FP's 30 years later: how much has LENR progressed?

Quote from [email protected]

Patents are probably going to be worthless as soon as the cat is out of the bag.

A patent is the only way to make money with cold fusion. The discovery is so important, every industrial company on earth will develop it. They will leap ahead of the person or company that makes the first breakthrough, just as aviation leaped ahead of the Wrights after they went public in 1908. By 1914, airplanes were carrying multiple passengers and flying more than a thousand miles. They could never have accomplished that. And if other people had not accomplished that, their patents would not have been worth much.

It is true that many companies and even entire nations will steal the IP, but enough will pay to make a cold fusion patent worth billions. There is no other way to cash in on this breakthrough.

Quote from [email protected]

Look at how much trouble the Wright brothers had keeping people from simply stealing their IP.

They won every court case. They made tons of money from the patent. It was trouble, but it paid well. It is true that the effort weakened Wilbur and he died of typhoid in 1912, but sickness killed him, not the patent system.

Alan Smith

Quote

Believe me, they are running scared of involvement in most cases. £1M might change their minds though. I know you won't believe it, but I have seen it happen twice.

If you saw it, I believe it but it would be interesting to know what labs and what they were shown. You can't just take some old kludge to Sandia or ORNL and say "test it." But you can take them a good looking prototype of a device with videos and performance data and ask them to confirm that. Only if it is clear and impressive, of course. Sandia also gets involved if fraudulent crap is being sold to DOD but that's in a different area. I am not sure what Earth Tech criteria are for testing but they seem to be the most open minded group of all. I'd say too open minded except that the testing results I've seen from them thus far all seemed reasonable. If they got positive results with woowoo crap like ESP, precognition and telekinesis, I'd want to rethink my comments. Puthoff has been known to be gullible-- read that: Uri Geller. I know absolutely nothing personal about the group but a number of years ago, I was told that Scott and Marissa Little keep Puthoff on track. grain of salt of course...

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I'd want to rethink my comments

Quote from seven_of_twenty

some old kludge,, fraudulent crap woo woo crap

Logical argument may be in the background ...somewhere?

Quote from [email protected]

By 1914, airplanes were carrying multiple passengers and flying more than a thousand miles. They could never have accomplished that.

***It doesn't matter if they could have or not could have accomplished it. The patent system is set up so that they are the ones to get royalties.

You misunderstand. If other people had not made rapid progress in aviation, the market would have been limited to a few hundred machines per year sold to wealthy risk-taking young men such as Charles Rolls (of Rolls-Royce). He was one of few people who purchased a Wright airplane. He was killed flying it in 1910. Most early pilots were killed, so there was no market for the machine at the stage it was developed by the Wrights up to 1908. They proved incapable of improving it further. Other people made the airplane much safer and more practical, and this generated a large stream of royalties. Without these other people the Wrights would have made very little money before the patent ran out.

Quote from [email protected]

And if other people had not accomplished that, their patents would not have been worth much.

***Not so. Everyone was excited about the development of flight, especially only months after the Langley debacle.

That is incorrect. Very few people heard about it. The mass media did not believe the airplane was real until the public demonstrations in 1908. See:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf

The first cold fusion devices are likely to be about as practical as the first automobile, which was made and driven in 1770. Here is a reproduction of it being driven in Florida:

The first airplanes were not only as useless as this; they were worse than useless, since they killed many of the people who tried to fly them.

You can see why the pathological skeptics and naysayers in the 18th and 19th centuries said that automobiles would never be practical, and why even after 1908 the skeptics said that airplanes would never be anything other than toys for daredevil rich young men, the way "flying suits" are today. The pathological skeptics here and elsewhere who demand practical, elegant demonstrations of cold fusion before they believe it are as foolish as the people who denounced airplanes in 1908. They have learned nothing from history.

Here is a more practical automobile, from 1886. The skeptics would dismiss it as a useless toy that would never amount to anything.

Quote from Director

I'd take it to some small country desperate for cheap energy which a ruler or government that would cut through any red-tape on the way towards rapid and full commercialization.

There are several problems with that.

Such countries are incapable of developing technology, or even implementing conventional technology. That is why they are desperate for energy. That is why Japan is rich and has abundant energy, whereas Mexico is poor, even though Japan has virtually no natural resources, and Mexico has among the most abundant resources of any country. If the small country was technically competent, they would install wind turbines, solar energy, or natural gas, all of which are at historic record low prices.

To understand cold fusion, we will probably need the most advanced diagnostic equipment, that I was told will probably cost ~$300 million. To manufacture it will require the kinds of equipment needed to make nicad batteries or computer chips, which cold fusion devices resemble. That is, the best automated materials processing and assembly robots available. Only wealthy first world counties and China are capable of making such equipment. No small country desperate for energy could do it.

Red tape does not impede technology. Red tape is what holds technology together, as Samuel Florman put it. Take, for example, standards. The standards for the USB connection, IEEE 1394, is defined in a publication around 800 pages long. It was designed by a committee of experts from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and others. That is one small component in a computer. Every other component is equally complex. The "red tape" that describes them would be thousands of pages long. To make one modest new digital device, you need to arrange to pay royalties to 5, 10 or maybe 50 different patent holders. Without all these standards, and without the detailed knowledge of thousands of experts, you could not make any high tech device nowadays. I don't mean a Boeing airplane; I mean you could not make the computer controls for a hotel door lock system.

Before the first cold fusion device comes off the production lines, we will need many books and standards as complex as the IEEE 1394 standard. You cannot make reliable high tech devices without them. There are no shortcuts. We will also need millions of hours of safety testing, which is another thing small countries desperate for energy cannot do. Skip that, and you take a short cut which makes for long delays, as J. R. R. Tolkien put it.

Quote from Director

If I were to ever develop a revolutionary LENR technology, I'd take it to some small country desperate for cheap energy which a ruler or government that would cut through any red-tape on the way towards rapid and full commercialization. As far as I'm concerned, after the behavior of the U.S. government (and others) towards LENR and exotic technologies, we don't deserve them.

Japan would be a good choice.

http://www.young-diplomats.com…igh-tech-countries-world/

Quote from seven_of_twenty

...I am not sure what Earth Tech criteria are for testing but they seem to be the most open minded group of all. I'd say too open minded except that the testing results I've seen from them thus far all seemed reasonable. If they got positive results with woowoo crap like ESP, precognition and telekinesis, I'd want to rethink my comments. Puthoff has been known to be gullible-- read that: Uri Geller.

You will find Russel Targ's recently-released documentary ("Third Eye Spies") to be quite interesting, I expect. They obtained CIA clearance to release previously-classified material and interviews with key CIA personnel who managed the research they were doing with SRI and the CIA in the 70's and 80's. The capabilities of remote viewing first explored by their research evolved into routine operational assets for various US government agencies, and may still be in use presently. Puthof, Geller and various luminaries such as Brian Josephson all make notable appearances. I highly recommend watching this film.

Quote from sam12

Japan would be a good choice.

Singapore would be even better.

I was just discussing this very matter with a Malaysian engineer last night.

A small tech savvy country with a history of bulldozing through developments

"for the greater good".

https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/…e-s-petrochemical-success

They know the writing is on the wall for their petrorefining industry

The problem is.. How to contact the CEO about LENR.

https://www.straitstimes.com/o…o-make-nuclear-power-work

New energy will be as simple as a bicycle, so you have to do it in a small, forgotten country, but oil magnates can destroy this country (that's the problem).

Quote from Shane D.

Why they chose to remain in the shadows, I do not understand. Maybe the stigma, maybe investors like to work quietly on their long shots. and noisily on the sure bets?

My guess is that when there are serious investors / scientists investigating LENR, they just don’t want to get associated with crackpots, amateurish researchers, scammers, self pronounced world saviours, conspiracy theorists etc. which populate the LENR blogs / represent LENR on the Internet.

So the Internet will put everything in its place, academic journals do not accept articles on LENR, it is necessary to understand the Internet who is who (a crook, an amateur)

Quote from sam12

[If I were to ever develop a revolutionary LENR technology, I'd take it to some small country desperate for cheap energy which a ruler or government that would cut through any red-tape on the way towards rapid and full commercialization.]

Japan would be a good choice.

That is a strange thing to say.

1. Japan is big country, not a small one. It is the 11th largest country in the world, by population.
2. Japan is not desperate for cheap energy. Energy costs are a small fraction of per capita income.
3. The Japanese government does not cut through red-tape. On the contrary, it strings out more red tape than just about any government. Look at all the meetings it took to arrange the NEDO funding for cold fusion.

Quote from Gennadiy Tarassenko

New energy will be as simple as a bicycle, so you have to do it in a small, forgotten country

I see no evidence that new energy will be a simple as a bicycle. On the contrary, it will probably be as complicated as an integrated semiconductor chip, a nicad battery, or a PV solar cell.

In any case, although bicycles are relatively simple, manufacturing them is complicated. Modern bicycle manufacturing is high tech, with complicated, composite materials and tight tolerances. Small, poor countries cannot make bicycles, so they import them from China. North Korea used to import thousands of used bicycles from Japan. A few North Korean engineers can make nuclear weapons, but the nation as a whole cannot even make bicycles.

I hope that cold fusion devices will eventually be rugged and easy to use, so that people in small, forgotten countries can use them, the way they use PV solar cells today. But I do not think they will ever be easy to mass produce.

This is somewhat off topic but Chinese companies have been making far too many bicycles lately. Tens of thousands have been abandoned. This is why capitalism works better than communism. The same dysfunctionality in their economy has produced hundreds of thousands of empty condominiums, offices and shopping malls. See:

https://designyoutrust.com/201…eate-graveyards-in-china/