Edmund Storms wrote:
Because the oil companies are so rich and powerfull all over the
world and because an effective alternate energy source would be so
financially disruptive to every industry at first, a great effort
will be made to resist any rapid change.
In the past, established industries often made tremendous efforts to
stop rapid change, but they failed. The people who made and sailed
sailing ships tried to keep the U.S. and British governments from
subsidizing steam ships. Railroads fought against automobiles. IBM
and DEC tried to stop personal computers, or take over the market. It
does not matter how much economic power corporations have; they are
slaves to the whims of their customers. Any corporation can be
bankrupted by 2 or 3 years of severe losses. IBM was the most
profitable and fastest corporation in the early 1980s, but it had the
largest loss in history a few years later.
For example, when cold fusion is made to work on a potentially
commercial scale, the negative propaganda would ask the public the
question, "This is a nuclear process, would you want an untested
nuclear reactor in your home or in your neighborhood?" Few people
would be given enough information to understand the difference
between this kind of nuclear reaction and the fission process.
If it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real, this will
probably be headline news in every nation on earth for weeks on end.
The technical details about the process will become known to hundreds
of thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide, and there will be
tens of thousands of replications. More progress will be made every
week than we now make in a year. Such widespread information cannot
be suppressed or distorted. People everywhere will soon know that
cold fusion can end the energy crisis, prevent global warming, lower
the cost of energy by a factor of a thousand or more. There is no way
corporations or governments can prevent something that good from
being implemented. They can prevent it now only because the
information has been successfully suppressed, and because there are
no practical implementations of cold fusion yet.
After all, the system has been very effective in keeping even
basic information about CF from the general public for 19 years so far.
That is only because of the peculiar circumstances of cold fusion,
which resemble the circumstances that keep airplanes secret from 1903
to 1908. These circumstances could change overnight:
There are no practical implementations.
The effect is difficult to replicate.
Many of the people trying to replicate are incompetent. (This was
even more true of the airplane.)
The Scientific American and other mainstream press, and the APS and
the DoE, have a vendetta against the discovery. These are normally
puny, powerless organizations, but by an accident of history they
happen to be well positioned to squelch cold fusion.
Many of the researchers have kept their results secret. Some of them
have told me they are happy with the status quo, and they hope cold
fusion remains secret for many years to come, so that they can study
it in peace without competition.
Even there, attempts to sell operating reactors would be met with
political rejection based on the use of bribes.
Bribes cannot prevent 300 million people from getting a technology
they crave, or thousands of entrepreneurs from making vast fortunes.
This is like suggesting that the Pennsylvania Railroad might have
bribed Henry Ford to shut down his Model T factory in 1908. He would
never have done that. The Railroad could not have come up with enough
money, even if they had handed over all their profits for ten years
running. Ford knew he would soon be making more than the PRR. It
would be like IBM trying to bribe Bill Gates to close down Microsoft.
(IBM surely would have loved to do in the early 1990s, when Gates was
eating their lunch. As it happened, Gates was seriously thinking of
trying to buy out IBM by that time.)
It is impossible to make firm predictions about the future of society
or business. People have free will, and you can never be certain what
they will do. People usually act in their own best interests, but on
the other hand in WWI the Germans sacrificed millions of their son's
lives for no reason, and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor even
though Adm. Yamamoto and millions of educated people in Japan must
have known that would lead to the destruction of their country,
millions of deaths, and inevitable defeat.
It may be that cold fusion will be suppressed despite the market
forces I have described here. That would be unprecedented, but after
all, much about the development of cold fusion has been unprecedented
so far. But I think we can predict with confidence that the normal
forces of the market and of history will take hold sooner or later,
and cold fusion will be treated like all of the other breakthroughs
in history that changed the face of civilization. Once market forces
and public opinion begin to tell, no power on earth can stop them.
Puny organizations such as the Scientific American and the APS will
be swept aside in a moment. Huge, ruthless organizations such as OPEC
and GM will be swept aside in a few weeks. Betting against market
forces and public opinion is like betting that you can wade into the
Niagara River and stop the Falls with your bare hands.
- Jed
