The National Ignition Facility, a man-made machine designed to recreate the power source of stars, will be dedicated today. If all goes as planned, the facility's 192 lasers — made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers — will fire as one to smash a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the Sun, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.
It's taken ten thousand workers and ten years of effort and it's ready to start researching free power for all people - when it isn't dealing with vocal skeptics. Doubters deride NIF as a $140 million annual sideshow that is squandering precious resources at a time of economic hardship.
Naysayers have always plagued those who dare to move forward, and for every nutball suing the Large Hadron Collider you can bet there was one particularly sloping-browed caveman insulting the guy with flint and sticks. The most popular 'problem' at the moment is "the recession!", the topical rallying cry of those who oppose what they don't understand.
The NIF has cost three and a half billion dollars, with criticizing such spending with "the recent recession." Because as we all know, canceling everything but bread and water at the first sign of market downturn is a strategy without flaw. Especially if it means abandoning custom hardware, which was only doing something silly like "maybe allowing free energy production." (Oh, and don't mention how that's less than the cost of a fortnight's worth of Iraq War. They don't seem to like that.)
Another idiot-detecting statement is "It's a very complicated system, and you're dependent on many things working right." The NIF does have one hundred and ninety two lasers and more optical components than a shortsighted army, but - well, do we even have to explain the problem with that statement? Of course you're depending on bits working right. The internal combustion engine depends on working right! That's why we didn't let bakers build it, instead insisting on people who knew what they were doing and who can fix the inevitable problems.
The last and bestest of all is when people demand guarantees that everything will work immediately, interpreting any other response as an admission of failure. Amazingly these people are actually reasoned with, as opposed to being led away somewhere a nice lady can use small words, and possibly puppets, to explain what "re-search" is.
The National Ignition Facility is humanity's attempt to light our own star, to solve our energy needs, and to add another fundamental force of the universe to the "We've got that working for us" list. If you're against that you simply don't understand some part of the issue.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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