Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: *"And they will make money from that technology as well. The cost of that > R&D will also soon be recovered. What is your point?"* > > You stated that power produced from LENR will be virtually free, to cheap > to even meter. >
I said that would happen eventually. It will happen after the initial patents expire and the profits are made. All industries follow that pattern. All products eventually become low profit or no profit commodities, as mass production is perfected and competition increases. Railroads in the U.S. were profitable from 1840 to 1890. By then, they were overbuilt and competing so much they were profitless. Computers were hugely profitable for IBM from the 1960s through 1990 or so, but nowadays only Apple makes a decent profit selling them. Marx pointed this out, and he was right. Computer hard disks are so cheap and abundant Google gives away cloud storage. I haven't had to buy more capacity in years, except for backup. I can't imagine needing more than 1 TB of main hard disk storage even in 10 years, whereas in the 70s and 80s I was doubling my disk storage every few years, as soon as I could. This is how capitalism works, whether we like it or not. There will be a generation or two in which people make tons of money with cold fusion. Then, gradually, the cost will decline until the cost of energy needed for daily life will be trivial, just as the cost of hard disk storage has become. Some people may still spend a lot on energy, but that will be for projects such as irrigating the Sahara desert or sending a million people to Mars while terraforming the whole planet. - Jed
