David Kirtley: belief

Transcript context

…So fusion is what powers the universe. Fusion is what happens in stars, and it’s where the vast amount of energy that we even use today here on Earth comes from the process of fusion. It also is what powers plants. And those plants become oil, and those become fossil fuels that then power the rest of human civilization for the last 100 years. So fusion really underpins a lot of what has enabled us as humans to go forward. However, ironically, we don’t do it actively here on Earth to make electricity yet. And so fundamentally, what fusion is, is taking the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, and lightweight isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and fusing those together to make heavier elements. In that process, as you combine atomic nuclei and form heavier nuclei, those nuclei are slightly lighter than the sum of the parts. And that comes from a lot of the details of quantum mechanics and how those fundamental particles combine and interact. We also talk about the strong nuclear force that holds the atomic nuclei together as one of the fundamental forces involved in fusion. But that mass defect, E=mc², we know from Einstein, is also energy. And so in that process, a tremendous amount of energy is released. And the actual reactions, I think, are a lot more interesting than simply it’s a little bit lighter, and therefore, energy is released. But that’s the fundamental process in fusion as you’re bringing those lightweight atomic nuclei, those isotopes, together. Fission is the exact opposite, where you’re taking the heaviest elements in the universe, uranium, plutonium, things that are so heavy and have so many internal protons and neutrons and electrons, that they’re barely held together at all. They’re fundamentally unstable or radioactive, and those elements are very close to falling apart. And as they do that, if you take a Uranium-235 or a Plutonium-239 nucleus, and you add something new, usually it’s a neutron, a subatomic particle that’s uncharged, that unstable, that very large nuclei will then break into pieces. Many pieces, a whole spectrum of pieces. But if you add up all of those pieces, they also have slightly less mass than the initial one did, the initial uranium or plutonium. And in that process, again, E=mc², a tremendous amount of energy is released. There’s a very famous curve in atomic physics, fusion or fission, looking at the periodic table. Going from the lightest elements, hydrogen, to the heaviest elements, those uranium, plutonium, and others. And fusion happens up to iron. Iron is the magical point in between where lighter elements than iron fuse together, and heavier elements fission or are fissile and break apart and release energy. I think about and I look at that process in stars, in that our star is fundamentally an early stage star that’s burning just hydrogens. ments fission or are fissile and break apart and release energy. I think about and I look at that process in stars, in that our star is fundamentally an early stage star that’s burning just hydrogens. But when it burns and does fusion, those hydrogens combine into heliums, and later stage stars can then burn those heliums and they can fuse those together to form even heavier elements and carbons. And those carbons can fuse together and form heavier elements. And that whole stellar process is something that inspires us at Helion to think about what are fusion fuels, not just the simplest ones, but more advanced fusion fuels that we see in stars throughout the universe. Okay, so there’s a million things I want to say. So first, maybe zooming out to the biggest possible picture, if you look across hundreds of millions, billions of years, and all the, in my opinion, alien civilizations that are out there, they’re going to be powered likely by fusion. So our advanced intelligent civilization is powered by fusion in that the sun is our power plant. Then the other thing is the physics. Again, very basic, but you said E=mc² a couple times. Can you explain this equation?…

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