'Fusion energy can make possible a fundamental global transformation to the next stage of human history. The first part of that transformation would be the elimination of want. Today, the majority of humanity lacks decent housing, good quality healthcare, clean air, clean water, and healthy food..'The Fusion TransformationBy Eric Lerner
March 1, 2020
SourceAs our latest Wefunder campaign comes to an end, we wanted to ask: what could the future be like if we succeed in our goal to develop a Focus Fusion generator that will provide cheap, clean safe and unlimited energy to the world?
Fusion energy can make possible a fundamental global transformation to the next stage of human history. The first part of that transformation would be the elimination of want. Today, the majority of humanity lacks decent housing, good quality healthcare, clean air, clean water, and healthy food. They lack the education they are capable of absorbing and the jobs they are capable of doing. And very few of those that
do possess all these things feel at all secure that they will have them tomorrow or the day after.
But with fusion energy replacing costly and polluting fossil fuels, the resources will be available to provide every human being with free quality housing, top health care, pure air, water and food and all the education that is needed for a technological society. Providing those services and building the housing, hospitals, schools and infrastructure will create jobs—good jobs—for all. Unlimited fusion can provide the energy needed to do those jobs. The “freedom from want” promised by FDR and the UN Charter of Freedoms nearly 80 years ago could become a reality for all humanity. The fulfillment of every human being’s basic needs would be a secured right for all.
The second transformation that fusion energy can make possible is the urbanization of the globe. In 2007, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities and their suburbs than in rural areas. It took 8500 years from the time the first cities were established to get to that point. Right now, about 55% of humanity is urban. But to get from where we are now to the 80% urban populations typical of industrialized countries, such as those of Western Europe, we need fusion energy. Complete urbanization will require nearly tripling total energy consumption and concentrating the use of energy. That is impossible with expensive and dirty fossil fuels, but entirely possible in a single generation with cheap, clean and compact Focus Fusion generators.
Complete urbanization is essential to eliminating the grinding poverty and social oppression of the millions of confining villages that people have been fleeing from for ages. It is essential to transforming the remaining rural areas into diversified, modernized centers of advanced agriculture and to providing them with the resources needed to preserve the land and to produce the healthiest food, not the most profitable.
In the process of complete urbanization, the cities themselves can be transformed and rebuilt, integrating natural and built-up areas.
Not only can the world’s population be linked together in cities, the cities can be linked together as well. One key infrastructure project that can be made possible by the gigantic savings that fusion will bring is a global hypervelocity transportation network. Since the 1970’s researchers have developed the technology that could make it possible for tens of millions of passengers to travel anywhere in the world in a few hours. By putting magnetically-levitated trains in evacuated tubes, velocities of 6,000 km/hr could be obtained with minimal expenditures of energy. The task of digging tens of thousands of km of tunnels under the continents and the Bering Straits would cost a trillion dollars. But that is only a few months’ worth of the savings from ending fossil fuel consumption. The result will be a subway system that will allow anyone to go from one side of the globe to the other in not much more than the time it takes today to get from one end of New York City to the other.
Finally, fusion can make possible the transformation of how society is run. Today, economic power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The extreme concentration of control of fossil fuel energy, particularly oil and gas, has facilitated extreme concentration of finance as well, with overlapping ownership and control of both sectors in the hands of at most a few thousand individuals. But energy from Focus Fusion generators, with abundant fuel resources that are widely distributed and can be derived from seawater, can’t be monopolized. Factories for the generators themselves will not be easy to monopolize either—they can be spread around the world. Although beryllium, the material that electrodes are made from, is currently produced by only a couple of companies, it is as abundant in the earth as is lead, so can be widely mined.
Moreover, the implementation on a mass scale of fusion energy will require sweeping aside the power of the oil, gas and coal companies and their financial partners. Fusion power threatens the multi-trillion-dollar profits of the fossil-fuel industry and of the world financial system, which has been tightly tied to petroleum for decades. Sweeping aside the Powers That Be means taking steps towards democratizing economic power on a global scale—another profound transformation.
None of this will happen automatically, just because we get fusion energy. Such transformations take the thought and actions of billions of people. But fusion energy, and only fusion energy, can make them possible. Without fusion, we’re at an impasse.
Fusion still needs research and research is uncertain. People have repeatedly asked us—will we succeed? The answer is—we must!
Context(Focus Fuson) - How We Will Get to Net...Energy(Global Healing 2020 - 2050) - 'The Ocean Cleanup successfully catches plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch'(Global Healing 2020 - 2050) - UN-backed asset owner alliance to drive portfolio companies to carbon neutrality by 2050(To Heal - Teal) Secondary Education for the Future – Agora(Corporate Rebels) - '..to learn how innovative businesses are changing how people work.'Holistic education - '..educating the whole child as its major priority..'Project C - MDE - Laying the foundation