The day Sun came to Earth.

The dream of every engineer since the 60s, sustainable nuclear fusion, producing excess energy, is slowly becoming a reality. Just a few months ago, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (1) accomplished something that has great significance for humanity. The progression of humans critically depends on the arrival of breakthrough technologies on schedule. There are three candidates on deck, nuclear fusion, room temperature superconductivity and quantum computing. Only the first one is getting close to reality, and it is about time.

Fusion has tickled the fancy of many. Every morning a fireball rises in the East like clockwork, a constant reminder that life begins with energy. For without the grand nuclear fusion experiment at a safe distance, the blue planet would have been dead and gone long time ago. A few charlatans appeared in the 90s, calming “cold fusion,” that was quickly put down. There is only one kind of fusion, hot, that is needed to coax Hydrogen atoms to combine into an inert gas.

The requirements were clear, you need to create hot plasma, and you need to contain it safely. It took no less than 192 lasers (1) for the scientists to ignite a life-giving fusion process. As expected, the engineering is complex and still requires fine tuning before humanity can rejoice. If they are successful, it changes the equation as it means free energy, something only the Sun could provide so far. With free energy, humans can solve virtually any problem they have — terraform the Earth back to health, create food and water on demand to feed 8 billion clones who roam the planet, and pull garbage out of the oceans.

Fusion, if we can bring it to fruition, could set humanity on a high positive slope.

(1) Here’s how scientists reached nuclear fusion ‘ignition’ for the first time (sciencenews.org)