Historic Moments!
Wait! Don’t for a moment think that we are talking about the tidal wave of human beings who were moved by bus with Mexican police escorts to our southern border near Ciudad Benito Juarez. Ten of those buses a day, improbably funded by unknown sources, who are then discharged to walk to the US border, wade across a river and then enter the American welfare system. All paid for by somebody we don’t know, until that burden is assumed by us.
We don’t recall being asked about this significant policy change, which we think is unsustainable and a clear violation of our rights as American citizens. It is sort of like the nuclear fusion breakthrough announced yesterday. Splash was the first one up at Big Pink’s bunkroom today. He went directly to the pantry to take action, since this could be one of those days that is celebrated through future years as a moment when everything changed.
We are talking about something so huge that is solves the climate crisis. It will save us from the perils of increasing carbon dioxide in the air we all breath. There is a mystery, though. There was some interesting tid-bits of information about that in the initial press release which led to another mystery. One of us actually knew a guy at the Lawrence Livermore Lab who as part of the breakthrough scientists have been working on for more than sixty years. He was so excited that he included an emoji in his note. He said the entire staff was embargoed from discussing anything beyond the colorful yellow circle with the smile and the exclamation point.
Washington gets to announce the triumph of re-writing the old laws of physics, which they claim they will talk about as early as later this morning. It is being described by a PhD credentialled fellow from the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) Plasma Physics Group. He may be embargoed at the moment in talking about the specific results of the research, but he was able to describe them as a “momentous achievement.”
The event we are talking about is a moment in nuclear fusion. “Moment” may be a little charitable in describing what happened. It is better described as a world changing event that lasted for about a billionth of a second in chronological time. This startling development has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy. There are preparations at the National Ignition Facility for celebration of the first demonstration of fusion ‘energy-gain.’ They have to wait until preparations are complete for the Government we sponsor to take credit for saving the earth’s future. That is the one we have been working on for a long time. The moment when more fusion energy is output from a collision of laser beams than it took to generate the input of the lasers, which was taken from the electricity in the wall-sockets produced by fossil fuels of varying types.
A source at the Ignition Facility was embargoed from actually saying how it works until after the press conference. But “they” could state confidently that “the experiment demonstrates unambiguously that the physics of Laser Fusion works.”
These are new rules, of course, and will need billions of dollars in additional funds to write them all down. So, this moment of triumph also has a little bit of ambiguity. In order to transform a global energy system based on fossil fuels to something else will require a lot of work before it actually produces anything usable. But we should recognize that this was a key step along the path to the future.
We will hear more about the development and the heroic achievement that will probably not recognize the efforts of the last ten Administrations that have been working on the problem. But considering we have been threatened with annihilation lately, it is a moment that should be recognized as the start of something new.
Some of the other news this morning was that our state capital at Richmond just removed the last city-owned monument celebrating an officer of the Confederate rebellion. That doesn’t mean the war is finally over, though. The remains of the officer in question, General A. P. Hill, are still under the pedestal. So, like nuclear fusion power, there is still work to be done.
We are confident that work is going to go forward with speed and commitment. The process may be something like the recent news of a young financier who apparently as able to create something he called “cyber currency.” It is a process that apparently focuses a lot of energy from various sources to create something new with intrinsic value. At the moment it seems a bit like nuclear fusion, since it appears the young man was able to build a momentary net worth of some $23 Billion dollars which sadly disappeared the moment someone asked to see it all.
It appears those billions took about as much time to implode as the nuclear fusion event was able to produce power. So, those two parallel but inverted events of ‘input’ and ‘output’ demonstrate some real moments in history. We think.
Our colleague Splash was determined to mark this morning’s moments and came back with two opened bottles of Fino Sherry Elegante, one in each hand. He had no glasses, so most of the circle shrugged and held out their coffee mugs. The residue of Chock Full O’ Nuts in the bottom of the cups may alter the balance of soft lemon and fresh yeast aromas from the sherry, but what emerged turned out to be tangy with a soft citrus aroma enhanced by the honey residue from the coffee.
That is another remarkable moment in this dramatic morning. We will not commemorate that part though. We will have to wait until after the press conference to get to the part about completely reworking how the world works. It may take billions in real dollars to produce more than a billionth of a second of real power. We understand that small detail, but the fact that the press conference will tell us a brand-new future is at hand is pretty darned exciting.
Historic morning, and we are willing to drink to that. Even before the Press Conference!
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
