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Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why you and many other commenters are so against the idea of fusion. Solar is decent, not perfect by any stretch, so we should just give up trying to solve the energy technology for the next 200 years? It's not even like it's one or the other. No one is abandoning solar to work on fusion. But fusion, if it works, is orders of magnitudes more efficient than solar is. It opens avenues that are considered impossible and science fiction today.

It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.

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I'm not against fusion, there just is simply no viable fusion power that can be built today. It's not going to get here fast enough. We need to adopt renewables yesterday. There is no time to be wasted pretending that fusion provides any value aside from starry eyed theoretical aspiration.

We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.

> We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.

Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.

I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.

But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.

I'm 48.

When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!

I hear a lot of stuff like this and it just doesn't jive with my childhood experience. I have a suspicion that bullshit was, on some specific channels like pop sci, much easier to pass in the pre-internet days. Or at least the signal : noise ratio has gotten much better with a voice of reason saying "no" whenever these things pop up.

It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.

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