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Maybe for companies, to aim for fusion is asking too much. But what about a commercial "DARPA" ? I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very

by petra 8y ago

Maybe for companies, to aim for fusion is asking too much. But what about a commercial "DARPA" ? I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is? But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well. So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal. But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-Parc was guarranteed to at-least break even?

programbreeding 8y ago
Your comment made me think of Bell Labs. From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Or Xerox PARC. There have been other attempts (like Interval Research) as well. Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.
DennisP 8y ago
For some companies asking for fusion isn't too much. Fusion startups include (among others) Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion, Helion, and TAE (formerly Tri Alpha). The latter has over $500 million invested. And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.

by petra 8y ago

programbreeding 8y ago

Your comment made me think of Bell Labs. From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Or Xerox PARC. There have been other attempts (like Interval Research) as well. Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.

DennisP 8y ago

For some companies asking for fusion isn't too much. Fusion startups include (among others) Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion, Helion, and TAE (formerly Tri Alpha). The latter has over $500 million invested. And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.