"Tech Billionaires Bet on Fusion"; To Solve Global Warming?

WASHINGTON - April 24, 2023 - PRLog -- "Tech Billionaires Bet on Fusion as Holy Grail for Business" headlines the Wall Street Journal. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-billionaires-bet-on-fusion-as-holy-grail-for-business-9a48a2ac?mod=hp_lead_pos8)

Despite valiant efforts to pressure countries to fight global warming by slashing their own greenhouse gas emissions, that plan seems not to be working.

Fusion power generation could help reduce global warming in at least two major ways, says Professor Banzhaf, an MIT-trained engineer with two U.S. patents.

First, fusion reactors could replace the need to use fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas, with their unavoidable emissions of greenhouse gases.

Second, fusion might be able to provide sufficient energy to make it possible to increase earth's orbit by the tiny amount necessary to completely overcome global warming; an approach now being discussed and analyzed which could involve cosmic nudging.

Prof. Banzhaf has calculated that increasing Earth's orbit by only 0.3% could completely offset global warming; thereby serving as an alternative (or as a supplemental approach) to achieving worldwide cooperation in slashing emissions of greenhouse gases by drastically modifying western lifestyles.

See, for example, Using Cosmic Nudging [Changing the Orbits of Asteroids] to Fight Global Warming (http://banzhaf.net/CosmicNudging.html)

While even this tiny 0.3% change in Earth's orbit would require enormous amounts of energy - energy which might be generated by nuclear fusion - the change could be achieved in a number of different proven ways: e.g., employing an electric thruster (an ion drive), constructing a huge solar sail, or utilizing a gravitational sling shot effect by changing the orbits of asteroids.

The concept of altering the orbits of asteroids to help sling shot Earth into a slightly different orbit gained traction when NASA recently reported that its test to determine whether it could accurately catch up to and then deflect an asteroid greatly surpassed expectations.

Moreover, recent calculations by an astrophysicist, as outlined in a newly published paper, have also lent more credence to Banzhaf's original cosmic nudge idea.

Entitled Cornell University - Gravity-Assist as a Solution to Save Earth from Global Warming (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02879),

In summary, if collectively we are willing to spend anything like the enormous amount of money necessary to slash greenhouse gas emissions (and put up with the huge lifestyle dislocations involved) on developing nuclear fusion as an energy source, and then on using it to deflect asteroids from their current orbits enough to enlarge Earth's orbit by only a fraction of one percent, we might have a feasible alternative to overcome global warming.

http://banzhaf.net/   jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com   @profbanzhaf