DIY

So you're concerned about America's energy future. You don't want to continue burning fossil fuels or homeless people's bodies or what ever you're using and you want to go green. But windmills? The sun? This all seems so utterly gay. Isn't there a way you could harness the power of the sun in a way that didn't involve technology you have on your crappy calculator?

Wouldn't it be better if you could create your own sun and subjugate it to your own will so you could.... watch Tivo'd episodes of Law and Order? Isn't that what a God does? Wasn't creating a fusion mini sun what Doc Ock was trying to do in Spider-Man 2? I think we all remember how well that worked out for him. Shouldn't we be able to do this?

Now, thanks to one man's efforts, we may. Home fusion.

Suppes never slows down, moving from one problem to the next with an irrepressible smile. The workshop is a few hundred square feet sub-let from a roboticist friend in a warehouse one floor above a hassidic clothing factory near Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. "I'm starting from nothing, I mean nothing," says Suppes, "There's no reason I should be doing this. It's ridiculous on all levels." What he's doing is building a Bussard Polywell fusion reactor.

That's from the beginning of a fascinating Gizmodo article on one Mark Suppes and his fusion efforts. Worth your time. The BBC also did a piece on him.

I tell you this because he may solve the world's energy needs, he may fail, and he might succeed but create a new sun somewhere in the vicinity of New York City. Which might be bad. Irregardless, we as a country need more of this behavior. Less people arguing whether or not evolution exists, questioning the scientific consensus on global warming, or even just questioning basic science itself, and more people saying "Fuck it, I'm building a sun in the den. Honey, hold my calls."

Let's get going on the future, people.