray converter) for an as-yet unproven technology. In short, a visionary who leads a visionary board of directors. But if we get one, we need no VC vultures polluting the culture.

3. Get manufacturing trade journals buzzing about how to fabricate all the parts and sub-assemblies, and integrating the modules into companies, machines such as boilers and ovens, and local transformer yards. Urban planning rags could discuss how a few FFs in their jurisdiction would begin healing their economies. And helping with the political environment at the NRC.

Two books about this are Viral Loop (viralloop.com) and The Tipping Point. I recommend them in that order because Tipping Point takes wayyy too many pages for the amount of useful information in it.

My votes for the authority figures would be Rezwan and Aaron, as if they weren’t busy enough already.

So we need to seed at least one viral message (there are several that we could use in a rolling barrage) that FF is clean, cost-effective, will your university be the first to confirm Eric’s results? Do your energy policies reflect (our) reality? If not, please elaborate in detail… and we need to get literally almost everybody figuring out how to integrate FF into their local grid, and be in the first 100 municipalities to do it.

As for producing 20 million units per year, I’ve worked in several auto plants over the years. As long as our supplier networks can produce 400 million collector panels for the X-ray converter per year, there should be no major problem with that much production. Imho, the biggest single problem is politics.

[Aeronaut]

Excellent idea, Warwick.

Getting back to the millions of small investors idea, I bought a physical book yesterday called The Viral Loop. Obama’s communications and fundraising plan were detailed very early. Seems that if you have a few million people chipping in only a buck or ten, you can go back for more almost as often as you wish. But if he’d asked the Faithful for $100M he would have flamed out.

Also, none of those contributors was looking for any kind of equity- just meaningful change.

Being a non-profit could make it trickier, but the first few million would pay for the engineering program before you’d have to figure out how to invest the surplus. Maybe desalination plants in countries nobody’s ever heard of.

[Aeronaut]

Phil’s Dad wrote: I… erm – sorry I forgot what I was saying.

Eh? I feel twenty something.

[Aeronaut]

Augustine wrote: Very exciting. How are they going to confirm fusion? Will they look for Helium?

They have oscilloscopes monitoring the voltages on the Rogowski coils. A sudden plunge on the main coil shows that a lot (unfortunately nowhere near the ideal 100% this year) of the magnetic energy was transferred into the plasmoid. Two more Rogowski coils in the drift tube monitor the helium ion beam’s exhaust energies.

Since a low energy neutron is made in less than 1% of the fusion reactions, and thousands of reactions occur in every plasmoid, a few low energy neutrons will be generated every shot, if I’m understanding this correctly. That’s why it was so important to properly calibrate the neutron detectors using deuterium before switching to the pB11 fuel.

I imagine the Donald Duck test will prove that helium is being made 😆

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