ITER tokamak

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The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

On one hand, the US Congress has been allocating just a fraction of the money that ITER has been promised, citing “concerns about the cost and schedule of ITER.”13 This, of course, only compounds ITER’s cost and schedule problems. On the flip side, there have been painful cuts to the US domestic program. In 2016, the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shut down leaving the US with just two large tokamaks. The US was left with a weaker experimental tokamak program than the village of Culham in England.14 Figure 7.9:The first ITER toroidal field coil, which was completed in Italy in 2016. Credit ©ITER Organization, http://www.iter.org Nevertheless, the $25 billion price tag of ITER, since it is spread over half the world’s population and across 25 years, is fairly small by governmental standards.

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After it starts operating around 2025, ITER aims to demonstrate the scientific and technological viability of fusion energy. While the goals and ideals of ITER are laudable, its implementation has been … complicated. In this chapter, we will discuss ITER’s goals, how it will achieve them, its cost, and where it might lead. Figure 7.1:The ITER tokamak. Note how big the device is compared to the person in the bottom left corner. Credit ©ITER Organization, http://www.iter.org 7.1ITER’s Goals ITER aims to be the link that connects existing experimental devices to the first demonstration power plant. ITER will produce no electricity and is both a physics and engineering endeavor.

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It will test how well we understand magnetic confinement fusion and illuminate the behavior of large high-performance plasmas. If ITER is successful, a path to a demonstration tokamak power plant will be, for the most part, clear. The important physics would be largely settled, making power plant design primarily engineering and economics. However, if ITER fails, it may indicate that the scientific and technological basis of the tokamak is not sound. Thus, the stakes for ITER are high. To serve this purpose, ITER is designed to attain the following goals: (1)Achieve a plasma power multiplication factor of Q > 10 in 5 minute long pulses. ITER is designed to create deuterium–tritium plasmas that significantly exceed breakeven (i.e.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Star builders have ideas about how to do this, but it’s hard to make progress without a net-energy-gain reactor to try them on. For tokamaks, the first stage, getting heat energy out, is the hardest. “We sweep it down to a sacrificial surface at the bottom,” Chapman continues. This is the divertor, a part of the tokamak designed to take a beating that’s more intense than what the space shuttle receives during reentry. The bigger the tokamak, the more intense the heat. ITER is designed right at the physical limit of what solid materials in conventional tokamaks can endure. For inertial confinement fusion, the geometry of the reactor is much more simple and getting the heat out is too, so it’s less of a concern.

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Clery, “Alternatives to Tokamaks: A Faster-Better-Cheaper Route to Fusion Energy?,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 377 (2019): 20170431; R. Mumgard, A New Approach to Funding, Accelerating, and Commercializing Fusion: NAS Comments, PPPL (Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 2018). 9. J. Wesson and D. J. Campbell, Tokamaks, vol. 149 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10. M. Claessens, ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor: Bringing a Sun to Earth (London: Springer Nature, 2019). 11. “ITER FAQ” (2020), http://www.iter.org/faq; E. Cartlidge, “Fusion Energy Pushed Back Beyond 2050,” BBC (2017), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40558758. 12.

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See also renewable energy Banqiao Dam failure (1975), China, 181 energy crisis solution using, 36–37 lack of plants for, 37 public support for using, 40 world energy consumption and, 34 hydrogen composition of humans and, 86 fusion using isotopes of, 51 nuclear fusion reactions with, 87, 93–94 star formation and, 74, 75, 76, 77 Sun’s fusion reactions and, 79, 83–84 tokamak plasma and, 95, 101, 104 hydrogen bombs atomic bombs compared with, 166 Bikini Atoll testing (1953) of, 161–64, 173–74 controlled fusion reactors for power compared with, 8, 166, 167 net energy gain in, 47 nuclear fusion and fission basis for, 166 proposed space exploration use of, 214 radiation exposure from, 163, 174 Teller’s idea of using to generate electricity, 115–16 HyperJet Fusion Corporation, 143 ignition definition of, 9 EAST tokamak in China and, 193 hotspot ignition, 124 increased temperature and fusion reactions for, 92 JET and, 92 Lawson’s theory and equations on conditions for, 109 Livermore progress in, 16 magnetic fusion machines and, 185, 217 NIF possibilities for, 126, 188, 190, 191 Imperial College London, 26, 73, 96–97, 126–27, 144 inertial confinement fusion, 10 China’s use of, 14 costs of, 122, 198, 206 driver focusing mechanism in, 116–20 First Light Fusion’s use of, 24, 135, 190, 197–98 fusion plasmas timing in, 113–14 Halite-Centurion experiments and, 131, 190–91 laser improvements in, 190–91 later use of simulations replacing, 23 LIFE power plant prototype for, 199, 206 Los Alamos National Laboratory and, 24 low meltdown possibility in, 168–69 MagLIF experiment and, 157–58, 190 magnetic confinement compared with, 113–14 mechanism of, 10 mix of temperature, density, and confinement in, 113 net energy gain goal for, 130–32, 190–91, 199, 217 NIF’s use of, 17, 111, 112–13, 118, 126–29, 134, 188–91, 194, 198, 199, 212 Nuckolls’s experiments and, 116–18 plasma instabilities in, 129 plasma physics’ challenge for, 120 reactor design and, 195, 196–97 shock waves in, 134, 135 start-ups use of, 22 target fabrication in, 121–23, 126–28 Teller’s conception of, 115–16 timing and number of repeat shots in, 197–98 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 33–34, 36, 45 International Atomic Energy Agency, 14 International Energy Agency, 205, 206 International Space Station, 202 IPSOS poll, 40 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, 186–88, 193, 194, 197, 201 breeding tritium and, 196 construction delays in, 187–88 cost of, 202, 203–4 design of 187–88 expense of buildings, 202, 203–4 high temperatures for fusion in, 195 international agreement for building, 186–88, 191 international satellite sites for, 187 net energy gain goal and, 191 plasma Q goal of, 188 Japan atomic bombings (1945) in, 154 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 JT-60 tokamak in, 185 Jernigan, Tammy, 78 Joint European Torus (JET) reactor building and shared management of, 88–89, 106–7 confinement of plasma in, 186 control room for monitoring data in, 92–93 cost of, 107, 202 deuterium alone used in, 94–95 high temperatures for fusion in, 91–95, 194 ignition and, 92 magnetic fields for plasma confinement during, 96 maintaining internal chamber wall conditions in, 104–6 physical setting for, 90 Q measure and, 92, 100, 105, 107–8, 183–84 Rimini’s role investigating instabilities of, 98–99, 102–3 robotics at, 196–97 safety of working environment at, 180 success of energy gain in, 107–8, 183–84, 191 trapping hot hydrogen in, 95–96 JT-60 tokamak, Japan, 185 Kingham, David, 33, 139–40, 141, 153–54, 205 Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), 184, 185 Laberge, Michel, 145 Large Hadron Collider, CERN, 52, 202 Larmor, Joseph, 96 Larmor radius, 96 laser fusion, 120, 192 lasers, in inertial confinement fusion, 117–19 lasers, Maiman’s invention of, 117 Laser MegaJoule, France, 192 Lawrence, Ernest O., 111, 173, 183 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, 78, 111–12 Halite-Centurion experiments at, 131, 190–91 inertial fusion energy goal of, 17 LIFE power plant prototype at, 199, 206 location of, 110–11 magnetic confinement device at, 97–98 NIF at.

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, John von Neumann, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Macrae, Project Plowshare, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, Yom Kippur War

They obliterated almost everything that wasn’t part of a tokamak project; the nation put almost all its magnetic fusion eggs in the tokamak basket. Many fusion scientists thought that other configurations (including some new ones like “spheromaks”) might lead to a working reactor faster than a tokamak would. In their view, cutting off research for these alternatives was shortsighted and premature. The tokamak shouldn’t be the only game in town. Thus, they were against ITER. They didn’t want to wager everything on a single enormous tokamak. Moreover, they weren’t alone in their wariness of the international reactor. Even tokamak physicists felt threatened, because the domestic fusion program would have to be gutted in favor of the enormous international collaboration.

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Together, the four countries would build an enormous tokamak that would finally achieve ignition and sustained burn. For the first time, humans would be able to harness the power of the sun for peaceful purposes. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was born. ITER was to be a monster. As design work began on it, scientists realized that it would cost $10 billion. The four parties, working together, could cough up the money, but ITER would devour the fusion budgets of all the participating countries.63 Even the big tokamaks—TFTR, JET, JT-60—would not survive. Once the ITER project was under way, there would be no room in the budget for anything else.

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Scientists in Europe, Russia, and Japan struggled to keep the ITER project alive without the United States’ participation. They quickly decided that ITER, as originally envisioned, would be impossible to build. The three parties settled upon an ITER-Lite design. Gone was hope of ignition and sustained burn. Gone was the hope of a great leap toward fusion energy. And without the United States, even a drastically reduced ITER would be decades away. In the meantime, fusion scientists had to make do with their increasingly obsolete tokamaks. They did their best to put a positive spin on a bad situation. Even as the original plans for ITER were dying, European and Japanese researchers finally claimed they had achieved the long-sought-after goal of breakeven.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

In a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, the amount of power that can be generated rises in proportion to β2B4, where β is the ratio of the plasma pressure to the magnetic pressure, and B is the magnetic field strength. An ordinary tokamak like ITER can only achieve a β of about 0.12, but an ST can achieve a β of 0.4. As a result, an ST can produce the same amount of power as a regular tokamak in a machine less than one-tenth the size and cost. Figure 6.3. ITER under construction (left); Tokamak Energy's Spherical Tokamak (right). Image courtesy of ITER and Tokamak Energy; reproduced by permission, © 2018 by Tokamak Energy Ltd. 2. Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Founded in 2018, this MIT-based venture has raised $75 million so far, including $50 million from the Italian oil company ENI and about $25 million from the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson.

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When I was in graduate school in the 1980s at the University of Washington, FRCs were all the rage, as they routinely achieve β values of more than 0.5. Moreover, their simple construction makes them potentially much more promising for creating low-cost commercial systems or fusion rocket drives than tokamaks. But by the 1980s, tokamaks had crowded out all funding within the US fusion budget, and shortly afterward, even the US tokamaks were starved for funds to feed ITER. FRCs were far too avant-garde to even be considered by ITER. But private investors are much more daring than international bureaucrats, and TAE is pushing hard, with a goal of demonstrating net energy production by 2024. Figure 6.4. Tri Alpha Energy has received more than $500 million in private investment to develop the field-reversed configuration into a practical fusion reactor.

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., 311–12 InSight Mars lander, 55 Inspiration Mars, 33 intelligence, search for, 256–58. See also extraterrestrials, search for; life, search for International Astronautical Congress (IAC), 107, 110 International Space Station (ISS), 45, 47, 51, 132, 329, 330 International Space University, 29 International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX), plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) interstellar communications, 257–58 use of bacteria, 258–60 interstellar travel, 181–214, 214 as indication of extraterrestrial intelligence, 256 list of what needs to be done to achieve, 327–34 making spacecraft lighter, 199–200 Noah's Ark Eggs (seed spaceships) concept, 209–14 propulsion systems for, 181–207 (see also antimatter propulsion systems; chemical propulsion systems; electric sails and dipole drives; fission propulsion systems; fusion propulsion systems; light sails; magnetic sails) reasons for pursuing for the challenges, 271–86 for the future we can create, 315–25 to gain more freedom, 301–25 for the knowledge gained, 249–69 for survival of humanity, 287–99 requiring a mature species to accomplish, 207–209 Saturn Express (concept project as step toward), 200–201 See also spaceflights/space travel Io (moon of Jupiter), 152, 153, 167 ionosphere, 133, 253, 256, 341 iron, 136, 137, 145, 149, 150, 171, 226, 227, 229, 242, 294 Isp (specific impulse), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341, 344 ISPP (in situ propellant production), 341, 342 ISS (International Space Station), 45, 47, 51, 132, 329, 330 ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Itokawa (asteroid), 130 ITS.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

And bonus, it’s happening inside a huge metal donut. ITER is the biggest, most expensive fusion project today. Unfortunately, ITER (like many science megaprojects) has been fraught with delays and cost overruns. You know how it’s hard to get cats with brain damage to agree on something? Well, imagine if instead of brain-damaged cats, it’s political appointees from many different nations. The current cost estimate for ITER is over $15 billion,* which is a bit of an increase over the initially projected $5 billion. In fairness, they were only one digit off. Still, progress continues. As we write this, the actual tokamak portion of ITER is finally being built.

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But this project is really exciting because the lab has produced some detailed computer models suggesting that if the approach is scaled up enough (in terms of energy), it should be able to achieve breakeven. Experiments are ongoing, and their giant capacitor bank (the Z-machine we mentioned earlier) is being expanded. If things go well, it’s possible they’ll make it by the end of the decade. ITER The biggest experiment of all, using the most successful and well-studied fusion configuration, is ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. ITER uses a “tokamak” configuration, which is a Russian acronym for toroidal chamber for magnetic confinement. Basically, imagine you have a gigantic Dunkin’ Donut, only instead of sawdust and tears, the inside is filled with plasma.

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As we write this, the actual tokamak portion of ITER is finally being built. The hope is that the full-on fusion reactor experiment will happen in 2027, just in time for the first Robot Uprising. ITER is generally considered the best hope for a functional fusion reactor any time soon, and not without good reason. The biggest currently running tokamak, the Joint European Torus (JET), is already hitting 60%–70% of breakeven. Other Projects In addition to these big experiments, there are many smaller heterodox approaches. The scientists we’ve talked to have generally responded to these experiments by saying some version of “I hope it works, but it probably won’t.”

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Unforeseen problems meant the challenges were consistently greater than anyone anticipated. In fusion, hydrogen is heated to hundreds of millions of degrees. Magnetic fields hold it inside what is called a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped ring. At that temperature the hydrogen nuclei collide and fuse to form helium nuclei. This process releases energy – and presents a fiendishly difficult engineering problem. Increasing the scale of the tokamak, for example, was understood to make fusion more likely. So you build a bigger tokamak. But this creates a welter of snags. And, of course, costs far more money. Theoretically, fission requires little energy to get started. Fusion requires us to recreate the core of a star on Earth.

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E. 34 Sheeran, Ed 107 Shelley, Mary 159 ships 66, 67–8 Shklovsky, Joseph 306 Shockley, Bill 182 short-termism 18, 148, 191–2, 194 Siemens 265, 288 Siemens-Martin process 80 Silicon Valley 15, 41, 96, 159, 182, 187, 220, 270, 279–80, 295, 312, 335 silkworm plague 50 Singer, Isaac 11 singularity 238 smallpox 47, 53, 335 Smil, Vaclav 80, 111 Smith, Adam 26, 34, 35, 87, 299 Smolin, Lee 13, 121, 203 social science 124 Socrates 108, 109, 216, 291 software developers 275 Solow, Robert 88 Sony 184 South Korea 262, 264, 275, 279 Southwood, Ben 82 Soviet Union 138, 144, 315 see also Russia space exploration 70–2, 131, 165, 218, 233, 239, 263, 265–6, 295–6, 315, 316, 338, 341, 342 SpaceX 131, 296, 318 Spanish flu pandemic 54 specialisation 156, 157–8, 160–2 speciation 30 Spengler, Oswald 187–8, 190 spontaneous generation 49 Spotify 86 stagnation 180–222, 283–4, 302, 308, 310–11, 314, 336 and breakthrough organisations 298 diagnosis 126 secular 95 see also Great Stagnation Debate stagnationists 14 Stalin, Joseph 114 Stanford, Leland 67 status quo 206 steam engine 26, 34, 38–9, 42, 67–8, 92, 233, 239–40, 253–4, 317, 335 steel 80 Stein, Gertrude 101 Stephenson, George 26, 219 Stephenson, Neal 98 Stockton and Darlington railway 67 Storrs Hall, J. 219, 222 Strassman, Fritz 144 Stravinsky, Igor 99–101, 103, 105, 132 string theory 120 Summers, Lawrence 94–5 Sun Tzu 259 superintelligence 238, 250, 341–2 superminds (collective brains) 299, 300–1 superorganisms 300 superposition 240 supranational institutions 332 sustainable living technologies 221 syphilis 52 Syracuse, Sicily 1–4 T-cells 58 team size 157, 161 tech companies 214 technological change 280–1, 338 and economic growth 88 illusion of 85 slowdown 84 technology 25–6 boosting growth 82, 88 endogenous growth 88–9, 94 see also new technology telescopes 231–2, 239, 263 television 75 Terror, the 137 Tesla, Nikola 286, 287–8, 290 Texas Instruments 184 Textual Revolution 252 TFP see Total Factor Productivity ‘theory of everything’ 122, 174, 330, 341 Thiel, Peter 13, 31, 84, 98 thinking 247–8 Third Millennium instruments 239–54 Thomas, Dorothy 39 threshing machines 11 Time (magazine) 59 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 124 Tito, Josip Broz 188 tokamak 145–6 Tolkien, J.R.R. 124, 236 Total Factor Productivity (TFP) 82, 88 trade 23, 24, 26, 177, 213 transhumanism 339 transistors 55, 92, 180–3, 245, 299–300, 338 transportation 62–73, 98 tribalism 210 Trotsky, Leon 188 Trump, Donald 208, 211 trust, failure of 208–9, 211–12 tuberculosis 53 Tuchman, Barbara 43 Tull, Jethro 25 Turing, Alan 77, 227, 246 Tutankhamun 153 Uber 205 uncertainty 302–336 radical 45 ‘unicorns’ 96, 270, 272 Union Pacific and Central Pacific 67 United Kingdom 96, 199, 214, 257, 262–3, 279, 326, 332 and life expectancy 54–5 and medicine 56 and transport 67–8 see also Britain United Nations (UN) 138, 271 Charter 133 Economic and Social Council 133 General Assembly 132–3, 135 Human Rights Commission 133–4 Sustainable Development Goals 318 World Technological and Existential Risk Council 313 United States 11, 82, 96–7, 103–4, 108, 111, 127, 134, 138, 209, 211–13, 216, 252, 255–8, 262, 265–6, 268–73, 275, 279–80, 283, 289, 292, 312, 314–17, 319, 332 and business start-ups 95–6 and the economy 91–2 and flight 62–4 and GDP per capita 82 and lawyers 205–6 and life expectancy 54 and medicine 54, 59–60 and nuclear power 146–7 and oil production 80 patent record 28, 32–3, 156, 195–6, 333 and transport 67–8 and the university system 198, 203 War Department 64 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 132–6, 138–40 universe, size of 170 university sector 127, 198–204, 206, 277–8, 291–2, 315–16, 327–8 Upanishads 36 Uraniborg 292 uranium 144 Uranus 26 urbanisation 270–2 utopias 308–10 vaccinations 46–9, 51, 125, 233, 245, 315, 335, 338 Van Reenen, John 91, 93 vellum 230 Velvet Underground 104 venture capital (VC) 195, 249, 280, 297, 331 Venus 265–6 Vesalius 291 Vienna 103, 188–90, 216, 217, 295 Vienna Circle 189 Vijg, Jan 79, 97 Vince, Gaia 300 virtual reality (VR) 241–2, 251–2, 307, 338, 339 Volta, Alessandro 26 Voltaire 25, 110 volume, measurement 1–2, 5 von Neumann, John 227, 246 Wales, Jimmy 326 Wallace-Wells, David 220 war 41, 43, 50, 284–5, 296, 314–17 see also specific wars Warhol, Andy 152, 295 Warsh, David 87 water frame 25 water supplies 53 Watson, James 119 Watson, Peter 109 Watson, Thomas, Jr 184 Watt, James 26, 330 wealth 151–2 weather, extreme 220 Webb, Michael 91, 93 Wedgwood, Josiah 34 Weiman, Carl 326–7 Weiner, Anthony J. 129 Wells, H.G. 45, 300 Westinghouse, George 33, 288 Whitehead, A.N. 304 Wiener, Anthony J. 129 Year 2000, The 9, 12, 13 Wikipedia 79, 97, 128, 297, 321 Wilson, E.O. 325 Wired (magazine) 12 Witten, Edward 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 103–4, 109, 173, 188 Wolf, Martin 84 Wollstonecraft, Mary 137 women 269–70 Woolf, Virginia 103 Woolley, Leonard 153 Wootton, David 232 Word2vec 235 World Bank 84, 279 World Economic Forum 86 Wright, Orville 36, 62–5, 68, 71, 139, 219, 295, 335 Wright, Wilbur 36, 62–5, 68, 71, 139, 219, 295, 335 X-10 Graphite Reactor 143–4 xenotransplantation 245 Xerox 184 Xerox PARC 180, 186, 296 Xi Jinping 284 Young, Thomas 154–6 Young Turks 182–3 Zionism 188 Zola, Émile 110 Zoom 86 Zoroastrianism 108 Zuckerberg, Mark 159 Zweig, Stefan 188, 189 Michael Bhaskar is a writer, researcher and digital publisher.

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Fusion's power record was set in 1997 by an experiment at the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire, resulting in a reaction whose power output was 60 per cent of that put in. While an international coalition invests billions in a vast new fusion project called ITER, a 5000-ton behemoth, and new startups like the SPARC reactor at MIT are claiming to drastically speed up the process, many scientists remain sceptical of quick progress. Laser compression techniques could proffer a breakthrough, but are still not ready. ITER isn't scheduled to deliver power to the grid until the second half of the twenty-first century. From the beginning ITER's vast scale and genesis as part of an international coalition made progress achingly slow. The whole project almost didn't get off the ground, sunk by bitter inter-country squabbles.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

Since then, the budget has trebled, the scale of the reactor halved and the completion date pushed back, but progress is being made. ITER will make the first equipment tests in 2020, and the first fusion tests are planned for 2028. The physicists hope to prove that they can produce ten times as much energy as the experiment requires: use fifty megawatts (in heating the plasma and cooling the reactor) to get 500 megawatts out. Larger tokamaks should, theoretically, be able to deliver an even greater output-to-input power ratio, in the gigawatts. It is a big gamble. So far, the world’s best and biggest tokamak, the JET experiment in the UK, hasn’t even managed to break even, energy-wise.

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When construction is complete, the pit will host a machine seventy-three metres high that will attempt to create boundless energy by fusing together two hydrogen nuclei, in much the same way as stars like our sun do. The result is an atom of helium plus a highly energetic neutron particle. Physicists aim to capture the energy from the emitted neutrons and use it to drive steam turbines to produce electricity. They have designed a doughnut-shaped reaction chamber, called a tokamak, which deploys a powerful magnetic field to suspend and compress the high-temperature hydrogen plasma for fusion. Once the reaction is initiated, the heat produced by the atomic fusion will contribute to keep the core hot. But unlike a fission reaction that takes place in nuclear power stations and atomic bombs, the fusion reaction is not self-perpetuating.

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Foundation 342 Goodall, Chris 322 Google 28, 44 Google Earth/Maps 51, 366, 367 Goreau, Thomas 167 gorillas 237, 248, 276 granite 299 graphene 317 grasses/grasslands 7, 106, 109, 129, 221, 222, 231, 238, 240, 271, 287 Great Acceleration 3, 8, 307, 320 Great Barrier Reef, Australia 169 Green Revolution 109, 114, 133, 317 greenhouse gases 8, 23, 34, 35, 51, 67, 68, 144, 146 and biofuel production 145 see also carbon dioxide; methane greenhouses 65 desalinated seawater 219–20 Greenland 73, 177, 178, 182, 215 Greenpeace 183 Gregory, John and Sue 153 Grindr app 367 groundwater 47 contamination of 310 extraction of 50, 72, 115, 203, 215, 379 Groupon (online shopping network) 367 guanacos 74 guano 108 Gujarat, India 110–14, 115–16, 212 Guyana Shield 267 Haber, Fritz 108 Hadley Cell 15–16 Hadley Centre for Climate Research 66 Hadzabe people 223–7, 320 Haiti 28, 366 Haiyan, typhoon 66 Hansen, James 177 Hartmann, Peter 80–82, 85, 86 Haywood, Jim 66 HCFCs 374 helium 298, 329 H5N1 influenza 349 HidroAysén (company) 79–80, 86–7 high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines 213–14 Hilbertz, Wolf 167 Himalayas 19, 40, 46, 47, 51–3 Hippocrates 304 hippopotamuses 207, 229 Hiroshima, bombing of 327 HIV/Aids 135, 198, 234, 245, 283, 349 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 89, 380 Ho Tong Yen 360–61, 362 Hoatzin/‘stink bird’ 271–2 Hobbs, Richard 253–4 Hofmeister, Anke 172 Holocene epoch 4, 7, 8, 9, 17, 238, 264, 299, 338 honey badgers 199–200, 226 honey birds 199–200, 226 Hong Kong 90, 346, 340, 369–70 Hooker, Joseph 285–6 Hoover Dam, USA 77 Huaneng Group: carbon capture facility 330 huemal deer 82, 83 Hulhumalé, the Maldives 162 Hunt Oil 280 hunter gatherers 7, 11, 94, 107, 124, 223–7, 233, 238, 279, 338, 345 Hurricane Katrina (2005) 380 Hurricane Sandy (2012) 379 Huvadhoo atoll, the Maldives 164 hydrocarbon fuels 214, 296 hydrodams see dams hydroelectricity/hydropower 31–2, 39–42, 52, 77–8, 213–14, 327 see also dams hydrogen 16, 214, 298, 329, 365 ‘hydropeaking’ 85 hydropower see dams; hydroelectricity Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol 98 ibex 50, 260 ice ages 7, 17, 34, 264 ice melt 177–81 see also glaciers Iceland 184, 213 ICRISAT see International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics IGCC see integrated gasification combined cycle power plants IMF 135 Imja glacial lake, Nepal 52 Incas, the 62, 270, 333, 334 Independent 178 India 34, 37, 116–17, 147, 320 air-conditioning units 374 air pollution/‘brown cloud’ 37, 38 aquifers 111, 112, 114 biofuel production 145, 332 coal-fired stations 325 GM crops 140, 141 groundwater extraction 115, 117 irrigation 114, 115, 211 land bought in Africa 102–3 mobile phones 28 Slum-Dwellers International network 350 tanka system 115–16, 117 tigers 244, 247 water shortages 110, 114–15 see also Ladakh India Space Research Centre 112 indium 315–16 indium tin oxide (ITO) 316 Indonesia 2, 35, 129, 256 ‘Indus Oasis’ (casino) 113 Indus River 53, 71–2 Industrial Revolution 3, 35, 263, 300, 307, 310 industrial symbiosis manufacture see ‘closed-loop’ manufacture insects 1, 17, 71, 108, 141, 142, 263, 271, 291 as food 97, 148, 388--9 and pest-control 134 see also ants; bees integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants 330, 331, 332 Interface (carpet manufacturer) 319 International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) 139–40 International Energy Agency (IEA) 213, 318, 325 International Institute for Environment and Development 98 International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) 328–9 Internet, the 11, 18, 24, 26, 27, 29–34, 136, 322, 367–9 Inuit, the 182 invasive species 250, 252–6 iron 298, 299, 306, 307 Irrawaddy River 53 irrigation 72, 79, 109, 114, 115, 118, 121, 132, 133, 143 with desalinated seawater 219–20 in deserts 107 drip 112, 113, 114, 120 in India 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 211 in Libya 215 solar-powered 211 Isiolo, Kenya 193, 194 Isla Incahuasi, Bolivia 334 Israel: electric cars 373 Itaipu dam, Brazil/Paraguay border 102 ITER see International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITO see indium tin oxide Ito, Akinori 326 Ituri Forest, Democratic Republic of Congo 246 ivory trade 198, 246 Jadeja, Hardevsinh 110–14, 143 jaguars 240–43, 237, 247, 260, 270, 275, 278 Janjaweed, the 245 Japan 102, 147, 161, 186, 318–19, 327, 340 jatropha 145 jellyfish 185–6 JET experiment 329 jet stream, the 180–81 Jinja, Uganda 122 Jones, Steve 378 Kalinowski, Celestino 279, 280 Kalinowski, Jan 279–80 Kalundborg, Denmark 320 Kampala, Uganda 112 Kandholhudhoo, the Maldives 160, 161, 163 Karachi, Pakistan: Orangi slum 350 Kathmandu, Nepal 18, 30, 32, 36–7, 39, 42 Kenya 135 drought 193, 195–6, 200–1, 206 education 204–5 206 M-Pesa 28 missionaries/missions 193–4, 199, 202, 204–5, 206–7, 208 pastoralists 196, 201, 205–6, 210 road-building 197–8 shanty towns 350 tribal conflict 193, 194–5, 196–7, 201, 206 see also missionaries; Turkana, Lake Kenya, Mount 46, 235 Kew Gardens, London 286 kha-nyou (rodent) 94 Khone Phaphene Falls, Laos 97 Khulna, Bangladesh 343, 346, 347, 352 Kikwete, Jakaya Mrisho, President of Tanzania 230, 259 Kilimanjaro, Mount 46 Kilimo Trust 120 Kinabalu, Mount 46 kingfishers 268, 271 Kipling, Rudyard 18 Kiribati 174–7 Kissinger, Henry 109 koala bears 237, 250 Kolkata, India: 2 Nehru Colony 366–7 Konik ponies 236 Korea, South 90, 102, 124, 346, 365 POSCO iron and steel consortium 336 krill 180 Kubuqi Desert, China 192 Kyakamese village, Uganda 118–20 Laama, Ringin 40 labour, division of 339 Lackner, Klaus 294, 295–6 Ladakh, India 48–51 artificial glaciers 53, 56–61 Laetoli, Tanzania 223–4 landslides 40, 46, 52 languages 26, 55, 62, 224, 273, 277, 347, 378 Lanzhou, China 362 Laos 88, 97, 98, 99 cluster bombs 90 Communist government 90, 91, 94 opium use 89 road-building 91–2 slash-and-burn 89 see also Mekong River La Paz, Bolivia 274, 275, 310 Las Vegas, Nevada 103, 193 ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’ 298 Laurance, Bill 255 lead/lead mining 301, 310, 315, 316 Leakey, Mary 223–4, 232 legumes 38, 133, 134 Leh, Ladakh, India 50–51, 54–5 leishmaniasis 274 lemurs, Madagascan 247, 250, 256 Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, Columbia University 294 León, German Cardinas 348 Leonard, Annie: The Story of Stuff 319 leopards 94, 227, 229 snow leopards 33, 260 leprosy 343 Li Quan 247 Libya: Great Man-made River project 215 Licancabur volcano, Bolivia 333 Licapa, Peru 62–4 ‘light-bulb conspiracy’ 312 lighting/light bulbs 315, 371 Lima, Peru 216–17 asentamientos humanos (AAHH; slums) 62, 217, 218, 347–8, 352 fog-harvesting 217–19 lions 227, 228, 229, 239–40, 248 Liquiñe–Ofqui fault line 85 lithium 332, 335–6 Liverpool 349 livestock 147, 148, 196, 200–1, 206 see also cattle; sheep; yaks llamas 74, 221, 300, 334 logging industry 9, 267, 268, 270, 273, 274, 276, 277, 283, 288, 289--90 Loiyangalani, Kenya 199, 204–5, 206–8 London 317, 349, 350, 364, 372, 378 ‘Gherkin’ 374 ‘guerrilla gardeners’ 377 smog 3, 35 Thames Barrier 379 Lopes, Antonio Francisco Bonfim (‘Nem’) 356 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 126, 245 Loshner, Gabriella 83 Lovelock, James 294 Lowoi (schoolteacher) 201, 202 Luang Prabang, Laos 89 Lugo, Ariel 254 Luis Val, Adalberto 291, 292 Lummerich, Anne 218 Luna, Javier Torres 217–18 Lyme disease 242 lysine 138 Ma’aden aluminium mine, Saudi Arabia 104 Maasai, the 224, 229–31 macaws 268, 271, 278, 281 McDougall, Gerald 188–9 McKinsey (consultants) 103, 319 Macquarie Island: rabbits 255 Madagascan lemurs 247, 250, 256 Madagascar 93, 124, 237, 264 Madidi National Park, Amazon Basin 267, 269–72, 273–4, 277–8 Madre de Dios region, Peru 278–84 Madre de Dios River, Peru 280–81, 283 Madrid: Canada Real Galiana 344 mahogany trees 270, 275, 279, 289 maize 125, 129, 130, 138, 144, 250 Makerere University, Kampala 137, 138 malaria 43, 121, 135, 199, 224, 274, 283, 293, 341, 367 Malawi 135 Malaysia 28 Petronas Towers 370 see also Singapore Maldives, the 152–3, 156--9, 175, 186 artificial islands/floating islands 157, 162–3 coral reefs 158, 159, 160, 161–2, 164, 166–8 ‘designer islands’ 160–61 heroin dependency 156 overfishing 169–70, 171–2 Soneva Fushi 172–3 tourists 153–4, 156, 158, 160, 163, 171, 172, 173 Malé, the Maldives 153, 154, 156, 161 Mamang-Kanga, Jean-Baptiste 245 Manaus, Brazil 290–91 manta rays 170, 185, 245 Manu National Park, Madre de Dios, Peru 278–80 Manu River 280–81 Manu Wildlife Centre 279, 281 marijuana 357, 369 marine reserves 186–7 Mascho-Piro tribe 279 Masdar, Abu Dhabi 366 Matterhorn, the 48 Mawlamyaing, Burma 91 meat consumption 147, 148, 290, 322 Medellín, Colombia 353–4, 357 Mekong River 53, 88–9, 90–91, 95, 99–101, 105 fish/fishing 95–6, 100, 101 hydrodams 83, 88, 89, 91, 92–4, 95–6 meltwater see glaciers Mesozoic era 221 metals 298, 299–300 rare earth 305, 315, 373 see also copper; gold; gold mining; iron; silver; silver mining methane 41, 78, 129, 134, 178, 214 methanol 296 metro/underground systems 346, 353, 354, 357, 364, 372, 373 Mexico City 379 miconia shrub 252 ‘microloan’ cooperatives 130 millets 130, 139, 143 minerals 191, 272, 298–9, 300, 305 mining 8, 9, 300, 308–9 see also coal; copper mining; gold mining; silver mining miscarriages 203 missionaries/missions see Kenya mobile phones/smartphones 27–9, 34, 118, 136, 210, 212, 231, 300, 304, 311, 312, 315–16, 335, 367 see also M-Pesa Mohammed, Fatima 161 Mojave Desert, California 209, 213, 214 monkeys 275, 291 chimpanzees 3–4, 306 howler monkeys 271, 281 spider monkeys 267, 271, 275–6, 277, 278, 281 Monsanto (company) 140–41 Montana, USA 236 Morales, Evo, President of Bolivia 274, 277, 278, 282, 335, 336 Morgan, Ned 121 mosquitoes 47, 274, 293, 341 moths, urban 377 mountains 8, 45–8, 66–7 painting white 62–4 M-Pesa mobile phone banking service 28, 208, 211, 350 mulch/mulching 133, 134, 145 Mumbai, India 344, 374 Murray River 72 Museveni, Yuweri, President of Uganda 126 mussels 187 Mutharika, Bingu wa, President of Malawi 135 Mwanawasa, Levy, President of Zambia 175 Nagasaki, bombing of 327 Nairobi 200, 207, 209, 210, 344 Nakai, Laos 92–4 Nam Theun II dam, Laos 92–4 Namibia 215, 216, 362 Nangi, Nepal 21, 24, 25–7, 30–32, 33, 36, 43 Napoleon Bonaparte 285 NASA 177, 294, 333 NaSARRI see under Uganda Nasheed, Laila 154 Nasheed, Mohamed (‘Anni’), President of the Maldives 153–8, 160, 161, 163, 172, 173–5, 190 National Geographic 273 Neanderthals 2, 238, 259, 306 Neem trees 134 Nepal 18–20, 21–3, 24–7, 43 Bengal tigers 243–5 electricity 20, 27, 41–2, see also hydropower (below) glacier melt 37, 40–41 hydropower 31–2, 39–40, 41 Internet/Wi-Fi 24, 27, 30–31, 32, 33, 34 tourism 32–3, 39 yak herders 24, 33, 37, 40 see also Kathmandu; Nangi Netherlands, the 236–7, 379 New Guinea: rainforest 264 New Orleans: and Hurricane Katrina 380 New Songdo City, South Korea 365 New York City 35, 317, 349, 350, 365, 378, 379 Bank of America Tower 371 raised railway park 377 water sources 104 New York Times 77 New Zealand 47, 175, 184, 237, 308 Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania 224, 228–30 Niger Delta 309 Nigeria 114 Nile, River 71–2, 79, 103, 122, 204, 207 Nineveh 339, 340 nitrogen 8–9, 16, 108, 133, 146, 373 nitrogen-’fixing’ plants 133, 136, 142, 143–4 Nomura’s jellyfish 186 Norphel, Chewang 53–9, 60–61, 69 North-East Passage 181 North Pole, the 177, 182 Norway: hydroelectricity 213–14 Nottingham, University of: Frozen Ark project 259 Nubian Sandstone Aquifer 215 nuclear energy/power stations 327–8 nuclear fusion plants 328–30 nylon stockings/tights 312 obsolescence, planned 312–14 oceans 150–52 acidification 3, 9, 152, 153, 165, 168–9 conservation zones/reserves 186–7 phytoplankton 152, 180, 190 pollution 152, 187–9 see also Arctic Ocean; sea-levels, rising ocelots 240 Odentethes hatcheri (fish) 83 Ohtake, Ruy 358 oil/oil industry 23–4, 181–2, 183, 280, 284, 296, 308, 309, 318, 326 oil spills 182 Okehampton, Devon 349 Okello, David Kalule 135–9 Olmaikorit-Oumo, Florence 130 Ologara village, Uganda 125–6, 127–31 Oman: peridotite 296 Omo Valley, Ethiopia 203, 204 Omoding, Ephrem 125, 127 Omoding, Winifred 125–7, 129–33, 143 One-Laptop-One-Child organisation 31 Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands 236–7 opium industry 89–90 orang-utans 248, 273, 276–7 Ordos, Inner Mongolia 331, 359 organic farming 133–4 orius (pirate bugs) 219 oryx, Arabian 256 oscar (fish) 291–2 ostriches 197 otters 83, 270 oxygen 16, 142, 214, 285, 293–4 lack of 133, 185, 186, 187, 291–2 and photosynthesis 263, 264, 284, 299 oysters 168 ozone 35, 37, 38, 373 ozone layer 3, 11, 17, 66 painting mountains/roofs white 62–4, 374 palm oil 276, 290 palm trees 172, 204, 266, 270, 293, 343 Panama Canal 320–21 pandas, Chinese 257 Pangaea 45 pangolins 245 Pantanal, the 240–42 Paraguay 102, 240 Parana River 102 Parco, Salamon 62–4 Paris 347, 364, 373 Parker, Ted 280 parks, national 236 see Bardia, Madidi, Manu, Serengeti and Yellowstone National Park Pascua River dam, Patagonia 73, 75–6 passenger pigeons 259 pastoralists 205–6, 210, 214, 220, 225 see also Maasai, the Patagonia 74–5, 81, 86 hydroelectric dams 73–4, 75–7, 79–88 Peak District, England 310 peanuts 118–19, 120, 129, 132–3, 136, 143 genetically modified 138, 139–40 peas 51, 139 peat 263, 310 Pemuteran, Bali 167 peridotite 296 Peru 41, 52, 108, 278–84, 332 mountain painting 62–4 pest-control/pesticides 129, 132, 134, 136, 141, 143, 185, 219, 243, 293 petrels 186 petroleum 309, 325–6 Petronas Towers, Malaysia 370 Phakding, Himalayas 39 pharmaceuticals 272 Philippines 28, 65, 66 Phnom Penh, Cambodia 100 Phoenix, Arizona 103, 193 photography 304 photosynthesis 2, 16, 38, 143–4, 165, 180, 190, 214, 263, 264, 265, 284–5, 291, 293–4, 297, 299, 317 photovoltaic (PV) panels see solar energy Phuktse, Ladakh, India: artificial glacier 58–9 phytoplankton 152, 180, 190 piezoelectric generators 363 Pilon Lajas Biosphere Reserve, Bolivia 278 Pinatubo, Mount (Philippines): eruption of (1991) 65 pine beetles 236 Piñera, Sebastian, President of Chile 80, 87 PlanIT Valley, Portugal 365 plankton 84, 168, 185, 309, 386 see also phytoplankton plants 1–2, 47, 70–71, 262, 263, 288, 326 plastic 5, 187–8, 311 bags 4, 128, 189, 323, 341 3D-printed items 317 turning back into oil 326 plate tectonics see tectonic movements platinum 214, 298 Playas de Rosarito, Mexico: proposed desalination plants 102 Pleistocene epoch 236, 237, 238 plutonium 328 Pokhara, Nepal 18, 19–20, 30 polar bears 178, 187 polio vaccination 367 pollution 310, 312, 318, 321, 330, 360–61 and environmental services fees 322–3 radioactive 7, 11 see also air pollution; ocean; waste; polyester garments 187 population growth 3, 9, 11, 36, 146–7, 251 POSCO iron and steel consortium 336 potatoes, sweet 140, 143 Potosí, Bolivia: silver mines 300–6, 307, 310 prickly pear 251, 256 printers, electronic 313 3-D 317 public transport 345, 372–3, see also metro Puerto Maldonado, Peru 283–4, 288 Puerto Rico, Gran Canaria: International Institute of Tropical Forestry 254 pumas 73 pumps, groundwater 50, 51, 115, 121, 122 see also boreholes; wells Pun, Mahabir 18–19, 21–7, 30–33, 37 Pun tribe 24, 27, 41 Putin, Vladimir, President of Russia 181–2 PV panels see solar energy pyrolysis 326 Qatar 219 Quechua 62, 347 Racoviteanu, Adina 60–61 radio 17–18 Rahmsdorf, Stefan 177 rain/rainfall 15, 37–8, 46, 47, 150, 151 acid rain 3, 310 in Africa 118, 122, 195 artificial production of 66, 132 harvesting and storing 115–17, 121–2, 216 in India 49–50, 111 in Lima, Peru 216, 217 in Uganda 118, 119, 122, 128 rainforests 15–16, 262, 264–5, 272–3 Borneo 264, 276–7 see also Amazon rainforests Raj-Samadhiyala, Gujarat, India 110–14 Rajkot, Gujarat, India 110, 115 Rajoelina, Andry, President of Madagascar 124 rats 250, 255 Ravalomanana, Marc, President of Madagascar 124 recycling see waste; water REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) 287–8, 289 redwoods, Californian 218, 293 Rees, Richard 171 refrigerants 17 Reid, Brian 84 reservoir-building 53, 77–8, 104, 112 Restore and Revive 259 rhinoceroses 227, 228, 246, 248, 258 rhododendrons 250 Ribeiro da Silva, José Claudio 268 rice/rice-growing 78, 90, 97, 101, 109, 134, 136, 143–4, 147, 185, 250 genetically modified 140, 141 Rift Valley 203, 223, 232 Rimac River 216 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: favelas 354–8, 367 Rio Grande 72 rivers 4, 8, 50, 53, 70–73, 104, 308 see also dams and specific rivers road-building Amazon rainforest 281–4 Burma–Vietnam 91–2 Serengeti 258–9 Robichaud, Bill 92, 94 Robinah, Byarindaba 118–20, 121 Rockefeller Foundation 138, 139 ‘rock glaciers’ 60 rocks 2, 46, 74, 108, 299–300 Rome/Romans 34, 307 roofs, whitewashing 64, 374 Roosevelt, Theodore, US President 227 Rotterdam, Netherlands 379 Rubbish Island, 163 Ruiz, Rosa Maria 266–72, 273–4, 275, 277, 278 ruminants 221–2, see cattle Rurrenabaque, Bolivia 265–6, 269 Rwanda: gorillas 276 Sahara Desert 195 aquifers 215 Desertec solar power plant 213 Great Green Wall 192 minerals from 191, 272 salamander, jumping 257 Sale, Peter 164, 167 salmon, farmed 185 salt production 334 Salter, Stephen 66 Samburu tribe 195, 197, 201, 204, 208 Samso island, Denmark 325 San Cristobel, Bolivia: silver/zinc mine 333 San Diego, California: Zoo 259 San people 232–5 Sánchez de Lozada, Gonzalo 273 sand dams 198, 216 sanitation 11, 20–21, 38, 115, 339 see also toilets Santa Cruz, island of, Galapagos 251–3 Charles Darwin Research Station 251–2, 253, 254 Santiago, Chile 75 São Paulo, Brazil: Heliopolis favela 358 saola antelope 94 Sarima, Kenya 201–3 SARS 349 satellites 18, 22–3 mapping by 60–61, 112, 367 Saudi Arabia 102, 104, 308 solar-powered desalination plants 216 superfarms 148 savannahs 221–3, 238, 265 Save the Children 135 scalesia (Scalesia pedunculata) 251, 252, 253 schizophrenia 377 schools see education seabirds 186 sea cucumbers 168–9 seagulls 377 sea-levels, rising 5, 9, 52, 151, 153, 159–60, 174–8, 189–90, 343, 379 Seasteading Institute 189 Semiletov, Igor 178 Seoul, South Korea 346 Serengeti National Park 223, 227–32, 256, 258 Serere bird 271–2 Serere Sanctuary, Amazon Basin 268 service manuals 313–14 sesame seeds 125, 131, 138 Shabab, the 245 Shanghai 35, 89, 211, 321, 322, 379 shanty towns see slums sharks 164, 171–2, 185, 242 whale 170–71 shearwaters 186 sheep 74, 81, 82, 221, 236 Shemenauer, Bob 219 ships 65, 317, 320–21 Shivdasani, Sonu 172–3 Shrestha, Alok 41 Siem Reap, Cambodia 99 silica 84 silicosis 301, 302, 303, 306 silver 304–5, 312 silver mining, Bolivian 300–6, 333 silver nitrate 304 Silvestre, Elizabeth 216–17 Simpson Valley, Chile 83 Singapore 90, 346, 360, 362, 369 Marina Bay Sands 376 Si Phan Don, Laos 95 Siteram (Nepali guide) 243–4 Skarra, Ladakh, India 53 Skinner, Jamie 98 skyscrapers 370–71 slash-and-burn 107, 128, 277 sleeping sickness 225 sloths 237, 250, 270 slums/shanty towns 341–4, 346, 347, 348–53, 366–7, 378 in Brazil (favelas) 354–8, 367 smartphones see mobile phones Smil, Vaclav 250–51 Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC 227 Smits, Willie 276–7 social media sites see Facebook; Twitter soil(s) 108, 127–9, 142 solar energy/power 30, 211–14 combined with wind projects 209, 213, 361 for desalination plants 193, 216, 219–20 for public and private buildings 363–4, 366 panels/photovoltaic (PV) panels 116, 211–12, 214, 315, 331, 332 and payback schemes 211, 212, 323 storage and distribution 213–14, 365 solar radiation management 63–5, 68–9, 132 Soneva Fushi, the Maldives 172–3 sorghum 120, 125, 130, 139, 143, 144 Soroti, Uganda 125–6, 132, 135 Soules, Luke 313, 314 South Africa 118, 236, 351–2 Southern Ice Field 73 soya/soybean 281, 289, 290 Spain 65, 128, 184, 213, 216, 301, 307 spotted fever 242 Stakmo, Ladakh, India 48–50, 61 Stanbic Bank Uganda 120 star coral 257 Starbucks 368 steam power 213, 219, 307, 365 Stone Age 2–3, 307 stoves see cooking stromatolites 16 sturgeon 71 sugar cane 122, 144, 145, 290 Sumatra: rainforest 264 Sumerian cities 339 Sundrop Farms, South Australia 219 sunflowers 125, 131, 138, 145 sunlight see solar energy; solar radiation management Survival International 234 sustainability 323–5, 369, 371, 375–6 Suzano (Brazilian consortium) 290 Svalbard islands, the Arctic 37 Switzerland 20, 21, 48, 60 Syncrude mine, Athabasca oil sands, Canada 4 syngas 296, 330 Syngenta 140–41 Tacana people 269, 277 Taiwan 90, 146–7 tamarin, pied 291 tanka system 115–16 Tanzania 223–4 road-building 258–9 tourism 227, 231 UAE hunting reserves 227, 230 see also Serengeti National Park tapirs 237, 240, 270, 275, 281 tar sands 309 tara trees 218 Target (supermarket) 369 tarpans 236 Tashi (Indian farmer) 48, 49, 61 Tasmanian devils 247 Tasmanian tigers 260 taxes 97, 123, 194, 324, 350, 356, 357, 368, 372 tectonic movements 45–6, 73, 85, 250, 263, 299, 334 telegraphy 27 television sets 313, 314, 315 tenebrionid desert beetle 218 Thailand 90, 91, 93, 100, 256 Thakek, Laos 91, 95 Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India 209 Thiel, Peter 189 Thiladhunmathi atoll, the Maldives 164 Thilafushi, the Maldives 163 Thompson, Lonny 64 thorium/thorium reactors 315, 328 3D printing 317 Three Gorges Dam, China 83 Thupstan (Indian farmer) 50 Tianjin, China Eco-city 360–63, 375 GreenGen energy plant 330 Tiedemann, Kai 218 tigers 94, 243–5, 246–8, 249, 260 tiger wine 245, 246 Tigris, River 71–2 tilapia 207, 208 tin/tin mining 299, 301, 310, 316 tin oxides, non-stochiometric 316 Toba, Indonesia: volcanic eruption 2 toilets 20–21, 25, 26, 113, 115, 116, 348, 363 tokamaks 329 tokay geckos 256 Tokyo: population 340 Tomasetti, Roberto 166–7 Tong, Anote, President of Kiribati 174–6, 190 Tonle Sap, Lake 99–100 Torres, Geronimo 63–4 tortoises 214, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255 Toshiba 314 tourism industry/tourists Amazon rainforest 270, 273, 276, 279 Cambodia 99 and ‘conservation fees’ 248 India 50–51, 57, 244 Maldives 153–4, 156, 158, 160, 163, 171, 172, 173 Nepal 32–3, 39 Serengeti 228, 231 in Tanzania 227, 231 TRAFFIC 245, 246 trains, maglev 372 trees 129, 263 artificial 295–6, 297 fog-trapping 218 see also deforestation; forests tryptophan 138 tsetse flies 225 Tsodilo Hills, Botswana 233 tsunamis 160, 161, 328 tuberculosis 135, 234 Tullow Oil 210 tuna 169–70, 185, 187 tundra, Arctic 178, 293 tungsten 298 tunqui (bird) 279 Turkana, Lake (Kenya) 193, 199, 203–4, 205, 208, 209 and see below ‘Turkana Boy’ 203 Turkana Corridor Low Level Jet Stream 208–9 Turkana solar power station 210–11 Turkana tribe 194–5, 197, 201–2, 204, 207–8, 242, 316 Turkana wind farm 208–9, 210 Turkmenistan 59 turtles 170, 174, 185, 187, 268, 280 Tuvalu 174 Twitter 28–9, 367, 368 Uganda 26, 118–22 agriculture 118–22, 125, 126–33, 135, 136, 137–8, 140, 144 gorillas 276 National Semi-Arid Resources Research Institute (NaSARRI) 130–31, 136, 138 roads 144 United Arab Emirates: Tanzanian hunting reserves 227, 230 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity 247 Environment programme 37, 248 Food and Agriculture programme 145 GRIDMAP programme 203 United States of America 157 Agency for International Development 133 biofuel production 145 dams 77, 98 maglev trains 372 meat consumption 147, 148 National Ignition Facility, California 329 Natural Resources Defense Council 374 no-till agriculture 142 oil consumption 318 water use 102, 362 see also specific states and towns Ur 339 uranium 308, 315, 327, 328 Uribe, Freddie 342 Uunartoq Qeqertaq 178 Uyuni, Bolivia 332–3, 336–7 salar (salt flats) 333–6, 337 Vabbinfaru, the Maldives 166–7 Vanua Levu, Fiji 176 VCRs 313–14 vegetables 26, 61, 65, 97, 272 see also legumes Venice 168 vetifer 129 Victoria, Queen 27 Vientiane, Laos 91 Vietnam 90, 92, 100–1 floating markets 101 Villa Hermosa, Colombia 341, 342–3, 344, 346, 347, 352 villages 338–9, 378 Vio, Francisco 82 Vishwanath (‘Zen Rainman’) 116–17 vitamin A deficiency 140 VoIP phones 31 volcanoes/volcanic eruptions 2, 5, 36, 65, 66, 68, 73, 79, 85, 299, 333 Vong, Mr (restaurateur) 96–7 Wageningen, Carlo van 210 Walker, Barry 279, 280–81 warthogs 229 waste 310–11, 312–13, 361 electronic 311–12, 313 food 144, 147 plastic 5, 187–8, 326 recycling 319–20, 322, 323, 324, 351 waste-pickers 350, 351–2 water 11, 46–7, 72–3, 215 fetching 202–3 recycling 115, 323, 362–3 ‘virtual water’ trade 102–3 see also aquifers; boreholes; dams; desalination; fossil water; glaciers; groundwater; irrigation; rain; reservoirs; rivers; wells water shortages 72–3, 103–4, 215–16 Africa 118, 121, 122–3, 215 India 49–51, 57, 110, 111–13, 114–15 see also droughts wattieza (plants) 263 wells, hand-dug 121, 122, 132 Westpoint Island, Belize 188–9 wetlands 53, 71, 78, 85 artificial 104–5 whale sharks 170–71 whales 73, 164, 180 wheat 7, 23, 38, 43, 51, 88, 109, 136, 138, 193, 250, 251 Wiens, Kyle 313, 314–15 Wi-Fi 24, 30–31, 32, 356 Wikipedia 12 wildebeest 228, 229, 231, 258 wildlife see animals and specific animals Wilson, E.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Between tennis shots, Michael told Peter about a program at MIT called UROP, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, giving undergraduate students the chance to work on research in fields as varied as nuclear science, urban planning, and solar-photovoltaic systems for houses. Michael told Peter that he was working on fusion experiments involving the building of a scaled-down version of a tokamak, a vacuum inside a circular steel tube that used magnetic fields to confine fusion. His project leader was Professor Louis Smullin, who had helped create the school’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and was head of the radiation laboratory in the early 1940s when the lab developed airborne radar used during World War II.

…

., 179 Svitek, Tomas, 229 Swept-back wing design, 51, 51n, 116, 162 Taurus XL, 230 Taylor, Andrew, 169 Taylor, Jack, 169 Telecom Technologies, 298, 298n, 300 Tesla, Nikola, 90 Texas Instruments, 21 TGV Rockets, 186, 273–74 Thermal tolerance, 249, 249n, 311–12, 322–23 Thermosphere, 335n Theta Delta Chi, 38, 42–43, 71 Third-stage cutoff, 13n Thompson, Barry, 317–18 Thompson, Earl, 168 Thrust into Space (Hunter), 129 Tighe, Jim, 6, 7, 344–45, 354, 380, 383, 387, 393 Ting, Samuel, 31 Titanic (movie), 225, 227 Tito, Dennis, 239–40, 299, 315 Titov, Gherman, 48 Tokamak, 28 Tosteson, Dan, 98–99 Transonic corridor, 324, 329–30, 343, 351, 354 Troposphere, 335n Truax, Bob, 55, 184–85, 184n, 234 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 24, 24n, 72, 90, 129, 150 Tsiolkovsky Medal, 150 Tumlinson, Rick, 185 Tuori, Mr., 22–23 Turta, Constantin, 276–77, 279 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 45–46 2001: A Space Odyssey (movie), 72, 174 Typhoon Marge, 60 Uliassi, Kevin, 195 Ullage, 358–60 UNIFON, 92 United Nations (UN), 44–47 Unity, VSS, 409, 414 University of Arizona, 233 University of North Dakota, 410 University of Pennsylvania, 238 University of Salford, 267 University of Virginia, 208 University Politehnica of Bucharest, 181 Unload for Control (film), 53 Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 159–60, 160n Van Vogt, A.

…

Burt would see how they would do subsonically first. Like his doodles on napkins, the models were a part of Burt’s process. With every new type of plane, Burt plotted and planned and worked out hundreds of details in his mind before testing anything in a computer. There was never an epiphany, a single “aha” moment; only iteration after iteration, layer after layer. Aesthetics were a part of performance. If a wing reached its performance goal, it was beautiful. If he put a sweep on a wingtip that looked like a shark fin, it was to improve performance. The fact that it looked cool was an unexpected benefit. He worked on every project until he reached the point where something in his gut told him he was right.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

But thirty-five nations – China, the twenty-eight states of the European Union plus Switzerland, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States – have sufficient confidence in the concept that they are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. The project, known as ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), is on schedule to produce the first plasma by the end of 2025.13 This represents a technical proof of concept rather than a commercially viable plant, but it will (if successful) demonstrate the ability to produce 500 MW of fusion power – enough for a small city. Once the scientific and engineering systems have been tested on ITER, the next stage will be to build a demonstration fusion power plant.

…

., 2017 18 Greenfield & Marsh, 2018 19 Fleming, 2018 20 Wikipedia, 2018 Wikipedia, 2018 21 Mayer, 2016 22 Freedland, 2017 Chapter 5: The Fork in the Road 1 Carney, Mark, ‘Keeping the patient alive: Monetary policy in a time of great disruption’, World Economic Forum, 6 December 2016 2 Miller, 2014 3 US Census Bureau, 2015 4 Rigby, 2016 5 Royal Academy of Engineering, 2013 6 University of Manchester, 2016 7 Walsh, 2016 8 Kirkpatrick & Light, 2015 9 Driverless car market watch, 2016 10 Yadron, 2016 11 Bostrom, Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies, 2014 12 United Nations, 2016 13 ITER, 2016 14 Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, 2016 15 Noakes, 2016 16 Hudson, 2013 17 Murgia, 2016 18 Rajesh, 2015 19 Smart Cities Council, 2016 20 The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2016 21 Andersen, 2006 22 Allen R. C., Capital Accumulation, Technological Change, and the Distribution of Income During the British Industrial Revolution, 2005 23 Allen R.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The shape of the containment vessel; the materials used; the composition of the fuel; the timing, strength, and angles of magnets and lasers; the pressure of gases; and the voltages applied all affect the stability of the plasma. The longest continuous runtime of a fusion reactor as of this writing was twenty-nine hours, set by a doughnut-type tokamak reactor in 2015; but sustaining this required vast amounts of energy. Another promising technique, known as field-reversed configuration – which creates a cylindrical plasma field – requires much lower energies. However, its longest runtime was just eleven milliseconds. That achievement was made by a private research company: Tri Alpha Energy, based in California.

…

When activated, the programme would quietly degrade crucial components of the centrifuges, causing them to break down and disrupt the Iranian enrichment programme.42 The attack was apparently partially successful, but the effect on other infected facilities is unknown. To this day, despite obvious suspicions, nobody knows where Stuxnet came from, or who made it. Nobody knows for certain who developed Mirai either, or where its next iteration might come from, but it might be there, right now, breeding in the CCTV camera in your office, or the Wi-Fi-enabled kettle in the corner of your kitchen. Or perhaps the crash will look like a string of blockbuster movies pandering to right-wing conspiracies and survivalist fantasies, from quasi-fascist superheroes (Captain America and the Batman series) to justifications of torture and assassination (Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper).

…

But DeepDream reversed the process: by feeding an image into the back end of the network, and activating the neurons trained to see particular objects, it asked not what is this image, but what does the network want to see in it? The process is akin to that of seeing faces in clouds: the visual cortex, desperate for stimulation, assembles meaningful patterns from noise. DeepDream’s engineer, Alexander Mordvintsev, created the first iteration of the programme at two in the morning, having been woken by a nightmare.31 The first image he fed into the system was of a kitten sat on a tree stump, and the output was a nightmare monster all its own: a hybrid cat/dog with multiple sets of eyes, and wet noses for feet. When Google first released an untrained classifier network on 10 million random YouTube videos in 2012, the first thing it learned to see, without prompting, was a cat’s face: the spirit animal of the internet.32 Mordvintsev’s network thus dreamed of what it knew, which was more cats and dogs.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

The public or Congress or other funders might well feel that science did not deliver on the big promises made in the name of mapping or that the time frame that was sold was far too optimistic. Any large-scale project seeking significant public funds risks facing the same problem as, say, building a location for the Olympics such as Sochi, Russia, or constructing a tokamak for nuclear fusion. Mustering public support for any science project that requires billions of dollars, and, at least in the US context, requires persuading a wary Congress, public, and media that wondrous advances in the human condition lie just around the corner if science can only get enough money, requires reasonable achievable goals, not science-fiction-inspired promises.

…

It is hard to imagine a single dataset, however massive, from which the truths we seek will emerge with only the right analysis, especially when we consider the nearly infinite set of alternative experiments we might have performed. Instead, we need an iterative process by which we move back and forth between using analytic tools to identify patterns in data and using the recovered patterns to inform and guide the next set of experiments. After many iterations, the patterns we identify may coalesce into rules and themes, perhaps even themes that extend across different systems and modalities. And with luck, we might ultimately arrive at theories of neural computation, which will shape not only the design of our experiments but also the very foundations of neuroscience.

…

A unique hallmark of mammals, the neocortex is a highly versatile, scalable computational tissue that excels at real-time sensory processing across modalities, making and storing associations, and planning and producing complex motor patterns, including speech. The neocortex consists of smaller modular units, columnar circuits that reach across the width of the cortex, repeated iteratively within any one cortical area. These modules vary considerably in connectivity and properties among regions. The computational function of a neocortical column—filtering the input, detecting features, context-dependent amplification, look-up table, line attractor, predictive coder, and so on—remains unclear, with some controversy whether there is, indeed, a single canonical function performed by any and all neocortical columns.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers by Stefan Fatsis

deliberate practice, Donner party, East Village, forensic accounting, Golden Gate Park, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, ITER tokamak, junk bonds, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

“Happily, I think I can finally say I’ve faced the demons and done the same.” The previous week, Eric reports, he played twenty-one games — “against good people” — and won fourteen. He averaged 421 points per game, including scores of 561, 558, 507, and 501. He tallied fortysix bingos, including such obscure words as DIECIOUS, HEXADIC, and DEMESNES. He played oOTHECAE, TOkAMAkS, and WISEACRe. Eric’s e-mail ends: “LET’S ROCK AT THE BIG DANCE!” Strapped for money, Matt Graham considers playing in Division 2, where he figures he would be a mortal lock to take the $5,000 first prize. Matt’s rating has slipped to 1877, so he has the choice of playing in the 1700–1900 group or where he belongs, in Division 1.

…

Computers are consulted to conduct simulations consisting of thousands of trials, known as iterations. Some players love sims, a few dismiss them as irrelevant; Marlon says either you win a game or you don’t — every game is different — and a sim doesn’t influence that. Too many players, especially the programmers, he says, consider Maven’s judgments to be gospel. “Sim is doo-doo,” Marlon says. But sims reveal not whether a play wins or loses a specific game but whether the play yields a higher probability of winning over all other moves. “Humans can’t do sixty-five hundred iterations in a twentyfive-minute game, so functionally you have to go with your intuition,” Bob Felt says.

…

The point of doing simulations is not to find out what play you should have played, but to change your thinking so you are more likely to make the play you should make in the future.” So while I gape at the tileheads, I also try to think more like them. In a tournament game, I draw an opening rack of CEEGPP?. I play PEP. Afterward, I wonder whether PEP was best and ask G.I. Joel for help. After 6,910 three-ply iterations, Maven says PEG wins 56.1 percent of games, followed by PEC, CEP, and then PEP. I picked the fourth-best move, which wins just 47.5 percent of the time. (Joel tells me that the G doesn’t naturally blend well with either the C or the P. The best consonant combo among these three letters is CP, he says, and the C is a keeper because it’s a good bingo tile.)

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

There was one group doing that already, Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered over, and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: it appeared they were excited by recent developments in their lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Continuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but it took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages too big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situations. This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellets of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusion results to power things. “Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked. “Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk with us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpful, this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s so damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yananda off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave a space for emission afterward.”

…

The light gravity and the resulting scale height of the atmosphere, the vast vertical relief of the surface, the presence of the North Sea that might or might not ice over, the thickening air, the perihelion-aphelion cycle, which was an eccentricity that was slowly precessing through the inclination seasons; these had predictable effects, perhaps, but in combination they made Martian weather a very hard thing to understand, and the more he watched, the less Sax felt they knew. But it was fascinating, and he could watch the iterations play out all day long. • • • Or else just sit out on Simshal Point, watching clouds flow across hyacinth skies. Kasei Fjord, off to the northwest, was a wind tunnel for the strongest katabatic blows on the planet, winds pouring out of it onto Chryse Gulf at speeds that occasionally reached five hundred kilometers an hour.