[jamesr]

The maths rule it out. It will always take way more energy to generate muons than any benefit they give.

I guess a very short burst to initiate the ignition of the plasmoid(s) may be a possibility, but then if you’re close enough to ignition for this to help, there will be far easier ways to tip it over the threshold.

[jamesr]

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

But they’re both so positive 😉

[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.

[jamesr]

Lerner wrote: I think it is relevant, and it is not selfish

Exactly. It is the genes & memes which are acting selfishly (not that they are aware), resulting in altruistic behaviour by us to ensure our own longevity by helping others solve humanities problems, such as cancer.

2% a year is huge – in just 100 years that’s more that a seven-fold increase in population. I think that would be pretty crowded and would maybe make people think working on issues such as colonising Mars may come ahead of curing cancer. Of course with all those extra people working to solve problems then those problems will get solved that much quicker.

I think 0.5% average growth is more than enough for now. The changing demographics of developing and developed countries can be offset a little by large scale immigration/emmigration to & fro. As we allow the median age to slowly rise.

[jamesr]

Rezwan wrote:

This is textbook selfishness. Memetic or genetic. There’s this book called, ” The Selfish Gene“. Own it.

@Jamesr, memetic vs. genetic, a fun novel about that is Fluke.

I hadn’t come across Christopher Moore before – looks like fun.

Moving on from The Selfish Gene, the book I found very compelling was Susan Blakmore’s The Meme Machine

[jamesr]

I sometimes like to take a memetic viewpoint on topics like this.

We used to be slaves to our genes. For genes to be successful they need to get copied so you get a fairly short life cycle promoting rapid genetic evolution, and adaptability to changing environment.

By contrast the ‘new replicator’, memes, and the memeplexes that form our culture, religions, political systems etc. work on a much faster time scale than genetic evolution, and so became the dominant driving force for change. Making humans very adaptable in a rapidly changing environment.

If memes find advantage by being copied by older people, then they can manipulate vessels they rely on for reproduction (ie humans) to do everything they can to live longer and longer to ensure the memes they hold can be copied to more and more people.

Over time the memeplexes that win out will be those which encourage their human hosts to live long lives and communicate ‘their’ ideas and ideologies to as many other people as possible.

Of course a successful meme does not have to be a moral one, or sensible for us or the planet, it just has to be one that is better at being reproduced than the competing memes of the day.

[jamesr]

Rezwan wrote:
I think there are a lot of interesting observations that will be made in the pursuit of fusion that will be tangibly beneficial.

True. If fusion based devices, such as ion thrusters, LPP’s X-Scan concept, machines for transmuting waste or manufacturing isotopes for medical use become more mainstream then it will be much easier for the public to believe fusion based energy production is just another step in what is a proven technology.

The cliff edge event would be much more dramatic for fusion, and more possible than the cancer cure, I think.

I think if a cure for cancer was found it would be just as dramatic as a fusion breakthrough. We are well on the way to tackling other killers like heart disease or kidney failure. If people don’t die of cancer then what do they die of? People will still get weaker and more frail with age, so we will end up with an increasingly ageing population being supported by a smaller proportion of the population in active productive jobs. The offset of curing younger active people with cancer, I think would be small in comparison to the extra burden of a more distorted demographic.

[jamesr]

If you relate fusion research to something people are maybe more aware of like cancer research then you can begin to make comparisons.

Research into a cure for cancer has been going on for hundreds of years compared to sixty or so for fusion.

Although there is not cure as such, cancer research has lead to intermediate, incremental advances in drugs and surgical techniques that have lowered mortality rates by a few percent a year.
The incremental advances in fusion on the other hand, have increased fusion yields by 5 orders of magnitude over the last 30 years (or around 35% per year on average).

The problem from the public perspective is that they can see the benefits of cancer research in their everyday lives even though they have not reached a ‘cure’, but for fusion there is no tangible benefit until someone finds that ‘cure’ for the fusion engineering challenge and reaches breakeven.

[jamesr]

Ho Hum… I guess in the end the results will speak for themselves. If the first pB11 shots show significant yields then it will be Focus Fusion at the top of the bill and the other guys get trimmed out of the editorials.

[jamesr]

Have you seen this interesting TED presentation by Prof Geoffrey West on the scaling laws inherent in urbanisation

http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html

[jamesr]

Even if we all cooked & heated our homes that way, it doesn’t change the argument – just delays it slightly.

A large part of the historical growth is down to population increase rather than per capita usage. So, even if our average usage was burning 500W of wood rather than 2000W of fossil fuels then we would still reach resourse limits, just a few years later.

Although, of course, since we’re not going to be able to cover the whole world with solar panels, and still have space for food we will reach the limits much sooner, and the population will plateau around 2070, or even go into catastophic collapse.

All new technologies like fusion power will do is push back the dates a little.

So I guess the question is: If we manage to get to a sustainible population level, so energy use only grows with the supply of new resources (deeper mines, asteroids etc) and improvements in energy production/efficiency. When do we outstrip the Earth/Sun etc. ?

eg. if of (using his figure) the 2.3% historical growth in energy half was due to population growth, then rather than 350 years before the resultant heat from our energy use heats the Earth significantly, maybe it gets pushed out to 600 years.

If we use anything other that Solar for our energy source, and since if we use it to do work then it ends up as heat eventually, then it will heat up the Earth.

[jamesr]

Voltage is not power.

The power supply would convert the 120V AC mains supply to a 25kV DC potential difference that is applied to the electrodes, across which ions & electrons can be accelerated.

[jamesr]

I was thinking more on the lines that there are many areas of the world with much higher natural levels of radiation than would be permitted in the US or most countries if from man-made sources. There is no evidence that people living in these area are affected adversely in any way (such as higher cancer rates). Some studies even show beneficial effects.

See for example http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/risk13&div=6&g_sent=1&collection=journals

[jamesr]

One comment that leaped out at me:

“There is no safe level of exposure,” said Marylia Kelley, the group’s executive director.

I realise she’s from Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, so I realise her agenda. However this kind of blanket statement suggests a lack of understanding of what the risks of radiation are, and the level of natural background radiation in our environment.

She would be receiving a far higher dose from the potassium naturally in her body, and the radon seeping up from the rocks under her feet than from any tritium emitted by the facility.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/calculate.html

People often use the ‘Linear No Threshold’ model to extrapolate back from radiation effects at high & medium doses (ie Hiroshima & Nagasaki victims at various distances), to claim effects at low doses. But the statistics are very flimsy and the errorbars when you extrapolate that far mean you simply cannot say that that there is no safe level.

[jamesr]

How can two have opposite rotation? if one rotates clockwise as viewed from the top, then its anticlockwise when viewd from the bottom.

The labelling of galaxy spin as up/down is as abitrary as whether we switch the names of matter & antimatter. By conventional big bang theories the matter/antimatter baryonic particles would have condensed out of the high energy soup before they began to collapse into galaxies and spin-up. So the early Universe would have been symmetric. Only now that we are in regions of space with significant gravitational twist is the symmetry broken.

I think there could be regions of the Universe that are predomenantly anitmatter, but our local matter region would be bigger than the local observable Universe.

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