For no rational reason, every time a millennium is reached, people and societies go off the rails: nations go to war, and people start blaming “sin” for the world’s ills, and generally claim The End is Nigh.
Not that it happens on the stroke of midnight on December 31st, the madness appears in the decades approaching it, and spills over in to the following decades.
At the end of the first millennium, it was the Second Coming, unholy crusades against the Muslim world and the barbaric sacking of Constantinople. The end of the second millennium saw the lunatic build up to World War I when Europe did its best to commit suicide.
Paradise got no nearer in both cases but it was not long before something was invented that changed the world in a material and more permanent sense, mostly for the better.
New theories
Looking back, the end of the third millennium again produced new theories that grabbed thousands of adherents, all of whom passionately believe they have the answers.
There are Muslim extremists determined to recreate a Caliphate, Christian fundamentalists waiting for the Rapture, and Creationists who believe humans and dinosaurs once shared the planet. The early 21st century also produced war and collapse in the Middle East.
The daddy of them all is, of course, the environmentalist claim that the end of the world is coming because of man’s wickedness in adhering to private property, a free market economy and eating meat – to mention just a few of our alleged Green sins.
The world has always been full of things we would rather do without – poverty, illness, drought, plague, locust swarms and the catch-all, inequality. But, there have always been technological responses to make the end not as nigh as the prophets of doom predict (and seem to wish for).
Few technological breakthroughs come from governments or politicians. Indeed, where famine hits there is often evidence of bureaucratic bumbling.
Admittedly, some beneficial technological changes originate in times of war, but even then, the private sector and the profit motive play a large part.
Responses to the alleged threat of catastrophic climate change are a case in point, foremost being wind generators and photovoltaic arrays built by the private sector (though the source of their profitability is mostly tax breaks and subsidies).
Dubious as the motives of some believers are, the fuss and palaver surrounding climate change theory has the effect of spurring the search to find a new source of abundant energy. Since the US fracking revolution, theories that the sky would fall in as crude oil runs out are not as loud as they once were.
The Lockheed Skunk Works (founded by US entrepreneur-extraordinaire Howard Hughes) is also a response. It has announced a new design for a fusion reactor – and plans to market it within a decade.
Mentioning nuclear fusion, the opposite of nuclear fission, is to have the idea pooh-poohed as impossible to achieve, since the temperatures needed are those found at the core of the sun – millions of degrees centigrade. Naturally, the Green lobby abhors anything nuclear.
Cynics point out that fusion has always been 30 years into the future. Making it work sooner might even make the next millennium free of crazies. Success would put off the end of the world, the Rapture and, until new apocalyptic theories are constructed, shut up all doom predictions.
Lockheed’s promise
What makes the Lockheed announcement different is that its promised time span is ten years. The last time a task was set to achieve the impossible was President John F Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon within a decade, as he said: “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard”.
That worked.
The decade is for Lockheed to have their reactor on the market. It promises a prototype within five years. It has been working on the design for four years.
The Skunk Works’ design is for a fusion reactor that fits in a pantechnicon truck. Its dimensions are 2m x 3m. That is a tenth of the size of other fusion reactor designs. If the boffins can make good on their promise this will produce 100 megawatts, it will kick into touch all doom-laden predictions of (and hopes for) the death of capitalism.
Fusion energy is clean, emits nothing except prodigious amounts of heat to drive steam electricity generators for as long as their bearings will last (with proper maintenance, Eskom please note).
Applied to our country, a successful fusion generator (or however many we need) means the end of coal-fired power stations, the end of air pollution near them, and the end of the money tree of back-up diesel generators that make oil companies laugh on their way to the bank.
Nuclear scientists have called the Lockheed promise rude names. They say it is too difficult and no known metals can stand the temperatures needed.
Others who know the Skunk Works’ reputation (it never promises what it cannot deliver), point to the use of new superconducting material that makes the magnetic field necessary to hold superhot plasma under phenomenal temperatures much more powerful than before.
Just to poke a bigger hole in the millenarian arguments, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) researchers are working on the same thing. Their design is also for a small fusion reactor.
If a bet was laid against the Skunk Works and MIT in favour of computer predictions of catastrophic climate change, what odds would you get, assuming you could find a bookmaker willing to take the bet?
* Keith Bryer is a retired communications consultant.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media.
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