Comment by zamadatix
5 days ago
As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years. Besides, the point is "we won't really know a good estimate for when until it's already about to hit us in the face" not "we should just assume 50 years is a more correct guess than other ones".
As for the comments about votes, they aren't a measure of terseness either. The point is to bubble comments likely to result in curious and thoughtful conversation to the top while comments which will distract from that kind of conversation (combative, vague, distractly offtopic, or whatever else the reason may be) tend to get hidden away. Whether a comment is totally on the money or absolutely incorrect, how you present the conversation starter has a far bigger drive on what types follow-on conversation will appear. Here, that also strongly implies what types of votes will appear too.
> As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years.
When a prediction is at a timescale where the person making the prediction will be retired by the time the prediction applies, you can safely ignore the prediction. That person has no reputational skin in the game.
If that's the singular prediction a report makes it can be safely regarded as suspicious regardless of the timeframe.
And how about a honest discussion about whether 30 years away for fusion research may boil down to never ? We are in a contraction already,people voting for decomplexification of society because that is just a natural felt trade off- feed my family now with less tax and forget about leechers promising free energy since almost a 100 years.Its not reasonable , its not historically backed up (science saved the day multiple times ) but this window of research opportunities is closing rapidly and its time to find alternatives to finance such endeavours besides state and oligarchy conglomerate investment scams.
Sustained fusion is already a thing in the universe but while we can't undiscover what powers the sun we could certainly give up replicating it on Earth if we'd like. That would be less an estimate of how long it'd take and more a measure of what we want to invest our limited resources in though.
I think everyone would agree we should find ways of investing that aren't scams. The hard part is who agrees on what is a scam. I don't mind more purely private investment myself though, which has seemed to be a trend in recent years.