Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

You will find, especially after reading the comments, that fusion is not about creating electricity (it never will), it is about sparking people's imagination. Many people grew up reading science fiction and there is seriously nothing it the last 50 years that comes close to the amazing breakthroughs in the physical world that happened in the 50 years before that. The idea of fusion is the best thing going right now.

You won't be able to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of fusion power because any serious conversation will always be trampling on people's dreams.

View on HN

If fusion is the best thing right now, that would be incredibly sad, because it barely seems to be making any progress at all.

Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.

Yeah but that stuff just doesn't really tickle the imagination. You won't see that stuff on the cover of an 80's scifi book.

That first sentence is an entirely subjective take, and one that I disagree with entirely.

I don't get comments like this. Is there a measure of progress we should be using for this? Not only does this resemble the "where's the flying car I was promised?" complaint but it ignores the very real realities that a lot of progress is measured in increments that have a way of sneaking up on you exponential-style. Solar energy, for instance, was not a huge announcement, but it was a steady trickle of learning curve improvements (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25265819)

Do you remember ten years ago when nobody had heard of mRNA or CRISPR? Or fifteen years ago when neural networks were a dead end and SVM were all the rage?

I'm not saying fusion is the "best thing" or have any insight as to where it might be in the curve of adoption, but it feels weird to be making a race out of fusion with these other technologies.

The comment I responded to held fusion up as an example of something that sparked the imagination. I'm just pointing out that it's a sad example and we have far better and more inspirational examples. mRNA and CRISPR are great examples of that; those are real breakthroughs.

Lol I wonder if anyone ever said this about flying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com