[dennisp]

Boy, I hesitate to jump into this thread! But as for the “Third Industrial Revolution,” I prefer Harry Stine’s version: get into space and put your resource extraction and manufacturing out there. Fusion will make that a lot cheaper.

Will it stop war? Not forever. But will it make war more expensive than just going to a different asteroid? Maybe. The resources of the solar system are so enormous that conflict over them will be nonsensical for quite a while. I guess we might still fight over prime beachfront property Earthside, but those sorts of conflicts don’t tend to escalate to violence.

We don’t have to hope for altruistic leaders. Selfish bastards will do fine, if peace is most profitable.

[dennisp]

Buckminster Fuller wrote in one of his books that a geodesic sphere a couple miles in diameter, with solar heating making the interior air a couple degrees warmer than outside, would have enough buoyancy to float in the air, even with a whole town built inside it. (Though I think you’re right about “probably later!”)

[dennisp]

Thanks PD 🙂

Just came across this external combustion engine that runs on any fuel…biodiesel, gasoline, propane, coal dust, whatever:
http://www.cyclonepower.com/better.html

With good efficiency and power density, too. If it burns, you can run your car on it. And the car will likely be inexpensive, because it won’t need a transmission, starter motor, oil pump, radiator, muffler, or catalytic converter.

If this were to catch on, it’d be easy to use locally-produced fuels. You can have an FF making hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 and you don’t need to bother with a refinery.

[dennisp]

I certainly didn’t mean to say the fusion bubble would be just hot air. Bubbles are typically associated with technological advancement. The stock market goes a little crazy and lots of money floats around looking for every opportunity to invest in the new big thing. So these bubbles have a useful purpose, in that they bring very rapid development and adoption of the new technology.

But all that investment is high-risk. After a while the mania passes, a lot of weaker firms fail, and a lot of people lose their shirts. But you’ve still got the new technology, which has longer-term benefits to the economy. In the case of fusion, that benefit will be enormous.

[dennisp]

“if one of the major alt.fusion frontrunners succeed, there may not be much room in the market for further research on a different unproven approach.”

I tend to think if one of them works, fusion will be the next big bubble, with plenty of money available for anyone who has a potentially competitive approach. Or a good application.

[dennisp]

I like the desert idea. Super cheap land that nobody’s using. It might be cheapest to close the water cycle as much as possible, rather than piping a lot in and just discarding it. But with cheap desalination it won’t be hard to find fresh water.

On cost, I’m just going by what I’ve seen on the focusfusion.org webpages. Between negligible fuel costs and half a million bucks for a 20MW reactor, with no need for a steam cycle, it seems reasonable that it would be quite cheap. (Assuming it really does work, at that price, is the starting premise for my question. If it somehow ends up costing more than coal that would totally change things.)

[dennisp]

Well let’s say I’m writing a science fiction book about it. What’s possible?

How hard would it be to make decaborane from elemental boron? What kinds of materials could we make on a small scale, given cheap power? How small and cheap could we make a fuel production plant? Etc.

Whether it will actually happen depends in part on the answers to these sorts of questions. Robb argues that, for various reasons, it will likely happen anyway. I don’t know if he’s right, but I think FF makes it a lot more likely. Right now though I’m just playing with ideas.

[dennisp]

There’s nothing else remotely that cheap. Of the other capabilities, there are subsets, sure. But it’s the combination of features that allows for new possibilities.

A power source that requires neither a lot of land nor external inputs, but produces a lot of power cheaply, is a new capability. The only thing remotely like it is Hyperion nuclear, but that’ll cost a lot more.

Small scale is important for ocean colonies, unless you only want to build huge colonies. It’s hard to go directly from nothing to huge.

Cheap is important for things like plasma torches or indoor hydroponics. Right now recycling is expensive and farming is best done on lots of land with free sunlight. FF could make recycling cheap and farmland more expensive than grow lights.

The way we produce energy drives a lot of our social organization. FF is fairly unique in being cheap enough to decisively outcompete everything else, and working only at small scale. You could pile a lot of them up at a centralized plant, but that wouldn’t give you any significant economies. It seems likely to me that this would have a dramatic effect on the way we organize ourselves.

[dennisp]

Sure, if another power source arrives which is non-polluting, non-radioactive, works at small scales, doesn’t require a steady input of large amounts of fuel from external sources, and is one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than anything we’ve got now, then that would work equally well. You could say the same thing about half the discussions in these forums.

I’m not aware of anything like that in development, so I think my question is fairly well focused on FF. (Cold fusion might qualify but seems less likely to work, and polywell works best at large scale. Fission is much more expensive than FF, and is mostly large-scale. The Hyperion reactors are small but you have to go buy a new one every ten years or so. Pretty much everything is more expensive than coal.)

[dennisp]

These devices by their very nature violate the law of conservation of momentum

They only do that locally, while in the universe as a whole momentum is conserved.

The physics kinda intrigues me. He’s got an elegant explanation for inertia, based on relativity alone. The only other inertia theory brings quantum physics into it. And his theory is pretty similar to Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Maybe, contrary to the cartoon, the universe really is like that.

I admit I’m not exactly holding my breath for this one, but it seems worth the experiment. Given that it’s only evident under very contrived conditions, if it’s true it’s not something we would have noticed so far.

[dennisp]

I’ve been following the Woodward drive…that’d be an even bigger breakthrough than fusion. Wish it had more funding but they are doing some experiments at least.

Short of that though, are you proposing heating via electric resistance? I think we just invented the flying toaster! 🙂

[dennisp]

Hmph. Ok maybe I should retract my “too bulky” comment.

How would the jet work? Propeller plane is easy, just electric motors, but we’ve got no burning fuel to inject into a jet engine.

[dennisp]

I think in discussions like this, people are mentally putting the question in the form “If FF works…” and answering in kind. At least I do. Later I go back to worrying about whether it will work.

FF seems bulky for an airplane, but we probably don’t need an airplane that can fly nonstop for a year. According to other analysis on these forums, FF could produce jet fuel at a good price from CO2 in the atmosphere, so we don’t need to keep drilling oil just to keep the planes flying.

[dennisp]

I wouldn’t call asteroid mining fictional if focus fusion turns real. The Polywell people are talking $27/kg to orbit, at prices like that asteroid mining and real space colonization become economical. I suspect focus fusion rockets would be even cheaper. One modest nickel-iron asteroid would easily make it worthwhile.

Between asteroid mining, fusion torch recycling, fuel production from CO2, and cheap power making indoor farming economical, I would expect most of the resource extraction we do now to quickly become obsolete. We could have a much lighter footprint on the planet, even as our standard of living improves.

[dennisp]

I don’t know if any of the following is valid but there are some ideas floating around about relativistic effects in casimir cavities and the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect making fusion possible:

http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg39377.html
http://www.scienceagogo.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=32373
http://www.advancedphysics.org/forum/showthread.php?t=12992

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