Comment by itp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itp | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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