Thinking of the Titanic

                                                                                         written 5 January, 2025

                                                                                   published 12 January, 2025

    

            At 11:40pm, April 14th, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg, sinking 3 hours later.  From the moment of impact, the ship was doomed, but that awareness spread unevenly through the 2,224 people on board.  

            For hours previously, despite repeated radio warnings of sea ice from other ships in the area, the Titanic never slowed, determined to make their maiden voyage in record time.  The night was moonless, and windless, making detecting icebergs very difficult.  Spotted only a few minutes before impact, the berg couldn't be avoided.  

            The Titanic was advertised as "unsinkable" with 16 watertight compartments.  But it could only stay afloat with four or less fully flooded.  The ice narrowly sliced along the side of the ship, opening 5 compartments to the sea, and the pumps couldn't keep up.  

            One of the first to know their dire reality was the ship's architect, who was onboard for the celebratory voyage.  With his extensive knowledge of the design, he had no doubt the ship would sink.  But most of the passengers were still asleep.  As the situation became clearer, the crew began to react.  Distress signals were repeatedly radioed.  All passengers were awakened, and lifeboats were being rigged for launching.  Many passengers still didn't know what was happening, or didn't believe the information.  Many, most especially the first-class passengers, were upset at being disturbed.

            Believing the ship invulnerable, there had been no lifeboat practice drills for crew or passengers, so events proceeded slowly.  Further, for cost and aesthetic reasons, there were only enough lifeboats on board for half the people.  Even when the boats were eventually launched, the were carrying fewer than full capacity, from unfounded fears they would capsize and lack of concern by many still on board, who continued believing the ship was "unsinkable".  

            The first ships arrived almost 2 hours after the Titanic disappeared.  By then all the people in the frigid water had died, over 2/3 of the ship's population, predominantly third-class passengers and crew.

            Moving from a past disaster to the present one, last year was again the hottest year on record.  For the first time, we are 1.5°C above preindustrial times, having added 1,000 gigatons of atmospheric CO₂ in the last 200 years, due to fossil fuel combustion.  The International Panel on Climate Change had set 1.5°C as a target to avoid.  Despite decades of scientific warnings, describing risk of increasing climactic collapse, short-term corporate profits prevail, and atmospheric CO₂ content grows each year.

            Arctic sea ice is the lowest on record for this time of year.  The concern is, with sea ice cover diminished, the shallow Arctic sea floor will warm, melting the embedded frozen methane, estimated between 200-10,000 gigatons.  Methane is 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a few decades.  Once the sea floor warms above freezing, an unrestrained methane release into the atmosphere would cause a sudden, massive temperature spike.  Beginning a decade ago, dinner plate size methane bubbles were reported rising to the ocean surface.

            Has space ship Earth already been irrevocably damaged?  Are we doomed to collapse, with most of the passengers still asleep, unaware of our fate?  Are there any lifeboats onboard?  What do they look like?  Where would we go?  Are we depending on rescue from other "ships" in the area, or divine salvation?  

            Less than 2 weeks from now, a president will take power who claims these concerns are "fake news", and is owned by the billionaire class killing the planet for exclusive profit.  It may be the current shift in our energy production, a crude lifeboat attempt, is far enough along it can't be stopped by the denial lunacy.  But the best efforts so far are inadequate to the challenge, and any delay will hurt, as more CO₂ floods in each year.  

            There may still be paths to avoiding societal collapse but we have wasted decades.  Gradual change is no longer sufficient, and abrupt social change doesn't seem possible in such a polarized global society.  

            We don’t know what’s going to happen.  Are we just a lethal parasite killing our host?  Could crisis awaken the masses to experience the fundamental unity of our reality?  Could limited dogmatic religious visons of transcendence fall away?  Could we embrace the power of our own attention?  Could we experience the imminence of reality?  Miracles are the operation of forces of which we are currently unaware.

Brief History of Fusion

                                                                                   written 29 December, 2024

                                                                                     published 5 January, 2025

            Last week I described how some of the heavier elements will fission, releasing energy as they get smaller.  Modern physics also shows the lighter 26 elements release energy as they get larger through fusion, with the nucleus more tightly bound.  The most well know example of this is the fusion of two hydrogen atoms into one helium atom.

            Because protons are all positively charged, the electromagnetic force repels them.  When that repulsion is overcome, and protons are brought close enough together, the "strong" nuclear force takes over, holding the nucleus together.  The core of the sun has pressure 100 billion times our atmospheric pressure, with a temperature of 15 million degrees Centigrade.  This is sufficient to initiate hydrogen fusion, and the released energy is what allows life on Earth.

            Combustion of any kind (carbohydrates in the body, plant material, or fossil fuels) involves oxidation of hydrogen, which has historically powered life and human civilization.  But oxidation of hydrogen involves the electromechanical forces in chemistry.  Fusion of hydrogen, involving the strong nuclear force, is 2 million times more powerful, making it an attractive energy source.

            The problem with accessing this level of energy is the extreme pressure/temperature needed to make it happen.  Once the first fission device was developed in 1945, it was realized this power could be used to initiate fusion by locating a hydrogen core within a nuclear fission bomb.  The first hydrogen fusion device was detonated in 1952, rated at 10 megatons of TNT.  Russia detonated their first hydrogen bomb a year later, and detonated the largest man-made bomb in 1961, rated at 50 megatons of TNT, 3,000 times larger than the fission bomb which destroyed Hiroshima.  

            As with the power from fission, efforts quickly turned to trying to make peaceful use of fusion.  This is a much more difficult engineering project than a bomb, as controlled fusion needs be sustainable and not destructive.   The fundamental problem is still how to generate sufficient pressure/temperature to initiate fusion.  Designs using radio waves, magnetic fields, and lasers have been proposed and constructed, trying to generate the necessary conditions and keep them contained.  

            Over the decades, research has become more globally cooperative, driven by the complexity and massive expense of such a project, with almost 100 fusion experiments now in play globally, and more planned.  Billions of dollars are invested annually in the US alone.  Successes have been measured in terms of temperatures and energy levels achieved, and duration of actual fusion.  Designs have improved, now including superconducting magnets and as many as 200 laser beams.  

            However, the longest duration of sufficient temperatures yet achieved was 18 minutes, and the longest actual fusion was just seconds.  Any power produced is a fraction of the power required to generate the fusion environment.  Therefore, commercial fusion power is still described as "decades away".   

            In 1989, there was a flurry of news about "cold fusion".  Two chemists, Fleischmann and Pons, reported excess heat and nuclear byproducts using electrolysis on the surface of an electrode, and the hope was a new form of cheap and abundant energy.  However, multiple efforts to reproduce the results failed, so this report was considered an error and the subject declared dead.  No peer reviewed literature now mentions cold fusion, and many consider it impossible.  

            However, some researchers continued, mostly working outside the US, despite limited funding and rejection by the mainstream scientific community.  Over time, these investigations have earned enough reputation to become known as Low Energy Nuclear Reaction research.  Rather than trying to push hydrogen together, one theory is cold fusion pulls them together, within the cracks of suitable substrate.  Perhaps the energy released destroyed the substrate structure, making the first results impossible to reproduce, and research now centers on creating more durable substates.

            Science has a history of blind spots, where orthodoxy refuses to recognize changes when they appear.  Cold fusion may be one of these and will one day become mainstream.  However, that isn't going to happen soon, if ever.

            Fusion is still a technologist's dream, and fission is expensive, economically risky, producing eternally lethal waste, consuming finite fuel.  No form of nuclear power is going to rescue our troubled energy future.  Even the oil industry acknowledges the US fracking boom is over, depleted.  Without even addressing the climate crisis, a sustainable technological civilization will require fundamental changes in our energy production, if it is to exist much longer.