Comment on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:06:47 GMT

Imagine what people must have thought in 1910 about the feasibility of getting to the Moon or generating energy by artificially splitting atoms (especially within the 20th century).

Two problems with that sort of comparison: First, something like going to the Moon is a goal, not a technology. Thus, if we have other sources of power, the incentive to work out the details for fusion becomes small. Second, one shouldn't forget how many technologies have been tried and have fallen by the wayside as not very practical or not at all practical. A good way of getting a handle on this is to read old issue of something like Scientific American from the 1950s and 1960s. Or read scifi from that time period. One of example of historical technology that never showed up on any substantial scale is nuclear powered airplanes, despite a lot of research in the 1950s about them. Similarly, nuclear thermal rockets have not been made. This isn't because they are impossible, but because they are extremely impractical compared to other technologies. It seems likely that fusion power will fall into the same category. See this article about Project Pluto for example.

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