How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?
In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don’t think that’s true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.
Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.
How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?
In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don’t think that’s true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.
Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.