[TimS]

Rezwan wrote: This is the story of investing. This is why VC’s don’t put all their money in one project. Only a fool would. Most projects fail. A few of the projects succeed big and mitigate those failures. I think the problem with fusion is it has this mystique about it, so people don’t deal with it the way they would with any other risk.

Excellent point; people do not see a failed project, with others right behind it that might work, instead they see more evidence of fairy tale believers. How do we work on this perception issue?

[TimS]

Brian H wrote:

…
Apparently the US Navy disagrees; otherwise they wouldn’t be funding EMC2’s research.

Admin, AKA Ivy Matt:
The Navy has big honkin’ lumps of metal to drive around the planet’s oceans, for which a commercial grade fusion power source would be much appreciated. Also, there are numerous uses for indefinitely large sources of electric power; tossing bombs is not the only thing the military relies on.

In 5 years or so after fusion [em]happens[/em] humanity will make the next leap outward, i.e. upward. The army and air-force think of going upward as ‘taking the high ground’. I wonder if the navy will also think that way. Which branch does ships?

[TimS]

Brian H wrote: TimS;
The success of General Fusion could be a very good thing. But its far more probable failure could/would/will further strengthen the eye-rolling reflex of the fusion doubters.

Hopefully they will get something out of it even if the good dog does not sit still (using Eric’s cool vernacular); like LPP will get an excellent X-Ray source even if we (gosh, I should pay those membership dues, shouldn’t I?) don’t break-even. Can’t see what they’d get, though… Maybe an alarm device that will wake up everyone on the block? If they sink 20 mil+ of some famous people’s money for nothing, – I do see your point.

[TimS]

Rezwan wrote: Now that you mention it, we did set up a separate section for the DPF – it was supposed to be for actual DPF practitioners to discuss their work, and we wanted to restrict it from the rabble. We set up a site (densplasmafocus.org), and I see that in the upgrade of our CMS, I have yet to change the settings to direct it properly. Not quite sure how. It’s not a simple re-direct, there’s a php thingie, so it’s low on the backlog list.

…………………

Guess I wasn’t clear, as usual. When I first heard of FFS/LPP/DPF a few months ago, I checked into DPF and saw that it has a very rich history going back decades. I know DPF has a whole community of practitioners. That is part of the reason I am here; Eric is leveraging all of that. However, I did not mean that FFS be focused on all of DPF. I meant, specifically, aneutronic fusion using a DPF reactor. Involving experimental projects. One such project in particular comes to mind, there may be others.

Like you say, if this does not work out, the name can be changed to “Focus on Fusion Society” at that time and we can all carry on. However, let’s think positive, and put our energy into making it work out. Most of the people here in this forum seem to regard LPP as the work that we are primarily interested in here, with other fusion projects being “other” fusion projects. It would seem to be a dilution and limitation not to be able to take all of the characteristics of DPF aneutronic fusion and use them to bring up some support.

Of course, I understand FFS is not legally part of LPP. We can’t be Eric’s cheering club, and I expect he doesn’t want that. However, personally I think DPF aneutronic fusion is pretty cool, but most importantly it is mostly what the people here are talking about.

I am bringing this up because I hope to get input from the wider community on this website, FFS members, etc. Is DPF aneutronic fusion the main thing here, or just any aneutronic fusion? I do not mean what do we think is most likely to be successful, or what we personally support, but I mean what do we think FFS is about?

[TimS]

Couple things-

What’s wrong with cheap? Nothing like a cheap date.

Regarding conservation; I think new energy can be tied into conservation of othing things, like resources and land. I already posted about aluminum recycling, which means not so much material needs to be mined. However, people on this forum have talked about very high energy applications to manufacture out of whatever junk is available. I forget the words or exact technologies they were referring to, but they know who they are.

The non-fusion application of the LPP reactor, as an X-ray source, could be used to monitor old structures and so not need to replace them as often. Conserving the effort needed to replace them. This might conserve energy in the construction sector even if DPF never generated an excess watt-hour.

That brings up one thing. All of this seems to be focused on aneutronic fusion, as opposed to aneutronic DPF. I think it would be great if any aneutronic fusion contender was successful, I certainly don’t just support DPF or LPP. However, when I think of the FF society, I think of DPF. I would not want to limit the FFS in any artificial ways. But this is a community, within that community I pay particular attention to DPF, and the F in DPF stands for focus, not fusion. The DPF is a particular type of reactor. That doesn’t seem to be an artificial limitation, that seems to be what we are about. Here.

Like in the previous paragraph about conserving energy in the construction sector, there may be other applications for DPF that FFS wants to focus on that other aneutronic projects are not so concerned with (although I guess they all produce X-Rays, but there may be other applications).

I think this issue is affecting the discussion on this and other threads; specifically people are focused on the aneutronic reaction, p-B11. That is good, the reaction is important, but so is the reactor. Also it may not be great in terms of an outreach campaign if we want to get away from people seeing the FF effort as “nuculur”, and instead see it as an exotic device (the DPF) the size of a coffee can that works like a big high-voltage spark plug, has no radiation problems, and produces tons-and-tons of power without harming the environment. Wait! I did sell this to a non-technical friend of mine, just a couple months ago, in just that way.

Also, I want my ring with a plasmoid and plasma swirls, not p-B11.

[TimS]

Excess energy can enable recycling. IIRC, complete aluminum recycling uses a huge amount of power. Certainly, abundant energy might contribute to industies that strip the worlds resources etc, and that is something to consider, but there does not have to be a dichotomy between protecting the environment and providing energy.

[TimS]

Eric would have fun with that one! Plasma streams between matter and anti-matter galaxies; how would they behave and what could we conclude from that?

[TimS]

I’m not sure I remember right, but doesn’t muon catalyzed fusion require H-H, e.g. DT?

Also, I thought it only worked at a lower temp where there was no ionization, e.g. not in a plasma, and the muon works by replacing the electron on one of the H in order to shield the proton from the coloumb barrier of the other H. Since DPF is very high temp, would it be applicable here at all? How is this effected by the muon binding energy in the p-muon atom?

[TimS]

Non-technical people always say “ick”. Their first reaction has been “is there radiation? OMG WTF how can you even think of more reactors!!!!!!” It is hard to explain to them that there is more radiation in a banana (radioactive potassium) than they are likely going to get from a reactor. It has been hard to get past this. There was no before and after, I don’t think I ever got through to anybody really.

Now with Fukushima, I think they might have been right. The word “likely” suddenly changed…

I haven’t talked about fusion since I discovered this serious aneutronic work. Changing “are likely going to get” into “can get” might make all the difference.

[TimS]

Do I really need to spell this out?

I wouldn’t be involved with lots of projects If I were entirely selfish. I’m not going to live long enough to reap the entire benefit of most projects I am involved in. And I certainly won’t benefit from the life extension efforts currently underway. Others will and that makes these projects worthy of my support.

Having longer lifespans leads to inherently better stewardship. Because it is people’s own future they are caring about.

This may not be true for everyone, but it is obviously true for many. This tripe about people not wanting to leave messes for their children to inherit is obviously not true for a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn’t be running a 1.6 trillion dollar annual deficit here in the United States. Words speak so much louder than actions And it’s obvious from their actions that many people would gladly enslave their children and grandchildren in order to live more comfortable themselves.

Yeah, life sucks sometimes. I HATE my current job. I deal with it. I also try to make the world a better place.

When you get sick do you seek medical attention? You don’t have to. Must be because you want to live longer. Others do too.

Big suprise!

This really gets into the whole memes versus genes thing we were talking about above. Thoughts regarding the 1.6 trillion dollar annual deficit, whether it is the end of the world or a temporary fact of the ongoing economic crisis, are part of our social circumstance and beliefs, basically involving our memes. This meme is causing a lot of conflict in our society, causing people not to seem to care as much about each other, essentially making them more selfish.

As I explained above, I think the extra gene pool diversity requirement for genetic evolution over memetic evolution causes genetic evolution to push individuals to try to connect with, and survive with, more other individuals than memetic evolution does. Genetic mutations are usually fatal, memetic mutations are new religions. Genetic evolution depends on larger gene pool diversity, memetic evolution can use mutational changes in the memes for necessary adaptation. The selfish gene may be selfish, but since that book was written I think the theory has gone more towards evolution of the entire gene pool, or even system of interacting gene pools, which may drive mechanisms to “unselfish” the individual gene. There is a word evolution theorists are using for “entire gene pool of a species” but it escapes me. These mechanisms may not be so driven in the case of memetic evolution, since it does not require as diverse a gene pool for adaptation, so memes are likely more selfish.

Certainly, people want to live a long, healthy life. Everybody I know wants to get to know their grandchildren (if any), maybe their greats. But in the long run, if individuals in our society evolve through their memes, not their genes, the world will become a more selfish place, according to the analysis in the previous paragraph. Would this be a good thing?

Sometimes the economic argument (ownership equals better stewardship, if people are not around in the future they can not own it, therefore infinite lifetimes will make the best possible world) is obvious, simple, and wrong because it does not account for the actual details of the mechanisms involved, such as genetic adaptation versus memetic adaptation.

[TimS]

Was that en.wikipedia.org?

[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?

[TimS]

What Rezwan just said points out a distinction between genes and memes. Successful memes take many forms and evolve in many interesting ways, that I have not thought about much. This is the same for genes, however for genes evolution requires a very large amount of variation. If a small number of organisms has its connection severed with the larger population, that is very bad for the evolutionary potention of those organisms by the nature of genetic evolution and how individual variation is more a function of genetic variation than mutation. Genetic mutation is usually fatal, memetic mutation is a new religion. Genetic evolution has a much stronger pressure for altruism than memetic evolution. One would think there might be some feedback in this, that genetic mechanisms that encouraged genetic mechanisms that encouraged … diversity would be more successful, since diversity is such a basic part of evolution.

In other words, is it the genes leveraging the memes to sever the connection between individuals, or memes with maybe a slight influence on genes through short term evolution? And which is stronger? And when She finally decides we’re making too much of a mess of things, will She just knock us all off and try a different social experiment where memes propagate in another way that is more in line with genetic evolution?

[TimS]

What about those of us who are probably not going to be much help in “pursuing” it, but are here to cheer and take delight in it? (unless Eric wants to hire somebody to help cleaning the lab – I would take that job REAL cheap!)

[TimS]

Joseph Chikva wrote:

My interpretation, which is why I said “essentially …”. It says that the electrolysis is powered by the battery, no other source of power. Since the battery is powered by the alternator, and the alternator by the engine, the car runs without any input power.

It is impossible. When battery will be discharged you will have negative energy balance.
You would have zero balance in case if at every energy conversion stages you would have 100% efficiency.
But taking into account that internal combustion engine has about 25%, alternator and rectifier – 80-90% and electrolytic cell – 80% balance will be negative.

Is impossible, yes. However, after reading patent, that is what it shows in my interpretation. Electrolysis powered by battery charged by alternator. Many thousands people have spent millions dollars on book of instructions how to install this in car, so people will buy this idea. Too bad these people do not put money in focus-fusion (or other [em]possible[/em] idea) as well.

[Author]

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