Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
The opposition may win this political battle. Cold fusion may never be
allowed.
. . .
Big Oil's lobbyists could conceivably render the United States
irrelevant to the world's energy future, but that's about it.
Yes. Right. I should not have said "never be allowed." I meant "not
allowed for decades." Or: "only allowed in minimal, unimportant levels"
like electric automobiles.
I agree that if development is blocked in the US this will soon reduce
us to the status of a banana republic that imports all important
technology from other countries.
Obviously, in the long run, if cold fusion succeeds anywhere it will
succeed everywhere. Something like this cannot be blocked indefinitely.
But when there is political opposition to a technology, even a very
useful and profitable one, it can sometimes take a long time to succeed.
For example, computers and the Internet are still rarely used in many
countries. When I was in India for ICCF16 I noticed that many stores
still use manual accounting, without even a cash register. I have not
seen since that I was in Japan in the 1970s, and once in a U.S. lumber
supply company circa 1985. In the 1970s even in large banks, the clerks
still used abacuses, railroad stations still had ticket collectors at
every entrance, and many elevators at department stores had operators.
This was a terrific waste of manpower. It was makework or conspicuous
consumption -- a way of making the department store seem glamorous in a
way. Department stores in Japan have been going out of business in
droves lately because they do stupid things like this.
Even though Japan is an ultrahigh tech country in many ways, it is
surprising how backward they are with computers in many ways. They count
election returns by hand on paper ballots which is a very good idea. But
before every election there is a stock scene on the seven o'clock news
in which they are going through the books of the politicians and parties
tallying up expenses. These are huge books printed by computer. People
are paging through them adding up the numbers on manual electronic
calculators. (Not abacuses any more -- they would have used 'em in 1975
though, if there had been election finance laws back then.) Since the
original data is obviously kept on computer it would take a few seconds
to do this with a program, but they insist on spending days doing it
manually.
After the earthquake and tsunami it took government agencies weeks to
put together lists of missing and dead people. At the refugee shelters
that were walls full of handwritten messages to family members arranged
in no order. See photo #9 here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/03/japan-earthquake-two-weeks-later/100034/
These messages say things like: "We're all okay! - Nakamura family."
"Has anyone seen so-and-so?" "We are staying with our relatives in
such-and-such town." "Takeshita Fumiko: so-and-so is looking for you and
says she will be back here tomorrow (the 13) . . ." These messages were
needed because the cell phone network and the Internet was disabled.
People were spending all day driving or walking from one shelter to the
next. It shows how vulnerable high technology can be.
Many of these shelters did not have electricity so it might have been
difficult to maintain a computer-based method of recording these
messages and sorting them out by family name, but it could have been
done with portable computers powered by generators. Or at least, with
computers and printers that arrange the messages on the walls in
alphabetical order by name. In the weeks following the time this photo
was taken, there were computer-generated printed lists of names taped to
the walls of the refugee centers.
Incidentally, there are photos taken after the war of building walls in
cities destroyed by bombing with similar messages from family and
friends looking for survivors. No phone numbers back then, but the
content was similar.
- Jed
