Puff of steam, wheels in motion
The year is 2045. At a fusion facility near Marseille, where the successor to the ITER project has just achieved a stable thermonuclear reaction at a temperature of one hundred million degrees, an engineer is checking the parameters… of a steam boiler.
Yes, you read that right. Humanity’s most advanced energy facility, which replicates the processes that occur inside stars, ultimately comes down to heating water.
This is not a joke or a dystopian scenario. This is the most likely future of our energy sector.
Share
You might be interested in
-
Nanotechnology: between DNA origami and gray goo
Back in 1986, when E. Drexler was scaring the world with the idea of “gray goo”—self-replicating nanobots devouring the biosphere after being accidentally released into the environment—it was hard to imagine that…
-
Bus to Proxima: how far really is far?
If Voyager 1, our farthest space envoy, were headed towards Proxima Centauri (which it isn’t), it would take it about 73,000 years to arrive. That’s roughly the same amount of time since…
-
Mars is a paradise, but only for robots
Elon Musk promises a million people on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, NASA is struggling to keep seven people on the International Space Station, which is just 250 miles above our heads.
-
We’re getting dumber, and technology is contributing to that.
Socrates was right. When in the 5th century BCE, in Phaedrus, he warned about the invention of writing, arguing that it would destroy human memory, he was laughed at as a technophobe.
