Fission is still based on limited resources ultimately. I agree that we probably will need it to get to fusion, and that in turn to get to dyson spheres, but in

Fission is still based on limited resources ultimately. I agree that we probably will need it to get to fusion, and that in turn to get to dyson spheres, but in the real long run, it just seems silly to not tap into a fusion reactor that is putting out huge amounts of energy, wether we use it or not. And then there is this "small detail": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma... Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, usually involving deep-geologic placement, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions. This is partly because the timeframes in question when dealing with radioactive waste range from 10,000 to millions of years, according to studies based on the effect of estimated radiation doses. and Hannes Alfvén, Nobel laureate in physics, described the as yet unsolved dilemma of high-level radioactive waste management: "The problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage until it decays after hundreds of thousands of years. The geologic deposit must be absolutely reliable as the quantities of poison are tremendous. It is very difficult to satisfy these requirements for the simple reason that we have had no practical experience with such a long term project. Moreover permanently guarded storage requires a society with unprecedented stability." So much for solutions that actually exist. There is no long term solution to nuclear fission, not yet anyway, while on the other hand, the sun does exist, so does technology to harness solar power. The tricky part, other than building it all of course (robots and nanobots surely will help there, both with building as well as with getting/making the materials required), is getting the energy from there to here. Microwave? Converting it into chemical energy on-site and sending titanic pocket warmers to Earth? That's not even that important, since even 0.00001% efficiency would net us more energy than we could otherwise have in our wildest dreams. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%2... ] Do you really think it would take us even 5000 years to get to the point of being able to build a dyson sphere? Hmm. At any rate, that's something that would work; on the other hand, we might find ways to use/defuse/store nuclear waste, we might not. We simply don't know yet. So yeah, I'll be doing that.