Scorching Capitals, AI and the Fusion Future
By Romi Mahajan, CEO ExoFusion
Some days ago, a thread about the temperature in Delhi was making its way through my various “WhatsApp” and “Signal” groups. Thankfully it wasn’t the endless forward of some foolish meme or some crack political wisdom from a graduate of WhatsApp University. It was, in fact, a weather report. And a shocking one at that.
The referenced article mentioned that the temperature in the shade in Delhi was 124 degrees Fahrenheit or 51 degrees Celsius! The human body starts to break down at such temperatures, especially if they are unremitting or if artificial cooling is absent. The second largest city in the world, the capital of India, was suffering a killer heatwave. This story has now become commonplace.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in the heart of America’s technology sector, the talk is of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its liberatory capabilities. The news is drenched in AI-talk and literally trillions of dollars of market capitalisation have come about by that incantation. “Imagine what the world could be, if…” goes the mantra, now operationalised after forty years of technology PR.
Critics remind us that with AI comes bias, oligopoly and a dystopian future. They also remind us that AI consumes a great deal of energy.
The exposed millions in Delhi don’t need to imagine what the world might be like. They are living in what it is. And it is not particularly liberating. In fact, the opposite.
Whistling past the graveyard doesn’t make the dead disappear. We are now faced with conditions that will make some of the most populated regions of the world uninhabitable. As elites attempt to air condition or AI their way out of this intractable situation, we heat the world more. That is the irony in our attempts to stave off an energy and heat crisis, we use a great deal of energy and in so doing, we heat the world further.
Now, this piece is not a tract on global warming nor is it a screed against capitalism. We’ll leave those topics to far more educated authors. What it is, however, is a throaty reminder that despite the great deal of incontrovertible evidence suggesting that we rethink our economics, humans continue to build, grow, consume, demand and desire. Good? Who knows. Bad? Possibly. But no judgment matters. The facts matter. And we’ve crossed the Rubicon with respect to being an energy-drenched and technology-soaked society.
We need energy. We want energy. We thrive on energy. But we must ensure that in producing more energy, we don’t generate so much heat that we need even more. And more. And more.
While technological innovation and newfound efficiencies suggest that total energy consumption in the OECD countries might decline, this will be outpaced five times by the growth in energy consumption in China, India and other parts of the developing world. Population growth continues unabated, with a likelihood of between 9.8 and 10 billion people on Earth by 2050.
Meanwhile, anthropogenic global warming continues with feedback loops increasing the intensity of warming and already disrupting the lives of billions of people. So here we are. Where do we go from here?
A large part of the answer is Fusion Energy. Commercially Viable Fusion (CVF) will be a breakthrough as profound as any other in civilisational history. It will offer an abundant, low-carbon source of baseload power. Imagine a world in which desalination plants, running on fusion power, offer the world’s population readily available potable water. That is simply one of many examples of fusion’s ability to change the economic and social paradigm.
We must collectively usher in a Fusion Era in which a good portion of world energy consumption needs is met with fusion. Our energy future should always be hybrid, but fusion should be responsible for a sizeable fraction of global energy production by the year 2050.
There is a road ahead to achieve our goals, but the end is “seeable.” While there are still constraints to Commercially Viable Fusion – including issues related to plasma confinement, the need for new materials for plasma-facing components, the natural dearth of Tritium, and the need for small, inexpensive fusion reactors – the advances made over the last five years are remarkable. Innovations continue to accelerate the path to fusion.
We can get there, together. To get the requisite interest and investment, we must learn to contextualise current struggles and opportunities (like Delhi’s scorching heat on the one hand and the promises of AI on the other) as at least partially “energy” issues. The what-if question we should ask is, “What if we had access to abundant, cheap, clean energy?” What could that augur for the human condition?
All roads lead to fusion.