Alain Sepeda <alain.sep...@gmail.com> wrote:
> #1 the naive one. Developing a small device, and sell it in small > quantity to make money. The problem is as soon as it will be understood it > is a LENR working device, that there is a HUGE demand, and immediately big > players will develop an alternative technology and kill your little > business. > This would not work for 2 reasons. First, as you say big players will definitely develop cold fusion. Nothing can stop them from doing this. Second, as I said, regulators will never allow people to sell nuclear fusion reactors until they have been thoroughly vetted and until the physics establishment believes it can explain them by theory. > #2 resonates like Rossi's vision is to develop discretely a technology, > then in few weeks, show that you can flood the market with your "V1.0", at > low cost... > You cannot possibly flood the market in a few weeks. The market is 7 billion people. It will take decades before demand levels off with market saturation. > No competitor will develop any alternative technology (V2.0), but you will > have disrupted all business on earth, even LENR startups... > No company is large enough to do that. Even if you have a patent, the US government will not allow a patent holder to withhold vital technology from competition. The government will force you to license the technology. If you do not have a patent every industrial company on earth will simply take the technology and many of them will soon produce far better version than you can. > > Shell,,Exxon,,Toyota,,Peugeot will be belly up in 15 days, and the pension > fund will be ruined, if not negative equity. > That is completely unrealistic. It would take far longer than 15 days! More like 15 years. It is true that their stock value might plummet once it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real. But just because a company's stock falls in value that does not mean the company goes out of business right away. If Toyota, GM and most other automobile manufacturers came out with a cold fusion car, and only Ford did not, Ford would be in deep trouble. Perhaps after 2 or 3 years it would be forced into bankruptcy. But it will take a very long time for any automobile company to develop a cold fusion car, and by the time they come out with one everyone will know they are going to do it. I doubt that the managers at Ford would sit on their hands and not develop a cold fusion car when everyone else is doing it. They might sit on their hands. After personal computers came out in the early 1980s, many minicomputer manufacturers such as DEC and Data General sat and did nothing in response. They all went out of business. > In modern economy you cannot behave like Edison and kill just the > gas-lighting in New York, then Philadelphia, then Paris... > Edison did not kill the gaslighting business. It continued well into the 20th century, 50 years after the introduction of incandescent lights. It died gradually. > If you start doing that today, immediately, despite all logic (of course > oil, old cars, old boilers, will still have a value for a decade, and > companies can adapt in that decade), trillion$ of business go belly up all > over the planet. 1929 crisis is a joke compared to what might happen. > There is no indication that the 1929 crisis was caused by changes in technology. I will grant, one person did say this. An economics professor at Cornell claimed that the transition from horses to automobiles caused the crisis, according to my mother. However most people blamed other economic trends. I do not think there are any cases in history in which a rapid change in technology caused an economic crisis. It is possible we are facing one now with the increase in robotics and artificial intelligence, but it is not happening swiftly. It will take decades. Trillions of dollars in business do not go belly up overnight. It is not possible to replace the entire energy generating infrastructure overnight. I predict that it will happen faster than some other people have predicted, because cold fusion does not need an infrastructure. However it will still take years because people have to design new products, regulators have to ensure they are safe, and in nearly every case the old machine has to wear out before people will replace it. No one is going to buy a cold fusion car or space heater when they have a new fossil fuel machine. They will wait for it to wear out. In any case, new machines could not be manufactured fast enough to replace all the old ones quickly. There are 286 million cars in the U.S. alone. It takes 11 years to manufacture that many (the fleet replacement time). Even if you could abruptly stop manufacturing gasoline cars, to make only cold fusion ones instead, it would still take 11 years to replace every car. And you cannot abruptly turn off a factory and transition overnight. It takes months or years to refit an automobile manufacturing plant. You could not close down every one of them for 6 months. The US actually did close down every single automobile manufacturing plant, in December 1941. Not a single car was made for civilian use until the end of World War II, and only a few thousand conventional models were assembled for the military. The production lines were used instead to make 600,000 jeeps, thousands of tanks, airplane engines and so on. After the factories were closed down, it took months refit them to make things like tanks instead of cars. They also built new factories in WWII. One of the most famous was Fort's Willow Run, in Michigan. I do not know how long the planning took, but clearing the land and construction began in March 1941. It opened that year, but it took a long time for production to ramp up to expected levels, which I think happened in 1943. In other words, it took two years during the most frantic, 24-hour per day intense efforts in the history of technology. Modern factories are much more complicated, with robots instead of people. I think they take even longer to bring up to full production. Two of the fastest transitions in modern history were from North Atlantic ocean liners to airplanes in the 1940s and 50s, and from minicomputers to microcomputers in the 1980s. They were swift, but not that swift. Many people saw them coming. Many companies adapted to the new technology in time. There was an orderly liquidation of assets. It did not cause a crisis. > But at the same time in China, India, people will decide to embrace LENR, > invest trillion$, to take supremacy over the West. > Given the military applications for cold fusion, this scenario seems unrealistic to me. > Imagine that Internet does not yet exist, but sure some guy in California, > or in Lannion in France will develop one version. > It would never happen. The Internet was made by the U.S. government and later the telephone companies. It took 20 years. It was slow moving and not expensive year to year, but overall it was one the biggest, most expensive, complex, large scale high tech projects in history. Some guy in California could not do it alone any more than he could launch a robot explorer to Mars, or build a transcontinental railroad in 1865. > If it is closed protocol like was IBM-SNA, few people will use it, and > Uber or Amazon will not exist. > I disagree. Telephone company technology was closed before the Internet, but it was widely used. The Internet is just another telephone technology. If AT&T had invented it, and patented it, it would still have come into widespread use eventually. It was not patented (much) because it was invented people working for Uncle Sam, and the U.S. government usually gives away its inventions, because the taxpayers already paid for them. AT&T was effectively subsidized by the government because it was given a monopoly for decades. The government forced telephone users to pay extra for service. > Big Margin, but small market. To be open, the big luck was that it was > developed for military and academic usage, in an open way... > All big technology is developed for the military or for major industrial use. The Internet did not grow until the telephone companies expanded it. It could not possibly have come about any other way. Neither can cold fusion. People have the notion that computers were developed Apple, software by Bill Gates, and the Internet was developed by dot-com entrepreneurs. That is nonsense. People such as Gates and I developed practically nothing. We took software developed in the 1960s mainly by the U.S. government, and nearly all of it paid for by the government. Except for the IBM 360 project. We moved this technology on microcomputers, which were also developed at the expense of the U.S. government, in the military and at NASA. All modern computer technology -- software and hardware -- was developed by or paid for by governments. People like Gates, Jobs and I did the last 1% of the work. Nearly every program and application written up through 1990 was derived from earlier versions, and nearly all of those early versions were developed by Uncle Sam. Google is the first company to make major innovations not paid for already by the taxpayers. The taxpayers footed the bill, and Gates got the profit. The same thing is happening with robotics now. The same thing will happen with cold fusion. Unless Rossi succeeds on his own, you paid for it. Nearly every researcher was a government employee, including Fleischmann, Pons, Mizuno, Storms, Srinivasan, Miles etc. More recently, the development was paid by DARPA grants to SRI and places like that. Every scrap of it should belong to the taxpayers, but I expect industry will suck up the intellectual property and profits instead. The 1% will then use *our* technology that *we paid for* to enrich itself, just as it has done with computers and robots. - Jed
