• kristina [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    if china develops a fusion reactor before the west capitalism is fuckin over lmao

    • KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Free energy + desalination + indoor farming = enough food to feed every climate refugee.

      I really hope Xi pushes the communism button around 2050. Communism is what we need to avoid climate-change induced WWIII, because capitalism sure isn't fixing shit.

        • kimilsungist [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          imagine thinking going to mars is an idea. like, genuinely tell me. Because i thought THE NUMBER ONE THING THAT IS OF ISSUE IS WEIGHT.

      • Koa_lala [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        That would enable Africa to be completely independent, right? We could also stop desertification like that, probably.

        • Alaskaball [comrade/them]A
          ·
          3 years ago

          Hold your horses, Africa still has to pay the West back for all of the education, infrastructure, industry, cultural uplifting, and genocide they graciously offered the simple people of Africa.

      • SweetCheeks [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        hate to break it to you but xi won't be president for the next 30 years.

    • happybadger [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      How so? It's not like we exported all of the manufacturing to the place that will have all the free energy. That'd be the one thing we didn't want to happen.

    • Pomegranate [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This experiment is actually part of ITER, but an international effort achieving breakeven fusion would still be cool as hell

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        almost everything fusion related is ITER though due to the international treaties in place

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        energy so cheap that you dont need foreign imports for energy. just give this to every third world nation and capitalism is ruined. im talking a near infinite supply of energy, and the resources to repair the reactor would be relatively common, enough to keep us going for millions of years

        this is why nuclear research and nuclear development is so important. humanity cannot sustain civilization and industry forever without it. we will eventually run out of good hydrocarbons, good lithium, and so on. and it takes more energy to create these things than it does to burn it. so without nuclear research, widespread industrial civilization cannot exist forever.

        the important thing about fusion is if we get it running, we can put some energy in and get more out of it, which will allow us to create things like lithium without an energy deficit. no other technology allows this level of flexibility. we're relying on energy from natural processes that formed lithium, hydrocarbons, etc. over the course of thousands or millions of years. but we'd be getting abundant energy quickly. and if we have hundreds of thousands of years to sit around and research, we might even come up with something better without a time crunch that other technologies give us.

        simple explanation (very unperfect): https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E

        longer explanation that is a bit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPS-epGPJmg

          • kristina [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            yep. pouring resources into it is very sensible if you think long term. but no, we like to think for the next quarter, the next 2-4 years.

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I don't really feel like we should sustain industry and civilization in the forms we're familiar with. They need to be replaced.