Having a luxurious way of life is very dependent on personal definitions. Some people will always want more than they have. Some people will be satisified with relatively little.

I personally would settle for sufficient resources for each person to keep the birth rate down, assuming the correlation between resources and birth rates continues to hold. For that to be achievable, we need new sources of energy somehow. I doubt we all get private airplanes, but who really knows? Cheap safe portable fusion power would permit it.

I’m not sure which science fiction author you’re thinking of, but Larry Niven pointed out the waste heat problem in Ringworld. The Puppetteers solved that problem by moving their planets farther away from their sun. Maybe someday.

My impression is that investors feel a bit burned out by fusion research. Fusion researchers have been promising for so long and delivering so little. That said, it is obviously of great importance to our future. The U.S. Department of Energy does of course invest in fusion, but I don’t know how much money they actually put into it. In general alternative energy sources tend to be underfunded as the existing energy companies get as much of the budget as they can.

Now, an open source fusion reactor? That certainly sounds like chutzpah.

Now that’s an idea that didn’t occur to me. Whenever I start to think about sustainability, I see there are lot to change in our societies and ways of thinking. In fact, so much that I start to get lost in the details, and give up even thinking about it.

MSimon, I’m afraid it’s not just that we need to get “a” safe power power generation system. We have to make sure it will be accessible to everyone and not used unwisely. I think private airplanes are uselessly wasting tremendous power (currently, as I don’t have one), but I can justify having a car. In reality, I probably shouldn’t use it. But this is not sufficient. Will we reach the point when everyone has a luxurious way of life, without wasting so much energy? If not luxurious, comfortable? Will we need a caste system for the people more equal?

I can’t recall which sci-fi author had the scene of having easily accessible, practically unlimited personal power generation devices — only to produce so much energy that the whole planet started having problems with the waste heat on an unbelievable scale. Remember, almost all of the power generated will be heat soon after.

Ian, thanks for the “new” site, I’m enjoying it

Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

So I have decided to do an end run around the government by designing an open source fusion test reactor.

Any one care to help? You can start here:

IEC Fusion Newsgroup
IEC Fusion Technology blog