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Comment by f38zf5vdt | Hacker News Reader

How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to you?

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For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' flight 40 years later?

For the vast majority of people, the Wright Brothers' flight was also "just another Monday [or whatever day it happened to be]".

It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.

The potential for powered flight was clear to those who observed and didn't think they were lying. The Wright Brothers sold their improved designs to the US Army in 1908, just six years after their initial flight. 15 years after said initial flight you have massive formations of planes Dogfighting over France, conducting reconnaissance and dropping bombs.

15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.

In the case of the Wright Brothers, most people didn't even believe it. One factor at work was that they'd been primed by years of Respected Scientists saying that it was physically impossible.

The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic...

I doubt that 'wright-brothers.org' is a reliable impartial source on that. The idea of heavier than air flight had been around, it wasn't conceived by them. Lilienthal was an earlier well-documented pioneer, there are pictures of his gliders in mid-flight. Just to name one. So without doing further research, the idea that actual scientists at the time thought it was impossible seems highly unlikely to me. As early as the 18th century Europeans experimented with fixed wing "flying machines". The Wright Brothers probably weren't even the ones to first archive powered flight, there are multiple contenders.

It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?

That's just what I could find quickly on Google, accessible by all.

A few years back I read David McCullough's biography of the Wright Brothers which told the same story: https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1...

This site cites a couple of the pre-Wright naysayers: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...

Like the ARPANET? That was even less of a notable Monday to the general populace, because I doubt any significant part of the public had a great interest in some universities being able to connect their at least fridge-size, expensive computers together similarly to how they were already able to do before, but now using "packets".

ARPANET was established in 1969, the internet as we know it started gaining traction in the 90s. So you're saying this "breakthrough" means we're 30 years away from the nuclear fusion equivalent of the dot-com boom? If that's true then I'm incredibly hyped, show me the data

There is no need to put “breakthrough” in quotes. For the first time since working on fusion since the 50s, we have achieved a positive gain of energy. Engineering-wise, it is a long way still until this can be put into its intended use, and who knows what roadblock scientists and engineers will hit on the way, but anyone who knows what they are talking about is suitably excited about this milestone.

How many times have you read yet another article on the most recent fantastic fusion breakthrough?

It certainly sounds like just another Monday to me.

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