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Comment by Systemic33 | Hacker News Reader

With regards to NIF being a military facility, I'd very much think that energy production (cheap, safe, limitless?) is very much a military needs as much as a civilian need. Even if said energy goes further to power laser weapons or other exotic power hungry systems; energy is energy, and something has to produce it.

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The internet was a military need from what I remember.

The military said something like: "Telephone routing is point to point and inflexible, if the enemy cuts out 1-2 lines of communication, an entire section is completely cut off. We need something better." That something better turned out to be packed switching where you just throw stuff along a network and the network ensures that the packet reaches the destination, but you could theoretically have two packets going from Bucharest to Johannesburg, one through India and the second one through Canada.

That said while the intent the current internet is pretty centralized at least in some senses.

But it’s software defined, so it’s much quicker to work around failures of those centralised points.

Yeah compare broken water pipes with broken facebook/whatsapp etc. If the former is broken, people don't have water until the issue is fixed. With latter, at least they can use one of the alternatives (and they do, usage counts of alternatives go up during outages).

Yeah, I'm not talking about broken facebook or twitter, I'm talking about the various cdns out there, cloudfare, etc

Even for those. Swapping a CDN or infra provider is difficult, but hardly impossible.

It's much easier than the same operation for physical infrastructure.

That is, unless the water pipes require internet to work.

It started as a way to network air defense bases for AESA radars, NORAD and Nike missiles together across CONUS. Feature creep and increased scope grew it into a general purpose data network that linked not only military sites but also research institutes by the 80's.

There’s about ten years’ of NSF funding between The Internet and the dotcom boom. So yes, but actually no.

Depends - if someday they manage to make the fusion generators compact enough (think of the coffee-machine-sized "Mr. Fusion" that Dr. Brown brought back from 2015 in Back to the Future where you could throw in any kind of junk and it would use it to provide energy, or even the shipping container-sized units that Lockheed Martin is envisaging), it might be interesting for military purposes. But it's very optimistic to believe that the NIF will seriously work on sustained fusion and extracting the generated energy in a usable way - after all they are called National Ignition Facility, so now they achieved that, mission accomplished. They can now run further ignition experiments with various pellets, laser configurations etc. and study the results, but they will probably say that a new facility (and more money) is needed for further studying sustained fusion.

NIF being a "military facility" has less to do with laser weapons or power-hungry systems than their type of research indirect drive laser-fusion, being the exact mechanism that takes place in multiple-stage nuclear weapons. The lasers at NIF first generate x-rays, which are then focused on the target to energize the pellet and create fusion.

If you look at the "shot history" of NIF -- the vast majority of their facility's energy is spent on actual DOD weapons research, not fusion power research that would be incidentally beneficial to the DOD:

https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics

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