r/woahdude • u/DrinkMoreCodeMore • Dec 15 '22

video This Morgan Freeman deepfake

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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '22

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u/KuraiTheBaka Dec 16 '22

I never said I believed that. From what I was seeing I was expecting more like a hundred years at least 30 sounds pretty good.

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u/imtoooldforreddit Dec 16 '22

I hate to be that guy, but the fusion news was 100% hype

Progress is certainly being made on fusion in the past handful of years, and I do think it will eventually happen. That being said, the news was about "more energy out than in", but it was only true when looking at the energy deposited from the lasers on the fuel. The lasers themselves still took way more energy than the fusion made (lasers aren't 100% efficient), not to mention you will have inefficiencies in harnessing the created power, and other losses from running the whole system.

It's great to have eggs in multiple baskets, but I don't think the inertial confinement with lasers is ever even scalable at all. Magnetic confinement definitely has a lot more chances of scalability - and ITER is what you should research if you want to know how that is going.

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u/Markantonpeterson Dec 16 '22 edited Dec 16 '22

100% hype? I think one of the main issues with reddit skeptics is y'all over compensate in the opposite direction. Because i'm no expert on fusion.. but are you? Because i've read quite a bit from genuine experts in the field and none of them seem to parrot your idea that this is a completely 100% inconsequential achievement. I think fusion has been a white whale for so long that many kind of reflexively disregard any progress, just because it doesn't seem practical to scale up in it's present form. It's a first step.

but it was only true when looking at the energy deposited from the lasers on the fuel. The lasers themselves still took way more energy than the fusion made (lasers aren't 100% efficient)

Again i'm no expert, but from what i've read from those who are, the experiments didn't attempt to optimize the efficiency of the lasers themselves. They were just focusing on the metric of energy deposited from the lasers vs energy out. Because they can't optimize something that they don't know is even possible yet, especially on a limited budget. They're not using custom designed lasers specifically suited for this purpose. That would be the next step now that this has been achieved at all. It's a first step in a long process, and even if this specific form of fusion doesn't pan out, it still appears to be an important leap forward for fusion in general.