[sandworm101]

Solar panels harness the power of the sun too. Fun fact: The sun's energy density is only a few watts per ton. A thousand-pound chunk of the sun could barely run a flashlight. Practical fusion requires H/He conversion rates exponentially faster than stars.

Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.

[nsxwolf]

Yes, but this I suppose is a bit like a mechanical watch (if many orders of magnitude less practical). You can spend $30,000 on a watch that keeps terrible time in comparison to a $10 quartz watch. But you know there's all these tiny precision machines inside ticking away, and that makes you happy.

The only power I can extract from a fusor is the current generated inside a Geiger counter. But in my head, I know there's all kinds of cool fusion reactions happening. Gamma rays, helium, tritium, neutrons... that's all going on and it's just cool to know you're making it happen.

[dylan604]

If the $30k watch can't keep time, then those tiny machines aren't very precise

[rob74]

According to the COSC standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC), a mechanical watch is allowed to have a deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day, while a quartz watch has to have ±0.07 seconds per day. So a mechanical watch can be two orders of magnitude "worse" than an electronic one and still call itself an officially certified Swiss watch. But I'm sure that manufacturers of $30k watches hold themselves to higher standards - not that someone who buys a $30k watch nowadays really uses it to tell the time, but still...

[dylan604]

That just means their mediocrity is up to spec

[jona-f]

Watt is not energy, though, you mean power density. Also your flashlight would run for a few billion years, not bad.

[pfdietz]

On the other hand, the thermal energy in a cubic meter of the Sun's core is about the same as the yield of a 5 megaton H bomb.

[graycat]

> Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.

No apology necessary! I'm well informed on the content of the US mainstream media, and there I've learned that without any doubt all of

force, power, energy, volts, amperes, Watts, Kilowatts, Kilowatt hours, and current

are all just the same things, just synonyms for just the same things!

When I was studying physics, I thought that there were important differences, but now with a lot of exposure to the mainstream media I've learned that I must have been badly wrong!

[hyperbovine]

It would run your flashlight until basically the end of time though. I think you neglected that small point.

[dylan604]

Huh? End of time? Stars die "all the time" yet time still keeps on ticking.

[labster]

Only a small portion of the Sun (relatively speaking lol) is hot enough to fuse matter. It kinda sounds impossible the way you phrased it but it really isn’t. It’s just… 20 years off.

[rob74]

...and it's been 20 years off for the last 50 years, I've heard that joke before.

[labster]

You’ll hear it again in ten years, too. I suspect fusion energy is possible, it’s just really hard. It’s like powered flight, which was imagined for centuries and we couldn’t quite do it, until suddenly someone did it. Eventually, the physics, materials, and engineering will make a path.

[oneoff786]

Your hand, can in fact, harness the power of the sun’s power by receiving warmth on its own.

[BurningFrog]

The neutron generator doesn't harness the sun.

It is a tiny sun!

(Well, sorta kinda)