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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

> As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment.

Sometimes. Technology is very path-dependent; to invent z, you need to have invented w, x, and y first. And even with infinite resources that takes time. We’ve been working on fusion for half a century and it might be ready in another half century. Will more investment help? Yeah, but tokamaks take time to build, and you don’t know how to build the next tokamak until after you’ve done all your experiments with the current one. You can’t have iPhones in 1986 no matter how much money you throw at it because the underlying processor and battery tech isn’t there.

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Without necessarily (or completely) disagreeing, I'm curious if you can further justify your assertion of the strong path-dependency. I am personally amazed when I contemplate the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project, and specifically the number of technologies that did not exist at the time. It strikes me that there's a clear observational bias here. Particularly in the modern era, we really only have a single data point around the development of any given technology (given how trivial communication and coordination are). Are there any examples from history of the same technology being developed independently with different dependencies?

Possibly relevant, given your choice of fusion as an example, is the somewhat famous graph from the 1976 U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration report on nuclear fusion[0]. We're obviously looking at a number of projections and can't know whether they were right or wrong, but it is noteworthy that we're not even pursuing a plan we believe will ever lead to nuclear fusion ("fusion never").

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

You have to remember there’s a huge gulf between building something once and mass producing something, putting it in market and having it produce profits.

Electricly powered vehicles existed before the American civil war, it’s taken until now for them to have any hope of success in the market.

The Romans had steam engines, too. It took until the 18th or 19th century for metallurgy to catch up to the point where steam engines were worthwhile.

The Apollo program could never have happened without the decades of rocketry work that took place before that time. It's not like the US started from scratch in 1961 and landed a man on the moon in 1969; while the work involved to pull that off was incredible, there were decades of work prior to that, much of which involved the exact same people, that made Apollo possible.

Wikipedia, citing "Ward (2005). Dr. Space: The Life of Werner von Braun. ISBN 978-1-591-14926-2."

> Apollo program director Sam Phillips was quoted as saying that he did not think that the United States would have reached the Moon as quickly as it did without von Braun's help. Later, after discussing it with colleagues, he amended this to say that he did not believe the United States would have reached the Moon at all.

Wernher von Braun worked on rockets since the 1930's, inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth, whom he later worked with at Peenemünde. The first V-2 rockets were launched in 1944. Von Braun continued working on rockets continuously until he retired in the 1970's, after working on the Apollo program.

What would be the point of pursuing fusion? We don’t even have the political will to deploy fission.

Funding a fusion program would be like buying a car while your license is suspended.

We should absolutely be deploying fission on a wide scale, but the issues with waste disposal and radioactive contamination, while vastly overplayed, also go away with fusion.

Also, fusion could be orders of magnitude more efficient than fission, to the point where we can solve literally all of our sustainability problems just by throwing energy at the problem. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere? Build a factory that uses electricity to extract CO2 from the air, combine it with water, and recycle it back into hydrocarbons. Not enough water? Build desalination plants--the only reason we don't is because they're energy-intensive and energy is expensive. Need a sustainable source of nitrogen-based fertilizers? Extract nitrogen from the air. Batteries don't store as much energy as hydrocarbons? Manufacture EVEN MORE hydrocarbons out of the air and water and then use them to power your airplanes, in a closed-loop system where you're not even increasing the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

You can make a great sustainability case with fission. With fusion, you can make an incredible sustainability case and take away all of the fears involved. And by the time we get around to inventing it, odds are we're going to be fucked enough not to have any other choice but to adopt it.

Tokomak is uncharted territory. It’s hundreds of PhDs trying to solve problems literally no one knows how to solve.

A lot of what Tesla has been doing is low hanging fruit. Supply chain optimization. Industrial design. Roboticization. These things aren’t science, they’re engineering. They’re applying known principles to the litany of problems an electric car entails.

There’s not much new science in a Tesla. Most of it could have been done years ago. There is some iteration required of course, but that’s why starting earlier would’ve made a difference.

The whole reason Tesla can exist in the first place, and was founded in 2003 and not 1993 or 1983, is because of advances in battery technology that have already been driven by the consumer electronics industry. They're not solving hard problems now because the hard problems have already been solved by dozens of companies trying to make laptops and cell phones and other battery-operated devices. If they started way back when, they would have to solve those hard problems themselves.

If I remember it correctly, sustainable fuel was a big thing a few decades before these oil businesses started springing up, I believe it was Toyota and BMW who had an electric version back then.

But later, these oil mafias systematically destroyed that to the extent that many people in US believe that climate change is fiction.

My point being, sustainable sources of fuel are being either systematically undermined or for the lack of interest.

if we did not have $$$ from the oil interests against these alternate fuel then just imagine how much R &D would have happened till now!!

Even Nicholas Tesla had an electric car's design back in the 1800s, if that tech had been evolved to say Hydrogen fuel or ethanol or anything that doesn't shoot down our atmosphere then things would have been remarkably different now.

So, yes, there is a path dependent approach to science and technology, but for alternate fuel, the path was made ugly by $$$ from the oil interests

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