I sometimes wonder what it is that keeps me hooked into this cold fusion/LENR/E-Cat story so closely. I’ve been following this affair since January 2011, and still we are in waiting mode for any practical product to make its appearance in the world.
If we are looking for important and interesting topics to focus on, and problems to solve, there are plenty to choose from. We live in world of great contrasts, along with all kind of amazing technologies there are human tragedies almost everywhere we look. There are so many problems to deal with in our world, and like most people I’d like to see solutions come along. But the thing I keep coming back to is energy — it seems to me that solutions to energy problems is at the crux of a good portion of the problems we face.
What a working cold fusion device that provides useful power on a local scale allows is a much greater level of energy independence than we now know, and this is something that is attractive to many nations, communities and individuals. As we know, he world’s energy supply today is a precarious one, and energy supplies are dependent upon all kinds of political and economic variables. The promise of the E-Cat, if Rossi’s accounts are accurate (especially now we hear of 600 C stable temperatures) would be an important step forward towards making greater levels of energy independence possible on a number of levels. Energy consumption in heating, lighting, cooling, transportation, manufacturing, etc. is a large of all economic activity and if cheap and abundant energy were available, there could be tremendous savings realized allowing for expansion of economic activity and developments of new technologies and industries.
In the recently published book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler write:
Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp . . . the advancement of new, transformational technologies—computational systems, networks and sensors, artificialintelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and biomedical engineering—will soon enable the vast majority of humanity to experience what only the affluent have access to today. Even better, these technologies aren’t the only change agents in play
The authors don’t mention LENR technology here, but it certainly has the potential that could be the change agent that can help power all other (and more) technologies mentioned above.
We’ve talked about these things here before, I know, but sometimes I find it useful to ask myself why on earth I am spending so much time focusing on every little detail that I can find about things related to LENR. Being generally an optimist I am very hopeful that the emerging field of LENR will allow for the realization of many important benefits for our world (and no doubt new problems to deal with), and for that reason I believe it’s something worth keeping a close eye on.
