Well SI per lb of fuel is quite a bit higher for fission, but I understand what you are saying. Since we don't have a fusion reactor, it's hard to say what that might be.

Now I've always been fascinated by the concept of the Bussard ramjet, but that's a whole different animal and fictional as well.

All very good points.

No way around launching radioactives. Until we can bootstrap enough to mine radioactives elsewhere.

The conversion bit is my own fantasy. But if you are using heated reaction mass, heat is heat. If you are using electricity well, does it matter the initial source? I'm think big transfer ships here, not optimized earth to orbit type things.

Thank you for this. I really tire of being the Debbie Downer on this topic. It's nice to have someone with some experience express concerns.

It is a great achievement make no doubt. In real terms it is a step toward practical fusion energy. But it is one step on a trip of 10,000 miles. I'm over 60. Fusion energy has been 20 to 30 years away my entire life. It's a hard nut to crack.

As to space travel, why don't we start building fission plant reaction rockets? Or even nuclear powered ionic drives? Sure, you'd have to launch them, but once up there, they could go anywhere. We could convert them to fusion if/when that becomes practical. Not that these things are easy, but they are doable with today's technology. Fusion power is simply not.

> I can’t help but think they are doing it for the funding.

I'm sorry, I rarely use the phrase, but I've never found it more appropriate.

Ya Think?

Yes. It's a capital investment and bootstrap problem. But once you build enough infrastructure, you can build from materials already up there. Kind of like the proposed Mars missions. Lifting out of Earth's gravity well is a huge problem.

My point is solvable with current technology. Land based fusion is simply not at this point. Not after Trillions in investment in research units which will never produce power. You can throw a lot of stuff into space for that money. Unless you know of materials that can resist 15M degrees Celsius.

To both of those: only on Earth. Put it in orbit (SPSS I guess the preferred acronym now is SBSP) and no atmosphere, no night.

> Humans are myopic. They forget that not long ago reaching space was impossible. Going at the speed of sound was impossible etc..

While I agree with the sentiment, it's not really universally applicable.

The time between the first human flight, the Wright Bros. and the first lunar landing was 66 years. The first human initiated fusion reaction was over 70 years ago. ie. Space flight is doable. We know that.

I'm pretty old, I'm a science geek and have been reading my entire life that fusion is 20-30 years away. It is with luck. It may always be. It's more than just an engineering problem, I firmly believe it will take a fundamental breakthrough to solve if it is possible at all.

What I always have to ask is why? There is a huge fusion reactor not that far away, but far enough that it poses only minimal danger to us here. All we need to do is to collect the energy. Why re-invent the sun wheel?

The fuel is plentiful you say. All it needs is Hydrogen. Well really Deuterium. Well in this case Tritium which is much more rare than uranium. So even if we spend the billions trillions to build fusion plants we face an energy shortage.

I realize I am a Debbie Downer on /r/Futurology . But let's focus on what we can realistically do. There is power a plenty right out there. A very small fragment hits earth, yet that is what we are pinning a lot of hopes on right now. We should throw resources into space launch, SPSS, who know what else. We are limited to Earth resources, but not technically limited to Earth.

As I believe Jerry Pournelle once wrote: "It's raining soup out there and we are using spoons to catch it."

I gotta throw some cold water on this. Everyone seems to think of nuclear weapons as requiring intercontinental or hyperson delivery.

Remember, close only counts in horseshoes and atom bombs.

Let's just hypothesize a bad actor with medium supply of megaton warheads.

You put a couple on a private Learjet (cheaper than a cruise missile with delivery system) and trigger it on final approach to your target airport. Airburst.

You put a several on fishing trawlers that slide into harbor towns.

Maybe you put one in a pig (a cleaning device for international running natural gas pipelines.)

You bury a couple in garbage barges full of metal for recycling or some such.

I don't mean to be giving bad guys a lesson here, but it's ridiculously easy to do to any country that does not have iron curtain type borders (USA anyone?)

This is easy. None.

If they have more than 50 employees, they are have probably had to make more than one moral sacrifice along the way. You will read that we do this or that, but the bottom line is well, the bottom line. Even if you try, you can't determine how much your supply chain is doing. And if you have a supply chain, well that's carbon footprint for sourcing and for distribution.

You can compare and say this one is better than that one, but morally and sustainably? Neh.

> any coffee seed (bean) can be ground and used in this machine

Well sure. Espresso is not just a machine it's a roast and technique. You can use any bean. I would argue that if you put a light roast in an espresso machine you are not making espresso. But any bean, if roasted properly would be.

This is exactly what I said. All espresso is coffee. Not all coffee is espresso.

Being one, I find it hard to think as anything else.

But is Turkish coffee espresso? Most German and Scandinavian coffees I am familiar with are drip.

> ask for a coffee—you’ll get an espresso.

I think this is the key. I never ask for a coffee. I make coffee.

I am not well traveled. I also believe that the proliferation of fancy coffee shops has somewhat influenced this as they tend to focus on upscale espresso based drinks. Do people drink espresso at home?

drink. I don't have a machine to make beans.

I am often accused of being pedantic and I am.

But this is an espresso machine. Do we now consider espresso and coffee to be the same thing? I suppose you could say that all espresso is coffee, but not all coffee is espresso, but this thing doesn't make non-espresso coffee.

But that's a beautiful machine and definately bifl.

While both are beautiful, doesn't anyone else have an issue with buying such a beautiful piece of craftsmanship (and valuable wood) and then either burying it or burning it up?

OK comrade.

> Tax the shit out of the mega rich and indict them of tax evasion, and throw them in jail to let them rot if we have to.

You do realize that this is exactly the same as saying "Take the money away from rich people by force"? So confiscation and redistribution?

I like this, it applies to people too. Kindness costs nothing and almost always leaves the recipient a little better.

Educate yourself and educate others. Learn to think critically. Education, not indoctrination. Obviously you must educate yourself before you can educate others.

Not to pick on anyone, but read through the comments on this thread. Some you will think are a good idea, some you will think are idiotic. This is simply caused by lack of information, sometimes on the posters part, sometimes on mine.

But try to educate yourself on a topic before you have an opinion on it. Do NOT consider yourself informed because you heard or read some expert say it. What someone on Reddit said is even worse. And if you ask someone on reddit to back up what they said they will cite an expert. Well that doesn't mean you know it, it simply means that someone said it.

If you ask 100 people what is the most important thing, you will get 101 answers. And most of these are just parroting what they heard someone else say.

I've always loved the tag line from the Straight Dope.

> Fighting ignorance since 1973. (It's taking longer than we thought.)

A very good point. There are problem less concerned with security or possible drug smuggling than they are by the fact that someone a woman might actually enjoy sex.

I didn't see in the article where it was metal, but yea, the UAE can be a little anal about such things.

This can't be the first butt plug they've ever seen. Who cares?

"Those who do not study History are doomed to repeat it"

And they often didn't do well in Math or Language either.

This is the correct take.

I don't find this alarming or interesting. I won't pick on Canadians, but way over 20% of Americans could skip a few meals with no problem at all..