<[email protected]> wrote:
> And, > having odds makers following LENR might generate a lot of public interest. > Sure. It sounds like fun. I have no objection whatever to setting up this bet. I am just saying that the issue will be decided by the money people. If they decide to invest millions, cold fusion is bound to be commercialized. If they decide not to, we are toast. I am also saying that I myself have no way of knowing how to bet. This is not a technical problem. It is a question about what people with money & power will decide. I cannot read minds! I have no idea why capitalists did not develop cold fusion after 1990. It seems like one of the worst investment decisions in history. But such decisions are not unusual. The history of business is replete with lucrative opportunities that were left on the table for years, or decades. The Transcontinental Railroad, for example. A lot of computer technology. I have a low regard for the intelligence of people on Wall Street. I have read many "technical experts" in business magazines who were complete dolts about computers, energy, cold fusion and other subjects. You can never tell when one of these nitwits will reject an investment for some off-the-wall reason, and put the money into a dot-com fiasco, or into selling $600,000 houses to people making $35,000 a year. If the future of cold fusion could be determined strictly according to technical considerations, such as whether it it exists, whether it can be scaled up, whether there is enough host metal and so on, then I could make predictions with high confidence. I am certain it is real and I have seen it work on a fairly large scale. Can it be controlled? The answer is that people have discovered many forces of nature such as fire, water power, electricity, nuclear fission, and so on. We learned how to control every one of them. It is absurd to suppose that our science can master anything else, but not this one phenomenon. So of course if we put enough money and effort into it, we will master it. It would be crazy to bet against that! We may not learn to control it because opponents may prevent funding. That is a political decision. It is a deliberate policy of suppressing knowledge and derailing science. For that matter we might never eradicate polio, but not for any reason relating to medical science. There is no doubt we could have eradicated it anytime in the last 50 years, for a trivial sum of money. (Far less than what the disease has cost the victims.) The decision to let polio go on killing people for 50 years has been a cold-blooded, deliberate act of policy by world leaders and public health officials, especially in the third world. They made a calculated decision that the lives of a hundred thousand third-world children are not worth a few million dollars. People often decide not to fix a problem or develop a technology even when the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. You can see examples throughout history continuing to the present day. There are many different reasons but I think most of them boil down to what Martin Fleischmann says: "People don't want progress. It makes them uncomfortable. They don't want it, and they shan't have it." As H. G. Wells put it: "It is wonderful how our fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work -- a pitiful handful.... 'Don't find out anything about us,' they said to them; 'don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion....'" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1059/1059-h/1059-h.htm - Jed
