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Fusion power comes to mind.
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It's interesting, solar panels were in this category in the 1980s and self-driving cars were in the 2010s, and both have had the gap between theory and practice significantly narrowed since.
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With fusion it's gonna be harder, I think. First you need to pump energy into it to get the fusion itself. This involves energising supermagnets, vacuum pumps and heating and controlling the plasma. We are not even here yet.

And once you get to that point, you need to harness the output energy of a million degrees plasma through something that yields a pretty high efficiency (so that pumping energy into the plasma is not only worthwhile, but makes financial sense) and requires a reasonably low maintenance.

I see fusion more practical as a rocket technology (which is just basically impossible) than as an actual energy facility asset.

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And it's worse than that. In order to "factor" 15=3x5, they designed the circuit knowing that the factors were three and five. In other words, they just validated it. And that's something you can do with a regular CPU.
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Y2K

Oh wait: thousands of programmers started working on this in the early 90s so that there would be so few failures people thought it was a scam.

The entire financial and government infrastructure was based on ecdsa until the shift to pqc. The consequences of not preparing are literal threats to global economy. That can’t be understated. The cost to switch to (hybrid) pqc is essentially zero when compared to the costs for not doing it.

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