RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Nuclear Fusion and The Last Man

Dec. 14, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

22:27

Nuclear Fusion and The Last Man

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	Well, I'm happy to say that I am bringing you good news.
	The nut of all nuts has seemingly been cracked.
	Energy from fusion is coming online, maybe in our lifetime, maybe in the next 20 years, if not tomorrow.
	We can create bounteous energy.
	For the grid, for electric vehicles, electric trains, space travel, who knows, and more, through nuclear fusion, without creating radioactive waste, and by avoiding the costly and dirty fossil fuels that have been the backbone of industrial civilization for the last hundred years.
	I'm not joking.
	This story has been picked up, but I don't think it's been given the fanfare that it deserves.
	It was first reported in the Financial Times, and I will just read a little bit of this just to get you up to speed.
	This reads like science fiction, to be honest.
	Or a young adult fantasy novel.
	Fusion Energy Breakthrough by U.S. Scientist.
	Boost Clean Power Hopes by Tom Wilson.
	U.S. government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
	Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun.
	But no group has been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes, a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels in conventional nuclear energy.
	As an aside, nuclear energy operates through fission, that is the splitting of the atom.
	The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.
	The fact that this includes the world's biggest laser is really the cherry on top of the sundae.
	An amazing story.
	And I am very happy.
	In fact, news like this almost kind of reverses many of the trajectories that I see for Western civilization.
	It's worth revisiting this notion called a Kardashian scale.
	And this is something that Carl Sagan spoke about.
	Others have as well.
	And it's basically, it came from a Soviet scientist in the 1960s.
	This was a very, very big picture idea.
	And it described three levels of civilization.
	So, level one in the original scale, it's been modified, but I'll stick with the original.
	All the energy that reaches the planet from the sun is being harnessed or consumed.
	Kardashev is basically measuring a civilization through the energy that it's consumed.
	Now, you could say, well, that's not really what civilization is about.
	Civilization is about art and intelligence and culture.
	And, of course, that's correct.
	At least in the industrial age, we can measure a civilization in terms of how much work is being done.
	Now, what the value of that work is, is not a question that can be answered.
	That is a value question that science, in a way, can't answer.
	But it definitely does offer a good...
	You know, rule of thumb type measure for where we are as a civilization.
	You know, whatever debates we might have, certainly if energy consumption began to drop by 10% a year and we were, you know, the world was going dark and so on, I think everyone could agree that civilization was declining.
	Now, it is interesting.
	we have not officially reached stage one.
	Stage one would be harnessing all of the energy from the Sun that is reaching the planet.
	Now, Now, on some level, all civilization, even hunter-gatherer civilization, if you want to call it civilization, is an attempt to do this.
	It is an attempt to harness the energy.
	Given off by the sun, whether through gathering berries that grow through sunlight and photosynthesis, whether it is hunting antelope that are also on some root level based on the energy input from the sun.
	But then you can take that up.
	That would include developing fossil fuels, which is, of course, from the dinosaurs.
	But are ultimately based on the sun.
	It might include solar power itself directly, immediately harnessing it, and other things like that.
	That would be a stage one civilization, and we actually haven't quite reached that.
	Now, a stage two civilization, you know, in this almost ridiculously big picture outlook, is capturing or harnessing the energy radiating from a planet's home star.
	So this would be like creating a megastructure around the sun, a massive series of solar panels where we are more or less taking all of that energy.
	Again, for what?
	We can't say.
	But with that amount of energy...
	You could certainly imagine interstellar travel and so on.
	And then, not to be outdone, Kardeshev really takes it to the limit and talks about a Level 3 civilization.
	This includes harnessing all of the energy of a galaxy.
	And when I hear something like this, I'm almost imagining the...
	Creatures or entities in Arthur C. Clarke's book, 2001, and that are more mysteriously depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001.
	This intergalactic organism that can seed intelligence in unknown planets and that can make plans.
	On the timescale of millions of years, just really something else.
	Now, let me talk a little bit about the implications, kind of more immediate implications.
	This news has just hit, and we should be cautiously optimistic or skeptically hopeful about what can happen here.
	I don't think the government is lying.
	I don't think this is propaganda or anything.
	I don't think they would have done that unless this potential is real.
	That being said, you're bombarding a pallet of hydrogen plasma with a giant laser.
	We don't know how this can be made pragmatically useful or, needless to say, be commercialized.
	Are we going to be able to harness this power in the next decade, in the next 25 years?
	It's taken us about 50 years of laboratory work trying to get to a net profit energy in the laboratory.
	Is it going to take us another 50 years where we can fuel a grid through the fusion process?
	I don't know.
	Again, this does fill me with optimism, but it's cautious.
	But keep in mind that markets are forward-projecting mechanisms.
	That is, you are not buying a stock, for instance.
	Due to its great performance in the past or how this has been a great company for the last 50 years and you just want to own a bit of it.
	That's nostalgia.
	Markets are always going forward.
	The question is, what is this company going to be in the future and thus can you sell it to someone at a profit?
	So markets are forward looking.
	And I don't know if anything has been affected by this news because...
	This is very early, but you could certainly imagine markets for fossil fuel companies and the like beginning to tank on this news.
	Now, again, I don't think it would happen that quickly.
	But as this is developed and as there's a kind of timeline for the commercial, industrial, just practical application of this, I could see that happening.
	There could be a run out of energy stocks, conventional fossil fuel energy stocks, in the sense of we're not going to care about this stuff anymore.
	We're moving on.
	We're going to fuel the grid through fusion.
	We're going to drive electric cars in the future that can be powered on the grid.
	And, you know, with a mere glass of water, you could fund a million electric cars for...
	This could be an extremely remarkable thing.
	Now, another political implication that I think is going to come from this is that if this is something very real, then there are going to be political forces funded by entities in the Middle East that are going to try to talk everyone out of this.
	Because needless to say, this reduces the power of the Middle East to a tremendous extent.
	Some 50% of the world's oil reserves and I think around a third of natural gas is in the Middle East, an ultimately small area on the globe that is immensely important.
	And there are going to be clear geopolitical implications to fusion if it is practical.
	I don't think getting our hands on oil was the sole reason for, say, the invasion of Iraq or our United States' continued interest in the Middle East.
	I think there are other factors at play.
	There's Israel and its perceived enemies.
	There are other things.
	And we didn't just go in and conquer and take the oil.
	It was done through But again, I'll grant you that the presence of oil makes someone like Saddam Hussein much more important and potentially dangerous to the U.S. Empire than someone out in a resource-depleted place that we don't care that much about because he couldn't, so to speak, turn off the oil tap at any point.
	You know, I was thinking about this.
	I wonder if there are going to even be religious implications to the ending of the Middle East as a place of importance.
	I think with Christian Zionism, American foreign policy, and just the endless chaos and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all of that tension and drama almost added to the religiosity of You know, the Middle East and Jerusalem and the birthplace of their religion, it's also in the news.
	And so you can kind of understand why they would have apocalyptic fantasies about the Middle East.
	If this changes and the Middle East becomes a backwater, and we simply don't care about Qatar or Saudi Arabia and the like, and we just simply move off it.
	I personally think that would be an amazing thing.
	But I do think it would obviously affect geopolitics, but I think it might also affect Christianity in some profound way.
	Just a thought.
	We could also discuss how something like fusion Could be the beginning of a new civilization, or it could be the end of civilization.
	Now, I'll give you the hopeful view first.
	We spend so much of our lives running around, working hard, fretting, pulling our hair out, just to basically survive, just to keep going, just to make sure that we can...
	Put enough food on the table or fill up our tank with gas or have enough money to fly in a plane or go on a train and so on.
	We put so much into the very basics.
	And the rest of it is the icing on the cake.
	Do you want to go on vacation?
	Do you want to buy a fancy dress or whatever?
	It's something offered in addition to our basic living standards.
	And if you just imagine what it would mean if those living standards become radically less expensive, because that's at least the promise.
	Of nuclear fusion.
	It's not just that we're going to pay 20 cents less a gallon for gas.
	It's that you could run your car for 100 years on a eyedropper worth of hydrogen.
	I mean, it is an amazing prospect.
	And energy would be so abundant.
	First, I think it would probably be shared with the rest of the world.
	There might even be a kind of lack of scarcity.
	I mean, think about this.
	With that much energy, you could operate a robotic mining organization almost endlessly digging for stuff.
	Now, I know that...
	Things have value because they have value in our heads.
	I'm not a Marxist.
	I don't believe in a labor theory of value where the cost of labor is what sets the price, ultimately.
	I don't believe that.
	I think our subjective viewpoint sets the price.
	Nevertheless, the idea of having a robot that could endlessly dig for gold, All day, all night, non-stop, and we have enough energy to do it for a hundred years.
	It's just a remarkable thing to think about, as it could radically end scarcity of things like gold, as I used in this example, something you have to dig out of the earth, but also food production and all sorts of things.
	What is our consciousness going to be without the scarcity?
	But I also think that two things need to be taken in on this.
	Civilization really can't be estimated on the basis of energy consumption because it's avoiding the value question of what are you ultimately trying to do or achieve?
	There has to be a new vision that accompanies this miracle.
	It's, of course, not a biblical miracle.
	It was done through decades of hard work, but you understand this miracle gift.
	This is ultimately nothing without a vision.
	Economies and scientific organizations don't just...
	Operate on their own momentum or according to their own logic.
	There has to be people operating these...
	Organizations or superorganisms, you could say.
	Operating towards end goals.
	And there has to be people setting those goals.
	There has to be a concept of, we are going to use this miracle to explore the universe.
	We are going to use this miracle to get to a point where we can more fully harness the power of the sun in order to, again, terraform Mars, go to other galaxies.
	Unlock the secrets of the universe, etc.
	You have to have that will and that vision to actually make this into something worth having.
	Otherwise, it's just going to simply be a nightmare.
	We could be in a scarcity-free or experience radically reduced scarcity, at the very least, and decide that Utopia is really here at last.
	And we don't have to work very much at all.
	You can experience Karl Marx's idea of paradise, be a fisherman in the morning and a poet in the afternoon and a piano teacher at night or whatever he suggested in that way.
	We can end the division of labor, have robots do most of the work.
	And we can, I don't know, sit around and improve ourselves or something like that.
	But I think most people would sit around.
	This does remind me a little bit of the UBI concept and one of the most compelling criticisms of UBI, that is universal basic income.
	The criticism is not that it's not feasible.
	It's that it would ruin something important about humanity.
	In the sense that you get your thousand bucks a month and you just simply sit on your ass.
	You're not going to go start a new business or go back to school or something.
	You're going to play video games or, much like in the movie Inception, go to some opium den and go to another world through the power of recreational drugs.
	There has to be a vision for what we're going to do with this new power.
	And simply offering humanity radically less scarcity, I think, could actually turn into a nightmare.
	There have been some books and films that have examined this.
	We could talk about Brave New World, but I was actually thinking about the really good Pixar movie, Wall-E, where people...
	We're in this techno-paradise, and they ultimately abandoned Earth, which had been polluted beyond repair, and we're just these obese blobs flying through space on a pleasure cruise.
	That's not really what we mean by exploring the universe.
	It's the last man imagined by Nietzsche Fukuyama on steroids, or made obese.
	It's a horrifying image of humanity.
	We should remember that we are evolved for scarcity.
	We didn't become who we are through civilization and free market economics and luxury goods at a reasonable price.
	No.
	We evolved into who we are through fighting and scratching in many ways.
	A willingness to cooperate in order for the tribe to be successful.
	And keep in mind that the success of the tribe often meant conquering other tribes.
	And the best one wins.
	We evolved through sexual selection.
	That is a kind of scarcity of mating and breeding in men and women.
	And thus we evolved to value certain traits.
	In the sexual game so that you could win out and have more children.
	That's how we evolved to who we are.
	We don't know who we are, really, as a species living in a world without scarcity.

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