[api]

I remember having this idea when I was studying machine learning in college. I'm really happy to see that it occurred to someone else in a position to actually look into it, because it "felt like something might be there" to me.

The basic idea I had was that fusion plasma containment involves containing a turbulent, dynamical system, so it might require some kind of actual intelligence learning or co-evolving with the system.

I wondered if this might be the only way to achieve over-unity fusion outside gravitational confinement (stars, black hole accretion disks, etc.). This would mean there are two fusion mechanisms in nature: gravitational confinement and cognitive confinement. The latter can only be a product of a living system.

When a living system achieves this, its biosphere "ignites" and becomes something I termed a "biostar." Biostars could be potential SETI targets -- biospheres that have harnessed fusion and so emit anomalous amounts of optical and infrared radiation on their night side. This moment of ignition would be an event in a biosphere comparable to the evolution of photosynthesis-- a fundamental change in the energetic dynamics of life.

In the far future life the that achieved fusion could settle things like rogue planets in deep space, so that would be another potential SETI target. Find objects emitting anomalous infrared in the interstellar void. The advantage would be being far from destructive events like solar storms.

[SubiculumCode]

Sounds like the basis of a new Star Trek episode.

Captain's Log: Since we came to orbit Venuuil III to host talks between the Klingons and the Venullians, there has been a increased incidence of unpredictable fluctuations of plasmas in the warp drive containment field. We are now devoting all available power to increasing our computer's ability to track and predict this rapidly changing phenomenon. Geordi reports that at the current growth factor we can maintain containment for 22 hours, 47 minutes, 17 seconds. To support the peace talks, we will remain here as long as possible.

Captain's Log: Intriguingly, the fluctuations are beginning to reveal an embedded temporal distortion that exhibits language like patterns. Data has begun working on an interface between the containment field and his positronic neural net.

[jetbooster]

In Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth series of books, true artificial general intelligence 'woke up' from the computers designed to handle the incredibly complex calculations required to make and maintain long-distance wormhole connections. Quite analogous to this situation I feel

[Sabinus]

And then formed a treaty with humans, providing Restricted Intelligences for high performance computing without self awareness creation, and then retreating to it's own planet.

What a series, I really need to read them again.

[londons_explore]

While deep learning might be a good control strategy for such systems, I very much doubt it is the only control strategy that works.

Control strategies in nonlinear systems are an effectively huge search space, and deep learning is just one way to find a good-ish solution faster.

[tsimionescu]

Currently imaginable fusion power plants generate nowhere near enough power for the excess to be visible from outer space. They would not even be a blip compared to the largest already existing hydro power plant, for example.

Edit: to add some numbers, the "planned" DEMO power plant (the hypothetical successor of a successful ITER experiment) would produce something like 750MW, while Three Gorges Dam produces 22,500MW. Even if DEMO could be scaled up (which is hard, given that it would already be beyond the limits of today's material science), it definitely couldn't scale up 30 times.

[leereeves]

What stops fusion from scaling up by building more plants instead of larger plants?

[tsimionescu]

Nothing except the costs, but then it's not a single reactor anymore and other power plants scale as or more easily. So nothing is really special about fusion power if we just want to scale horizontally.

[leereeves]

I thought fusion is special because the inputs are more abundant and the outputs less toxic than other fuel power plants.

[tsimionescu]

Fusion can be compared like this:

- vs fossil fuels, almost limitless fuel with no greenhouse gas emissions

- vs nuclear fission, more fuel compared to current designs (though breeder reactors could essentially use any piece of rock as fuel), and shorter lived but even more toxic outputs (at least for D-T fusion, all pieces of the reactor become highly radioactive materials after 10-20 years)

- vs renewables, it has the advantage of being decoupled from weather and day/night patterns, but it is more expensive, it requires fuel, and it produces much more toxic outputs

[eganist]

The concept of "cognitive confinement" (your term I presume. It's neat, I hope it sticks) was explored in Spiderman 2.

I'm being entirely serious. Even though the visualization of the reactor was wildly off the mark, this specific concept fits what the writers had in mind with the AI mechanical limbs.

[baq]

Assuming fusion drives are a thing we should be able to see them as they'd be glowing rather bright.

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php

[gs17]

Unless, of course, all the ships are coming straight towards us.

[piotrkaminski]

That would actually make them easier to spot, as they'd need to flip around for a breaking burn roughly equal to their acceleration burn, pointing their engines straight at us. (Assuming they want to stop by and say hi, of course. If not, then there's not much to worry about.)

[gpderetta]

> not much to worry about.

Unless they are literally coming straight ahead at us!

[piotrkaminski]

If they intend to go straight through Earth at relativistic speeds (to establish a hyperspace bypass, perhaps?), then there's really not much we can do about it anyway. :p

[p1mrx]

You could lie down, or put a paper bag over your head.

[tsimionescu]

Fusion drives wouldn't allow these ships to get anywhere near the speed of light, so we would have ample time to see the light they emit long before they arrive.

[tekla]

> This would mean there are two fusion mechanisms in nature: gravitational confinement and cognitive confinement

Da fuck? The mechanism is compression. This is like calling "generating electricity via a generator", "cognitive energy".

What is ITER? Black Magic that happens to cause Fusion?

[api]

Fusion is reasonably easy. You can do it in your garage with an electrostatic confinement fusor. I’m talking about fusion that generates significantly more power than it takes to run the reactor. Only that kind is useful as an energy source. That so far has been elusive.

Inertial confinement has sort of achieved this but only on paper. If you tally up the total input to set up and run the system it’s still way in the red.

ITER has the potential to run just a bit over unity but it’s really just a research platform.

[AtlasBarfed]

Except that fusion on earth will likely never be cheaper than solar/wind.

I mean that is a cool scifi story, but economics seems to hate cool things.

There's this "big lie" that fusion people imply that it will be cheap, clean, and limitless.

Cheap is doubtful, clean is undermined by the reality that fast neutrons from fusion degrade the reactor to radioactive isotopes, and ok the fuel is pretty much limitless

Now, if we can get scalable fusion as viable load levelling, to develop it to the point it can be used in space then that's some real scifi.

[audunw]

I thought so too. It’s pretty simple: if you’re making a nuclear thermal power plant a lot of the costs are associated with building the containment vessel and the heat exchange mechanism. Fusion is fundamentally lower power density than fission, so you’ll need a bigger vessel for a given power, and both the containment and heat exchange mechanism are far more complex and expensive. Thermal fusion will never be cheaper than fission, which already has a hard time competing with renewables. And renewables are still getting cheaper.

But then there’s Helion. If you can extract electrical power directly rather than through heat exchange and a turbine, it changes the equation drastically. So I think their approach can work from a theoretical point of view.

[thechao]

Fusion will be necessary if we plan to colonize the solar system beyond Mars, and not at Jupiter. It's cold, dark, and scary, out there.

[tsimionescu]

We won't, not with anything resembling current technology. So, if we were to imagine a colonized solar system, there is a good chance it's not fusion that gets us there, but some currently unknown technology.

[AtlasBarfed]

Jeez, they invented the core tech in the 60s. An orion pulse nuclear ship can get a small city to Jupiter in a month.

You don't need a wonder technology to cart around the solar system, well, unless you are talking ECONOMICAL technology.

I'm not sure how expensive H-bombs are to make at scale.

[tsimionescu]

I'm not talking just about transportation, I'm also talking about the technology required to make an actually self-sustaining human colony anywhere outside the Earth. That is the part that only exists in principle - when you go to the details, we don't actually have any idea how we could build even a Mars colony that is truly self-sustaining, never mind one on a more inhospitable world.

Note that when I say self-sustaining, I don't just mean power, food, air, and water. I mean everything that a high-tech colony actually needs - plastics, machined parts, microprocessors, software, and so on.

[pfdietz]

Power can be beamed out to interstellar distances, so fusion isn't necessary.

For that matter, if a space colony is equipped with a mirror for concentrating the sunlight needed to illuminate the inside as if it were Earth, and we place the limiting distance as that at which the mass of the mirror is equal to the mass of the space colony, the distance is about 1 light year.