The risk of #3 is that they don't create fusion but they do develop a machine that can emit streams of hot plasma which is then turned into the Navy's weapon of choice for close weapons support on carrier battle groups.
That said, I am looking forward to at least one of the fusion efforts bearing fruit. I'm something of an optimist here but I expect a durable solution to the 'energy problem' to emerge from our developing understanding of both quantum mechanics and particle physics. I am also cognizant of the fact that it also raises the bar on both good and bad things that humans can do. The tricky parts are in the transitions, pre and post event.
Nuclear bombs aren't that dangerous though... in the grand scheme of things. That's because their use could trigger a chain reaction which creates a virtual apocalypse scenario. Basically ensuring their use impossible.
What's scary is a weapon that can cause massive damage, that we are actually willing to use.
In the grand scheme of things, the situation that held during the Cold War was a historical accident. Not every nuclear bomb in the future will necessarily be possessed by nations who are facing adversaries who can respond in kind to the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are very scary indeed, and we are very lucky to have made it decades since they have last been used in war. I have good faith that we will make it to a century, but I would not make a bet that they will never, ever be used in anger ever again.
I think MAD between a small number of (mostly rational) actors was the best case scenario.
Sure, nuclear states vs. non-nuclear traditional states is the most likely use right now, but we're not that far off from non-state actors being able to make nuclear weapons. Right now the only real protection is limiting access to fissile material.
With respect to nuclear weapons, the question isn't just with their use but also their misuse. There have been a non-zero amount of incidents in North America with non-nuclear detonations (fortunately).
I don't understand why this was downvoted. I'm not going to discount the possibility to invent something worse then our most powerful fusion bomb, but if we talk probability here, developing processes that allow greater control is likely to result in a worst case scenario where we have a weapon that is at most as powerful as what we already have, but more focused.
IMHO focused fusion destruction is likely to be far more humane than the indiscriminate destruction caused by the weapons currently in our arsenal. i.e. a highly focused weapon is likely to to result in instant death for the victims instead of minutes to months to years of suffering for victims depending on their exposure levels.
I regret posting this comment due to all the completely unrelated commentary it generated, detracting from the startup in question. If you read this comment, please skip my comment above and all the replies. Your time is better spend reading about what this startup is doing.
I won't deny it's complicated, but there's more to thinking about how we conduct war than just the proximal individual act of killing. Two cultures that, for instance, respect military vs. civilian distinctions may war with each other with much less total damage than two cultures that practice Total War, even if the political outcome is the same in the end.
Just because war is bad does not mean we are forced to throw up our hands and stop making distinctions between degrees of badness. War is not simply infinitely bad... that's ultimately a very sophomoric view.
This is a simplification. Defending yourself against unprovoked attack is not juvenile, although there are moral systems that advocate rolling over and giving up if you are attacked. And there is a whole spectrum of combat actions where "defense against unprovoked attack" is one extreme.
In industrialized countries, wars of aggression are usually never profitable, but the same can unfortunately not be said for less-developed societies. Even Europe didn't find this obvious until after World War 2. So I guess it ends up being a question of how you define "sophomoric".
Actually, wars of aggression are almost never profitable. Accumulating riches via conquest is almost always a myth, because armies a) destroy much that is of value and b) are unbelievably expensive.
"Wealth through superior firepower" has hardly ever been achieved. Even Rome mostly got rich through trade after its armies conquered Europe and North Africa, and a lawful peace was imposed. Had everyone been economically rational pretty much the same end could have been achieved through trade (spoiler: not everyone is economically rational.)
Simple looting of the kind the Spanish engaged in in the New World was never a very good path to wealth, partly because its first effect was to create massive inflation (if you use gold as money and inject vase amounts of gold into your economy without increased productive capacity, you get inflation, not wealth.)
So the conditions of gaining wealth by war are very, very narrowly defined. It's not impossible, but it's amazingly difficult.
There are defensible moral reasons for engaging in mass organized violence--I support the current American efforts to kill people in Northern Iraq, for example--but economic rationality (profitability) is never one of them, because the first step to creating wealth is never to engage in the wholesale destruction of everything the creation of wealth depends on.
Interesting that wars of aggression have almost never been profitable; this fills a hole in my understanding. I've always understood that this fact only became obvious after WWII, and almost 10 years of terribly destructive fighting in Europe and elsewhere.
Interesting, you know more than me but afaik it is correct. Both in facts and arguably in moral.
Since you brought up Rome in discussing payback for warfare, you could also ask "Cui bono" here -- "who benefits?"
A war is potentially just like a gold rush, the people getting rich are the ones selling the tools to dig or make war.
Just look at my native Sweden, we managed to stay out of a few wars and shamelessly sold high quality steel to the countries fighting. It made Sweden go from the bottom to the top in Europe.
What this implies about lobbying and how wars starts I'll leave to the imagination.
(I might also add that IS has declared war on the democratic world. So trying to stop their expansion is arguably self defence.)
"Sophomoric" is not merely an empty insult, to be flung at whatever you don't like. It is a specific thing. It can not apply in this case... only a particular justification for a war could be sophomoric, not the whole act.
If you were going to have to die some way, would you prefer to die from 3rd degree burns over most of your body and with your retinas burned from a bright searing light or would you prefer to die from a lethal dosage of heroin?
The outcome may be the same, but there's a whole lot more humanity in subjecting someone to the latter.
Sometimes situation dictates that someone is going to die, and you have the option of deciding who and how - best it happen to the "most deserving" in the least painful/agonizing way possible.
which dictionary did you pull this from?
I see "characterized by tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for people and animals, especially for the suffering or distressed"
When a democracy has a war with a dictatorship it is similar to when the police defends civilians from violence.
(So this don't get into a shouting match: Check "democratic peace theory". I am aware of that the police can misuse their position. A democracy often also do cynical realpolitik when it isn't its voters that gets harmed.)
Edit: You might want to do the distinction of a junta that do a general draft, so there are soldiers for the dictator which didn't volunteer. It isn't an easy solution, but citizens in a country can theoretically overthrow their dictator. Hopefully with more help than the Syrians got from Obama.
Edit 2: I assume that you don't think it is immoral to sell weapons to police. If you are that pacifist, then I think you should move to some place without police to protect you... I hear they have good weather in inner Somalia and southern Yemen. Both are traditional clan societies without police.
Edit 3: Ah, you have a 60s style of police racial violence discussion in the USA right now. I get the down votes.
Regardless of everyone's feelings on whether weapons research is or isn't a good idea, this strikes me as a grossly unlikely application.
The problem with direct-fire weapons is not something like "bullets don't do enough damage." It's aiming and range and so forth. A plasma weapon seems unlikely to have good range or good aiming, and if it does not come with a fusion reactor alongside it, it's also kind of hard to see how you'd power the damn thing.
I'm sure someone can imagine some upside to such a weapon, but in practice, the odds that that particular result would come instead of a million other variations that would be inferior to just shooting bullets at things seems deeply unlikely.
And as everyone has already said, we already have fusion bombs. And for that matter small tactical nuclear weapons for more battlefieldy uses.
Rather than a literal plasma gun, I think they were just saying the risk is that the team will pivot into weapons research. But no one has thus far explained why weapons research would be anything but a positive thing.
Yes, using weapons is unfortunate. The decision to ever use a weapon should be made with the utmost discretion. But when it comes time to use a weapon, it seems hard to argue against having the most effective weapons that also have little collateral damage.
Maybe people are worried that a new, extremely effective weapon will be discovered which happens to have high collateral damage. That's a concern, but it's never been possible to delay the advancement of technology. If something is possible to discover, then it seems like some diligent researcher will eventually discover it. But the concern itself seems misplaced: most new weapons have less collateral damage, not more.
And what I'm saying is that regardless of the ethics of it, why should we regard it as in any way plausible that this company would pivot into weapons research?
By a huge margin, the most plausible military application of anything this company develops is "a fusion reactor on an aircraft carrier."
And I say that as someone who regards it as deeply unlikely that this company will create any major step towards a fusion reactor.
I think people are worried about a low-collateral-damage weapon which means political leaders can be more likely to deploy it. Observe the objections to the use of precision-guided munitions fired from long-hovering remote-controlled drones.
> The risk of #3 is that they don't create fusion but they do develop a machine that can emit streams of hot plasma which is then turned into the Navy's weapon of choice for close weapons support on carrier battle groups.
The possibility of pivoting your business model to "building plasma cannons for the Navy" is less of a risk and more of an awesome opportunity. I mean, defense contracting is a bit of a drag and there's tons of red tape, but if there's anything as cool as building fusion reactors small enough to replace diesel generators, it's building plasma cannons for the Navy.
And of late someone has: guided .50BMG bullets which can adjust their flightpath to assuredly hit a target (which, one can presume, is being shot to prevent others from being killed). EXACTO .50-caliber demonstration: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/07/10a.aspx
We'd certainly be concerned about those kinds of applications. Fortunately we don't use beams in this approach. The plasma used in the Fusion Engine is akin to a balloon or pillow, granted - a really hot pillow, but luckily a terrible projectile.
There are already commercial oilfield tools that use neutron generators with relatively low power input requirements. I'm not seeing how to make a useful weapon out of something like that, though. What can it do that isn't already done better by normal guns and bombs?
I guess you could use it to attack people inside a building without directly destroying the building, but I would figure that if you got a high enough neutron flux to reliably kill everyone inside the building, you'd also get enough activation radiation to render the building uninhabitable for at least weeks. You might well need fancy decontamination, and possibly to demolish the building and haul away parts of it. Seems easier to just use a bomb.
The biggest fear of carrier groups are mach 7 ramjet antiship missiles launched from hundreds if not thousands of miles away, way too fast to destroy with anything even laser (you barely see them coming at you) and on top of that relatively cheap at maybe half a million a piece compared to the billions a carrier costs, meaning the enemy could launch tens of them at each ship.
It would be pretty difficult to weaponize a closed system design without significant R&D. The only risk I see would be if some small component of their design was transferred to an existing military weapon to make it better.
The risk of #3 is that they don't create fusion but they do develop a machine that can emit streams of hot plasma which is then turned into the Navy's weapon of choice for close weapons support on carrier battle groups.
Why is that a risk? I'd like to live in a country with that technology, because otherwise other countries will have it and we won't.
Depending on the military application, it might still have a halo effect.
Great skill in manipulating magnetic fields would probably be useful for: MRI. Detecting landmines and UXO in a field from a UAV or otherwise safe distance. Detecting submarines, including those by terrorists or rogue states transporting NBC weapons.
While those are military applications, they're fairly unalloyedly positive.
Even the hypothetical plasma rifle isn't necessarily a bad thing; if a plasma rifle allows rich countries like US, Japan, etc. to overmatch poor countries and thus prevent war, that's kind of a plus.
But it would create a financial upside. They are a fund after all, and you'll find plenty of institutions investing in LMT, NOC, and friends.
You might lose some of the halo effect for one audience, but gain it from another. Not everyone things defense (or if you prefer weapons, or arms dealing) is a bad sector to be in.
That said, I am looking forward to at least one of the fusion efforts bearing fruit. I'm something of an optimist here but I expect a durable solution to the 'energy problem' to emerge from our developing understanding of both quantum mechanics and particle physics. I am also cognizant of the fact that it also raises the bar on both good and bad things that humans can do. The tricky parts are in the transitions, pre and post event.