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Some Sci Fi authors have made the point that the first interstellar space ship is likely to be greeted at their destination star by human immigration control officers boggling at their long superseded sublight ship.

This is also one of the reasons ITER is such as bad project. It's so big, slow, and had to be planned so far ahead that it "locked in" older superconducting tape technology that has been superseded.

by aaroninsf17 hours ago|

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The wildcard for our civilization that I pay a lot of attention to:

will AI help us get through blockers like this?

I'm out of the prediction business but my guess is: absolutely, but iff we don't collapse in some way first.

Wild to be alive as the centuries-long horse race of industrialization between doom, or the stars, approaches its finish line.

by willis93611 hours ago|

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How would AI help achieve commercial fusion? You first need to identify the blockers. These almost all entirely boil down to "how do we precision machine large pieces of hard metal?", "how do we assemble facilities with untold process channels?", "how do we capture neutrons without making a prohibitively massive machine?", and "how do we make metal that doesn't melt?".

Now, AI might have a chance at supercharging material research and making miracle materials that help address the blanket and first wall challenges, but honestly those are roadblocks we're not even running into yet. AI can not and will not fix issues related to organizing labor and supply chains and suddenly make megaprojects have a 100% success rate for on-time and on-budget. It's just not going to happen.

So are these problems intractable? Of course not. It's just not what the chatbot is well suited for. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something.

by hunterpayne12 hours ago|

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This is the science fiction fan's version of hopes and prayers.