Future Technology

I read K. Eric Drexler's blog because I've had an interest in him for 20 years since I first read his Engines of Creation book about the promise of nanotechnology.

Here's Drexler's take on fusion energy:

There is no known way to build a remotely economical fusion power plant, even if the fuel is free and the plasma physics works perfectly.

The report speaks of potential, unspecified, orders-of-magnitude reductions in fabrication cost, but what would other technologies look like if evaluated by the same rules?

Advances that would drop the cost of future fusion power machines into a range competitive with current photovoltaic devices are on a scale that would drop the cost of future photovoltaic devices to almost nothing.

I enjoy this comment because I can remember reading stuff in the early 1960s about the "promise" of fusion energy. The authors ernestly promised that fusion would deliver cheap energy "within the next 20 years". For the next 50 years I've watched as the changing faces of scientists in white lab coats have stepped forward and repeated the mantra about the promise of fusion energy "within the next 20 years".

What it took me nearly 30 years to realize was that I was being had. All these "scientists" were really bureaucrats being trotted out to justify getting pork barrel money to advance military technology under the cover of "fusion energy".

What really bugs me is that there is a place where new technology for energy production is accessible and might prove to be cheap. It is the field of "cold fusion" (this is a misnomer, it isn't "fusion" if you accept the Widom-Larsen theory which I do). This is an area which could benefit from a tiny, tiny fraction of the billions spent on "fusion research". This is an area where I suspect the real advances in energy production will occur. But it is ignored.

Here's a bit from the blog by the one guy, Steven B. Krivit, who has independently and honestly reported on this field:

I am often asked my opinion of the Allen Widom and Lewis Larsen ultra-low-momentum neutron-catalyzed theory of LENRs.

Many scientists in the LENR field think, for a variety of reasons, that the Widom-Larsen theory is wrong. Many scientists outside the LENR field who have looked at the Widom-Larsen theory think that it looks feasible or at least that it lacks error.

I’ve carefully considered the scientific as well as pathological skepticism regarding the Widom-Larsen theory. I also have 10 years of experience as an analyst of pathological skepticism in science. I have spoken with a broad cross-section of people and had firsthand conversations with Larsen, which few people seem willing to do. Larsen has openly posted his phone number on a variety of Internet sites.

Widom, Larsen and their collaborator, Yogendra Srivastava, probably have found a way to explain most of the LENR phenomena.