It was Monday a week ago that Boston Joe posted a diary on Dr. Bussard’s fusor design for a nuclear fusion power reactor, as described in his talk at Google.
After viewing the lecture twice, it seemed to me that the fusor is indeed a serious and promising line of enquiry–more promising than the tokamak (in its various forms, including ITER)–and I reposted Boston Joe’s diary at European Tribune, where it got a rather frosty reception. But there were also some useful responses, including a link to the physicist Lubos Motl, who works in string theory, who posted on his blog a clear and concise summary of Dr. Bussard’s design.
But that is not precisely my topic today. Rather, I want to note how I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for this research proposal, and what it meant that I should be so enthused. For three days my entire mood was shifted and lifted!
Why?
(Though in a very limited way) the fusor design promises a way out–an amelioration–of what is coming, and no matter how hard I try, I cannot face THAT without a sense of desperation that I have not really acknowledged.
I need to back up, and also perhaps indulge myself a little, and say what this series “The Autumnal City” is about. My title is taken from a novel that I will now never write. For mood, imagine Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Samuel R. Delaney’s Dahlgren. For theme, the transition from a reality that is organized linearly to one that is probabilistic and connected web-like. I am definitely a child of both the modern and post-modern experience. For topic, the 1960s–what else!? 😉 and possibilities not taken. But the Autumnal City itself, of course, refers to a world that is about to pass away.
It refers to us.
Last winter I attempted to write each week for an entire season, and nearly succeeded. Perhaps I just ran out of things to say. But now once again it seems I should write. The choice of venue–a political blog–is problematic. Politics is about to become very irrelevant. But as politics becomes irrelevant, public discourse will become very relevant–if the better scenerios are to be reached! The political-economic-geological transition we are entering will be shaped by thoughts and actions that are occuring now. What should they be?
There is something very odd about writing now, as most of what needs to be said should have been said twenty-five years ago. We are really, really behind. Beyond admitting I was personally incapable then, I should like to recall Izzy’s recent diary Before They Called it Aids. It catches the mood just right. Too many of us were worrying about the immediate crises of the 1980s that arrived with President Reagan to think into the strategic implications. Would it have mattered? Well, much underlying work that should have been done will not get done, as we only begin now to think about the world that will come. There might have been a soft landing, but that window has closed. So that is certainly too bad.
So here we are, and time is very short. I want to refer to James Howard Kundstler’s Clusterfuck Nation of last Monday 27 November ’06 (scroll down) inspired by a recent visit to the Interstate malls of Minneapolis Minnesota. One of his best pieces, ever.
It is so over.
This week he links to Dmitry Orlov, who has previously written in detail about the collapse of the Soviet Union in three articles posted at From the Wilderness. Orlov’s current summary of those articles is very concise, exceedingly funny, and thoroughly morbid. This is the truth that none of us wants to look at.
Oddly enough, Orlov’s proposals are in plain sight. After Katrina, who can doubt that survival depends on the ability to form practical, co-operative groups? Government won’t do it; corporations won’t do it.
That too is so over.
A key issue is timelines, which I am beginning to see is one of my weaker talents. I underestimated by a factor of eight how long it would take Bush to destroy civil liberties, and while economic collapse is certainly on schedule–with the housing market already in a coma, and the dollar moving into a serious and presumably terminal slide–to say it will hit this winter is certainly different from saying how long it will take to play out, which is another matter entirely. On the one hand we may see total collapse in 2007, but again, suppose it takes years to unfold? After all, the Great Depression took nearly four years from onset to bottom.
It is only in the slow melt scenerio that the fusor is relevant at all. There has to be enough time to build it! But not only that, it is only in the slow melt scenerio that fusion power is needed to stave off more evil alternatives, specifically, new fission reactors and a massive switch to coal burning. (In the fast-collapse scenerio there is not time to build and do these things.) So my wild hope of last week is revealed to be a grasping at straws. Reality is more modest, with a good chance that fusion power will not matter.
Food is much in my thoughts these days. Can people be gardening by next summer? (Ironically, I have no talent myself.) And that may not be soon enough. Yet it hardly seems likely to happen. People are still asleep–it’s contagious! I feel sleep seeping into my head with each happy, irrelevant conversation I have, to the point I can hardly think about this stuff myself.
That is why I have to write: I have to keep trying.
Meanwhile: Maybe I am wrong. It’s my only hope.
