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Fusion vs the doomsday clock

Will fusion save us? If SPARC or ITER are on the right track, then no way. Their timelines are way too slow. Earth will be toast😭

It's a know fact to everyone involved that ITER won't work. Best outcome is that they learn something from it.

So if you're working on tokamaks like ITER, that kinda means that you think the world will be saved in some non-fusion way, in a way that doesn't need fusion for people to live, and that there'll be enough of humanity left when tokamak fusion is finally ready to come in and make the already-saved world even better and greener and maybe set our sights on the stars. That's great, but, let's solve the burning kitchen before building a new deck on the patio.

If, on the other hand, something like Zap or Helion with their pie-in-the-sky, Hail Mary approaches are correct then that’d be awesome. That’s not super likely and we definitively have to work on other approaches to end fossils and not put all our hopes on one or both of these wild ideas, but it’s nice to have like an additional tiny li’l source of hope.

It’s like if you’re on the battlefields of Rohan or Gondor but you’ve got Frodo and Sam inching towards Mount Doom (or Luke Skywalker in the trench if you prefer the space edition). That doesn’t mean you should just hang back and think everything’s fixed (because you don’t know for sure that they’ll make it), but that doesn’t mean you should give up either (because you don’t know for sure that they’ll fail).

That goes for a lot of other supposedly world-saving tech, too.

There are two common ways we humans mess up when there’s this kind of tech, anything from wild energy storage plans to wave hydro to MSR a.k.a. LFTR. We go “Oh, OK, guess I don’t have to do anything, then!”

We give up on other plans because we’re so sure that the Hail Mary plan will…

work and fix everything no matter what we do
fail and it’s no use trying anything

Both are mistakes. Let’s keep trying to fix the climate crisis and end fossils.♥︎

Also I obviously think a pulsed system is more appealing than igniting an actual miniature sun when the original sun is already making our li'l blue marble too hot.