Thread by @willwjack

Humanity is on the cusp of practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion and basically nobody is talking about it, which is nuts.

I left working in fusion because I was skeptical of the field's ability to progress, but my mind has totally changed (1/n)

Humans have built >100 tokamak fusion devices, which use magnets to confine and heat fusion fuel. We've hit a peak energy out/energy in (Q) of ~.67

Empirically, it turns out that Q scales *kind of* with the magnetic field cubed. 2x the magnetic field, 8x the efficiency. (2/n)

WELL, recent advances in mass manufacturing high temperature superconductors make WAY higher magnetic fields possible, and hence make Q >> 1 fusion possible! (3/n)

Of course it's still a *massive* effort to pull this off, but it's now more of an engineering + business problem than a science problem, and companies like @CFS_energy are well on their way to solving it.

Fusion's no longer 'always 30 years away' (4/n)

Two of the biggest questions society faces are where to get energy and what to do with it.
It's vogue to talk about how we may build AGI to revolutionize how we answer the latter, but few are excited that fusion is so close to making the former practically a non-issue (5/n)

And as someone that's worked in both, limitless energy by fusion is WAY closer to being 'solved' than AGI is. More people should be excited. (6/n)

Like the AI space, there's a fair amount of BS and noise in the commercial fusion space right now, but there's also way more clearly defined signal. Some teams with good theoretically + empirically informed approaches, and tractable plans to execute. (7/n)

And just imagine what possibilities it could unlock for humanity in the limit... fusion drives are practically a necessity for us to become an interstellar civilization. They run on stardust, and there's not much else other than that out in deep space. (8/n)