The quest for fusion energy — the clean, potentially limitless source that could end mankind’s power woes — began as an answer to an old questi

The Quest to Build a Star on Earth

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2024-11-15 12:00:07

The quest for fusion energy — the clean, potentially limitless source that could end mankind’s power woes — began as an answer to an old question, one we’ve been asking since we first raised our heads toward the sky.

It was the mid-19th century. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection had upended our notions of ourselves and our world. But the theory had a problem. How, the physicist Lord Kelvin asked, could the sun have been shining for so long? Wouldn’t it have burned through its fuel well before humans had evolved as Darwin proposed?

Neither man lived to learn the astonishing answer: that inside our sun lighter elements are constantly fusing into heavier ones, liberating vast amounts of energy in the process.

In the next few years, these companies say, their fusion machines will produce more energy than they take to run. Soon after, they will start generating electricity for factories, data centers, steel mills and more, helping humanity take a decisive step away from fossil fuels, away from global warming and air pollution, away from powering our lives by setting tiny fires in engines and boilers and furnaces.

Big-name investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman have staked hundreds of millions of dollars on this, fusion’s potential Kitty Hawk moment: the one that shows that the limits of our species’s mastery have once again been catapulted forward.