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"Rob is a Y Combinator alumnus with professional experience in electrical engineering, computer science and entrepreneurship. Lacking the means to produce cheap

"Rob is a Y Combinator alumnus with professional experience in electrical engineering, computer science and entrepreneurship. Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification." On one hand, the entire field of nutritional science (and several associated topics), coupled with a wealthy and powerful nutrition industry who, despite literally decades of research, have never succeeded in creating a total meal replacement. Oh, and don't forget the world's militaries, who throw enormous amounts of money at research groups for anything even remotely useful and for who full meal replacements would be a holy grail. On the other, this one computer hacker dude who is going to 'disrupt' the expert opinion and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. He read some papers guys! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And yet the sum total evidence is 'Me and my friends haven't died yet, and we feel good'. His company still has no staff with biology experience, and the blog sells more merchandise than science. Still, otherwise incredibly smart and driven people on HN eat this up.

kamaal 13y ago
>>Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification. I wonder what that is, and if he has written about it some where?
gwern 13y ago
> Oh, and don't forget the world's militaries, who throw enormous amounts of money at research groups for anything even remotely useful and for who full meal replacements would be a holy grail. Not a good objection, because for military purposes, Soylent is completely unacceptable. How well do the ingredients tolerate extremes of heat and cold, no access to a kitchen, being stored in crates for months or years...? Not too well. And those are just the obvious requirements for an MRE.

kamaal 13y ago

>>Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification. I wonder what that is, and if he has written about it some where?

gwern 13y ago

> Oh, and don't forget the world's militaries, who throw enormous amounts of money at research groups for anything even remotely useful and for who full meal replacements would be a holy grail. Not a good objection, because for military purposes, Soylent is completely unacceptable. How well do the ingredients tolerate extremes of heat and cold, no access to a kitchen, being stored in crates for months or years...? Not too well. And those are just the obvious requirements for an MRE.