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Comment by viach | Hacker News Reader

Yup, as much as things like magic wand, warp drive, aliens or parallel worlds colonization, they all can save us.

How dare people say just limiting consumption and CO2 pollution could have any effect. Let's just bet everything on zero.

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Fusion is scientifically possible; executing it in a cost effective way is just an engineering challenge. That doesn't mean it'll happen, soon or ever, but it's a valid gamble. Yes, the history of fusion has been long and full of false starts, but it's undeniable that huge progress has been made, and it's hardly absurd to think the journey is finally drawing to a close.

Magic wands, warp drives, aliens, or colonising parallel worlds are not comparable. They are not, as far as we know, scientifically possible, and no progress has been made towards them.

Of course, but in a world where, practically, we aren't and won't be able to reduce emissions in time, what do we do? All approaches need to be looked into simultaneously. And it seems like that might be the world we live in.

In many cases it may be far easier to get billions funneled to researchers and scientists for moonshot projects like this than to get world leaders to agree to and enforce billions/trillions of dollars' worth of emissions reductions.

As mentioned in other comments, even if the warming issue itself is solved "out-of-band", there are still lots of other issues associated with what's being released. But it's a start, and might be the difference between turmoil and utter catastrophe. Countless human and non-human animal lives could potentially be saved which might otherwise not be if moonshot projects like this didn't exist. Reducing suffering and death, for all time scales, is the only metric we should be optimizing for at the end of the day.

This problem has to be viewed in terms of what will actually help, not what we "should" be doing. I'd certainly wish the president of my country would sign the Paris Agreement; obviously, we should. But a scientist won't be able to influence that, and probably otherwise won't be able to have much impact lobbying politicians, so they need to find a way to help any way they can.

My point is, we are trying to get workaround for the impossibility of reaching consensus and absence of political will with some complex tech. Probably we'll manage to do it this time with fusion. But this is a dead end in the long run.

It's hard to see fusion as a dead end, when it could produce as much zero-emissions energy as we need, and last until the sun goes out.

I hope we do fix the political situation, but doing that may be harder than achieving fusion, so I wouldn't want to bet entirely on that. And even if we accomplish it, fusion could still make our task easier if it's cheap enough. There's no merit to making things harder than they need to be.

Fusion is nothing like these things you listed - we can see that it can be done with our naked eyes each day, and we even managed to use it for weapons. The only thing stopping us from doing it now are engineering problems.

Limiting CO2 emission is needed anyway, I don't know why people feel the need to dismiss other parts of solution just to make their favorite parts seem more necessary.

What we really need is Mega Maid, but for CO2 this time.

EDIT For the young'uns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7aeWQCF1jM

Several companies are working on machines that directly capture CO2 from air. It looks like the cost will be around $100/ton at scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture

One of them should call their product Mega Maid :)

Yes but with fusion there is a zero. Warp drive etc is just walking away from the table.

We put our bets on everything that might help, long shots included.

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