> According to the patent, Pais’ plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a “concentrated magnetic energy flux” that can squish the gases together.
If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to make?
They're both points of equilibrium; Lagrange points are both stable (like a ball rolling in a half-pipe) and unstable (like a pencil standing on its tip) equilibriums. A stable equilibrium means that when an object in that point is displaced, it starts oscillating around that point, and unstable means that an object at that point, when displaced, will uncontrollably move away from it, unless you push it back onto that point.
Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume it's a stable equilibrium.
There are many fusion reactors, just none that produce more energy than they consume.
Barring some random research breakthrough by a small team somewhere, ITER is probably the best bet for reaching positive net energy first: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Yeah, in fact many folks have created DIY fusors in their garages. Just hook any sort of energy harnessing device onto that and you can claim you've got a fusion reactor too!
They may be referring to W7-X. The lower the aspect ratio of stellarators, the larger the major radius is. This makes a bigger, more expensive machine, but really blows the doors wide open on the largest engineering challenges (high neutron flux, high heat flux materials).
Nuclear reactors aren't necessarily used for power generation. The other applications of nuclear reactors are for example producing interesting elements or isotoopes, and irradiating things like cancer patients and physics experiments.
There's are also bioreactors and chemical reactors. It seems to me the term reactor is just used for a device that induces reactions.
Incorrect. The experiments, largely, are not failures. The confinement devices are made to perform science. A fusion reactor power plant is expensive and it is much cheaper to design a reactor that works then to make a bunch of full-scale reactors that don’t. Also finding 10 billion dollars is hard.
Most of these devices use hydrogren most of the time, meaning the cross section of fusion even in high temperatures and densities will be low. If the goal of these devices was fusion energy they would all be using deuterium, at the very least.
The fields of plasma physics and materials have progressed to the point where a future reactor likely wouldn’t be a failure. Just look at W7-X and (in 10 years) ITER. Q=10 operation will likely be a very stressful test on ITER and it will likely only happen towards the end of its life (2035). Q=1 shots should be pretty early into tritium operation.
Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator" (which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor".
All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank.
Even when Occam's razor would point the way of this being an intel ops to make adversaries waste resources, wouldn't it be cool to be proven wrong, and actually have a sudden and unexpected giant leap forward in science?
You have plenty of real world scenarios of companies wasting resources on the pursuit of something that looks trivial: like electric vehicles. Yet a lot of them are pulling the plug on something that looked easy, after dumping millions into it, right? "It's just electric motors, a battery and wheels".
If any government goes on a spiral to pursuit these devices it surely is a money furnace.
On the other side, if this is clearly non-sense... don't they have smart people in Russia, China, etc, claiming the same?
Maybe that's the genius of it all: it's so obviously propaganda non-sense that's too much obvious to be propaganda.
Exactly, or maybe it's a weird sense of humor, trolling their friends/adversaries?
I mean, if I worked on secret stuff for years, maybe I would develop that kind of humor, and file a patent application for a Flux Capacitor, just to tease my friends about the time machine we are building...
Fully with you here. But here’s the thing, if your nuclear scientist troll spends one afternoon with the bogus patent application, and the adversary loughs at it after 30 seconds, you end up wasting more resources than them. Which means you need to be sophisticated to troll. War is the art of misdirection, but you can’t fool someone you have a tank when all you have is an umbrella.
What if these are "tanks"? The British didn't want to let anyone know they were building armored vehicles, thus the unassuming name that someone in 1915 would not have guessed what it was. If the Navy has created a groundbreaking new device, but they want to hide its true nature, a far-fetched name like "gravitational wave", even though it's not the theoretical gravity wave it sounds like, lets you talk about it without an eavesdropper knowing what it is. That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes.
> That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes.
I'm apparently not familiar enough with the patent system. It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.
While I agree with you and I think parent's wording isn't the best, I think parent's point is that military tanks aren't liquid tankers or holding tanks like the term would have meant when the term was first used for military tanks, and military tanks were called that specifically to give little insight into what they did. Now no one takes issue with a military tank being called a tank.
> It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.
Yup patent trolls make millions through this flaw they get the most vague patents they can and then sue everyone they see, they only need to win one case with a sleepy judge to make their money back.
This matches Bob Lazar’s description only in the very general sense of using the same alien-technology buzzwords that are used everywhere by cranks and conspiracy theorists. The details though are very different from what Bob Lazar described.
Its a defensive patent scheme. Remember the old days of the internet where people would take boring business model X and patent "doing X on the internet" and try to make millions or billions? The idea is if it costs $5K to file a patent and you think there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone actually inventing room temp superconductors soon-ish, then you net profit if you license your patent for more than $5M which seems quite reasonable. Say, for example, GE discovers and commercializes room temp semiconductors, it would be a lot cheaper and faster to pay this guy off (despite him doing nothing) for perhaps $10M than to fight him in court and try to explain to a completely non-technical judge that the guy didn't actually invent anything. Any one patent will almost certainly not pay off, but file enough patents and you'll win the lotto eventually. Somebody out there working independent of the patent guy will eventually invent an actual real world room temp superconductor and the patent guy will get a lot of money for doing, well, essentially nothing.
Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.
That's fine for room temperature superconductors, but things like gravity manipulation and inertial dampeners are, as far as I know, not even technically feasible. Why even bother with a defensive patent for patent nonsense?
There are several problems with this idea, as I see it:
1. The assignee is the US Navy. He won't personally profit.
2. Protection is given for the claims, not for the abstract, diagrams or specification. The claims have to describe something relatively concrete or they'll be rejected. You can't obtain patents for titles or elevator pitches.
3. Even if it's granted and you think GE infringes, they might disagree. Welcome to patent litigation, which is super expensive.
4. Even if it's not granted, it might be successfully cited as prior art against GE's application. You won't get royalties on nothing.
5. Patents expire. If you're patenting science fiction, yours might expire decades before it's actually possible.
I have filed a patent on my own time and dime. It is much harder than it looks. ~$50,000 USD and hundreds of hours of work over 5+ years.
This is in the ball park for a patent being filed and managed internationally (say Japan, USA and Europe) through all the stages to grant. Which takes ~5 years. And then over it's life cycle - there's a lot of admin. I've been regularly quoted £20k.
Yep. I filed through through WIPO for worldwide priority. Eventually my finances stretched as far as obtaining an Australian patent and a US patent. EU was going to cost tens of thousands for low probability. Chinese patent would've cost another 10k at least and it would be a gamble on the future state of IP enforcement there.
There will be more expenses. $50k was the get as far as the US patent. I've spent another $3k since then on costs arising from other paperwork around it.
That's a cheap patent. Especially given the timescale. Look at it this way. Can you find a lawyer to help shepherd a patent for 5 years and his/her fee is less then 10.000 dollars per year?
I kept down the cost by doing a ton of the legwork myself. Lots of drafting, diagrams, picking apart the examiner's citations etc. But for a lot of it you absolutely need a professional to help.
...and there are ancillary patents, for defense of the original patent, that need to be filed in order to keep up with competition. I have a buddy who has several patents for polishing concrete vertically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSR0R8tA8A
Conflicted on this, on one hand things listed make it all sound crackpot.
Then again he is listed as a researcher in Navy R&D (http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcad/)
Also is that typical for supposedly cutting edge things from a defense perspective to get patented before a functional use case is demonstrated?
Alternatively, could this name be a pseudonym for the research group writ large? It assigns the patent to the whole group to avoid giving any particular team member the credit, and it also avoids identifying any individual who may be regularly dealing with classified information.
I’ve no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent system, though.
This link[0] seems to suggest that filing under a pseudonym is not possible. Full legal name, residence, and citizenship of each inventor must be provided.
And there are criminal penalties for knowingly supplying the patent office with false information[1]:
>1) All statements made therein of the party’s own knowledge are true, all statements made therein on information and belief are believed to be true, and all statements made therein are made with the knowledge that whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the Office, knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact, or knowingly and willfully makes any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or knowingly and willfully makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be subject to the penalties set forth under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and any other applicable criminal statute, and violations of the provisions of this section may jeopardize the probative value of the paper; and ...
Remember that the NSA has illegally spied on US citizens for decades. I think the Navy could easily swing a waiver from the Patent Office under the rationale of "national security."
Why would anonymizing the actual inventor be a matter of national security when they could easily have prevented the patent from being disclosed in the first place:
It's the patent by Salvatore Cezar Pais. The same guy who patented gravitational wave generators, room temperature superconductor and "craft using an inertial mass reduction device".
Seems like the HN community expressed scepticism/doubt about the science behind patents filed by this guy? (Also commented in the posts regarding the ufo sightings by us navy pilots).
Prior art is very difficult to prove and patent reviewers often miss obvious examples. They can't so easily ignore a pre-existing patent. It also protects the invention from exploitation by foreign competitors, in jurisdictions with reciprocal patent protection.
It depends, obviously. Prior art is easy to prove by pointing at an existing patent. It is also easy to prove by pointing at an article in a mainstream publication in the local language. So "protective publication" or "defensive disclosure" is a reasonable alternative to getting a patent (and perhaps letting it expire at the first opportunity).
Prior art is only difficult to prove if you're relying on something along the lines of folk knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lands where the Jumblies live.
It's non-obviousness that is notoriously difficult to prove.
Prior art doesn’t apply in foreign jurisdictions. A country that is first-to-file can file the patent then stop your domestic company from using the tech.
> Prior art doesn’t apply in foreign jurisdictions.
Can you elaborate on this? Japan, for example, requires you to disclose any prior art during application similar to the U.S. Israel recently adopted similar rules. These disclosures frequently include US and foreign (WO, EP, etc) patents and patent publications.
> A country that is first-to-file can file the patent then stop your domestic company from using the tech.
Assuming you filed first in your domestic country, then you just apply in the foreign country and claim priority from your domestic application - thereby granting your application an even earlier effective filing date.
If you publish a design, it becomes prior act, and nobody can patent it. You can even do that in the patent office without filling a patent, making them the registration of your design, without patenting it.
It seems clear to me that what they want is to appropriate someone else design because I do not believe they have a working prototype of this.
I don’t have a problem with it. This prevents a private entity from monopolizing a possibly world-changing invention. The government can auction licenses to create competition, or even give it away for free.
The best way to prevent a private entity patenting an invention and monopolising it themselves, is to patent it first. Proving prior art is notoriously difficult and patent reviewers frequently overlook even obvious examples, but pre-existing patents are impossible to ignore. So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.
> So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.
I would assume or at like to believe this is true with federal government patents, but it's not true for state governments, government-funded universities, etc. It would be nice to have a law or official policy to point to that states outright that the federal government can't or won't sue anyone for using the technology in those patents (or the opposite).
This kind of technology would be so world-changing that I can't believe anyone with the knowledge and capability to develop it would actually allow something like patent law get in their way. Whomever gets this working basically becomes a godlike power compared to the rest of humanity. Who cares what the lawyers say at that point, let them try to subpoena you at the Mars colony that houses your space fleet.
I think it's more about preventing international private entities from profiting. AFAIK, they would get the same anti-monopoly effect just publishing about it because nobody can patent prior art.
U.S. patents are only enforceable within U.S. territories. And if the tech truly were break-through, even if the patent were enforceable outside the U.S., no foreign government would comply.
This used to be the attitude within government. However, it has changed, and this is for the better.
It is quite rare that government R&D is sufficient to demonstrate that a particular technology is commercially viable. Without a patent to license to a private entity there is little changc such an entity will invest the time/money to perform this R&D. They need that patent protection to raise funds.
While I think discussing whether military research should be patented is an interesting question, I think the nature of this particular patent (that is, that it’s total nonsense) kind of trumps any speculation here.
From the DoD scientist point of view there are only so many ways to show productivity. Showing productivity is required for raises and receiving funding for projects. (National/DoD labs basically function like universities.)
It's really either papers or patents, and patents are generally counted equivalent to two papers.
Used to be you could negate a patent by citing prior art. The date of invention, not the date to file was important. Now that has changed. Date of filing is all that is considered. Previously I can show my signed and dated notebooks to prove I was first to invent in a patent challenge. That's no longer the case.
If I invent something and don't patent it, Bob might come along and patent it instead.
Alternatively I can file it as a trade secret, where there's documentation I invented it, but no public disclosure. So I don't get patent monopoly protection, but I can prove prior art if someone else tries to patent it. This wouldn't work for public research that isn't a secret.
Government research filings mean that someone else who didn't invent it won't be able to patent it, or at least as easily.
Patent examiners rely quite a bit on earlier patents to determine if something is new. They are not experts in all unpatented but invented research taking place in all fields, so filing this patent helps the PTO block similar patents filed later by other parties.
Also, having a patent portfolio of impressive things as the inventor of record, even if some other entity owns the patent, is very useful to your career. It's comparable to having a track record of published papers in prestigious journals. So allowing inventors to document their inventions with patents is likely useful in terms of attracting talent. A government agency, as employer, being owner of the patent, also prevents the inventor from going off and patenting it on his own after no longer working for that agency and thus privatizing the invention.
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Seems popularmechanics.com needs to tune their what-is-related algorithm a bit. Or is it a subtle jab at "yes my boss says I need to publish this even though it's an obvious crank and it's just clickbait"?
If the military has developed several breakthrough technologies, why in the world would they patent them, thereby making them public? Given a revolutionary new tech, no foreign government would respect a U.S. patent, nor would it be enforceable in the first place.
It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these patents at face value.
As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc.
Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?
It's not so out of character. Consider the recent disclosure that certain famous UFO video clips are genuine and show unidentified phenomena. Why would they disclose that when shutting up would work and was working?
The answer is they want to.
There are factions within the US government and it seems that the "tell them, but take it real slow" faction is presently in the ascendant.
The military verified that, yes, those were videos captured by the them. However, the videos themselves are inconclusive. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said (paraphrasing), "the 'O' in UFO is highly non-specific". Others have suggested explanations such as: equipment malfunction or misinterpretation, misinterpretation of known natural phenomena, or classified US gov tech. Further, these too could be an intentional ploy by the military/gov for unknown but rational and non-ET related motives. These are just a sampling of possible explanations.
You seem to be leaning toward an extraterrestrial explanation. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but it seems like a very low probability explanation and one that defies the principle of parsimony.
The videos are subsets of what they have, supposedly (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing things. It's not an accident that the inconclusive part is what got released. It was chosen.
They have been sitting on this stuff. They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption. They are choosing, deliberately, to gradually change attitudes. Part of the gradualness is maintaining intentional levels of ambiguity that can be slowly, slowly dialled down.
All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on. Doesn't have to be ET.
> (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing things
Link? Who are these people? Are they credible? Do they seem rational, reasonable, and (highly) skeptical?
> They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption
There is nothing reasonable about this assumption.
> All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on
Huh? How? Why?
This is all veering into conspiracy-theorist-cum-crackpot territory. You are doing some extreme extrapolation from very thin and inconclusive evidence.
The people in TTSA on their show Unidentified, said it, if my memory is correct. I forget exactly who but probably Luis Elizondo. TTSA is composed of ex-intelligence-insiders with clearances to see more than they are cleared to reveal.
Just so we're all clear, the TTSA you're referring to is "To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences", an org founded by former Blink-182 band member Tom DeLonge and staffed by kooks and wackadoos, right?
Given that the only people who would have found out about the verification of the videos are those already with an interest, I don't think it's a campaign to change the general public's attitudes.
Reveal UFOs are real, slowly enough that it goes straight from "kook conspiracy theories" to "meh old news" without ever passing through "mass hysteria".
Decommission the internalized cover up ("If you see a UFO you are a kook and will lose your job"). This gets in the way of receiving useful intelligence reports.
(Partially) decommission the external cover up, at least enough that the public sees UFOs as a known but unexplained phenomenon. And as military business.
Paradoxically, cover up the cover up itself, by acting like all this stuff is new to them and hasn't been under observation since the 1940s.
Obtain funding due to the public not liking UFOs poking into their airspace without permission.
Bring technologies out into the mainstream, commercially or militarily. Looots of funding.
So why now? Considering Project Blue Book, and the rise and fall of UFO popularity with the decades, why only now - is this just the slowest dissemination of knowledge possible?
Could just be a matter of faction ascendancy. I've seen a report on how Tom DeLonge pushed the idea of TTSA, that suggested the convincing argument was: would you like to go back to being "respected all-American heroes dealing with a mysterious menace", as opposed to wasting effort sweeping things under the rug and looking like the bad guys off the X-files? Cover-ups are also wasteful of opportunity. Scientists can't collaborate. Intelligence sits un-analysed.
It feels looking in from outside, as if there are "pro continued cover up" and "pro managed disclosure" factions, and they are in a bit of a stand-off. The recent disclosure that the videos were genuine, for example, felt like the one faction had bought the release of that shocking information with the apologetic concession that "but they were never meant to be released to the public" which was included in the same statement.
At least in the context of the Nimitz incedent, Cmdr. David Fravor said on the Joe Rogan interview that there is no "full video" - this is something that was invented by people who have never seen the video, what we got is pretty much the entire thing.
That somebody on the internet (or an organization full of cranks like TTSA) can say they watched the "full video", and you don't even question it, is telling. Unfortunately this, like the entire recent narrative of some sort of a "disclosure", seems more like a fantasy invented by UFO enthusiasts that really wish it to be true, than something based on reality.
My working theory on that is the military are concerned about foreign surveillance UAVs.
And by reigniting the UFO narrative, they are more likely to receive reports and data from the public who may be looking for Aliens.
Interestingly, if this were true, it might imply that there is some pretty funky military tech out there, not owned by the US, that might have some interesting capabilities.
I'm sure UAV's, especially at night, would very much look like a UFO - you can't discern scale, and they'll move in all sorts of ways you wouldn't expect. If they are far enough away to mask the noise you'd just see a light doing extraordinary things, and without scale the speed and distances could potentially look vast.
Things drones can do that seem UFO like: turn sharp corners suddenly and stop on a dime, move in concert as if they were points of light attached to a solid object, disappear or hide by turning their LEDs off, appear by turning them on.
Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object, be eerily silent.
True to some of those (I think that some of the aerodynamic feats can be perspective and size) but I'm not saying "all UFO's are drones" - that'd be ridiculous, just as I'm sure you're not saying that all the claims are real, and the more extraordinary, the more reason to doubt the claim.
>Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object
Eh, if you have an LED screen in the sky, you can create the appearance of a lot of things.
But your example doesn't disclose anything at all - those cases have nothing to do with one another. The US loses nothing of any value by admitting that a bunch of leaked videos, confirmed by former pilots, are real. This isn't comparable at all to disclosing that the US military is in possession of a magical technology, not to mention details on how to build it.
... While "real," those videos in fact show (as the Navy must be well-aware) easily explained FLIR artefacts; e.g. distant jet fighter exhaust ports. Wittingly or unwittingly, the US Navy / TTSA / Elizondo et al. apparently are part of an elaborate, ongoing disinformation campaign.
I tend to agree over all, I think there is some kind of disinformation campaign behind it. There very well may be some nuggets of truth in there - I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn the US govt has tech that would blow us away today - but I think they're heavily exaggerating things at the least.
At the end of the day, they're either trying to convince other world powers that we have tech we don't, or they're warning others that we do. The only other possibility is, as you suggested, some kind of hoax or prank.
Which, with how it panned out, does fit: "1) luring foreign militaries down blind alleys of expensive research" most aptly, albeit not put into the wild via a patent and more case of funky CGI graphics pushing a dream as reality.
Yes, the spin rabbit hole goes to infinity and beyond. But certainly a plausible situation. We may never know and suspect that very few people ever knew in such secretive projects.
Remember this was still with the whole Moon landing era fresh in mind for so many, that was also a President's speech dream, that seemed equally as wild and fantasy at the time. Yet that happened. SDI was, given the media mindsets of that era, easily to latch onto as - it's going to happen.
Today, we are more cynical/pragmatic/realistic in mindset and with that, do question things and able to do so en-mass more easily with the internet than ever before.
Except much of the technology in SDI is scientifically feasible and much of it is either deployed today or in active development. The Patriot missiles that were used to shoot down Iraqi Scuds in the Gulf War were developed under SDI and are still in use for ballistic missile defense today. Even directed energy weapons are still in active development.
Worth watching the initial announcement by Reagan: https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-reagan-announc...
Starts with "American does possess NOW, the technologies..." tails into - hey scientists, show us something cool we can use to do this. So initially it was a big pot of money for ideas to achieve it. Then you had the big companies set the direction with space lasers, few CGI's (that cost loads to make) in a time that it was still very new for TV and suddenly you have the media and directional focus going with that - as a majority of people of that era will recall it due to media focus upon that, at the time ->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smrZrimAuis "STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE STAR WARS RONALD REAGAN 33112"
But 30 years later, and only starting to see lasers deployed upon very large ships - shows how long it can take from feasible towards practical and dare say, still kinda in the flintlock stage of it's evolutionary cycle. But then, we may well see power generating inventions born out of the need to power these things, trickling down into consumer hands, which would tie in with the title most aptly.
There are a lot of skeptics that think this is conspiracy theory nonsense, but Lockheed has been open about working on fusion for a while and maybe some others too.
The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re declassifying it.
Maybe they think world security will be better with this public, maybe the secret is already leaked, maybe they think a bigger advantage will come from having this commercially available, maybe this is useless for defense because it is trivially detectable, or maybe they’re filing patents to mislead adversaries on operational details and delay them, or maybe knowing how it works is unimportant because there is some impossible to acquire secret sauce . There are lots of ways to think about it, and obsessive grabs on technology secrets is not the only one.
>The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re declassifying it.
Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much... there's a strategic advantage to having more advanced tech than your enemies, but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power.
Not to mention that such a discovery would have been worth trillions of dollars to the energy industry, and the Navy has plenty of civilian firms working with them that would have pushed hard for this tech to be exclusively licensed to them if it worked.
AND it's unlikely that the tech wouldn't have been stolen in that time frame. It would be a major, major coup for whatever country got it, and in the past 20 years almost every secret military tech the US has created has ended up in the hands of the Chinese or others... the US military just isn't that good at security, and you can't keep all the docs needed for development of something like this offline or in paper form.
> Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much...
The Glomar Explorer is an example of the US Military doing exactly that, they made a boat specifically for recovering a sunk sub and told every one it was a research vessel they kept it a secret for over 20 years.
There are countless other examples of this like the black bird.
They were only able to keep the project secret for less than 5 years - the operation leaked and details were published in the LA Times and other newspapers in Feb. 1975, which forced them to cancel plans for a second attempt to recover the rest of K-129.
>You omitted the "... but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power"
Not to go tinfoil hat here but... if we had a relatively small fusion reactor, lobbyists would do all they could to make sure they never became operational for connection to the grid.
- Fossil fuel lobbyists
- Power company lobbyists
- Fossil fuel worker union lobbyists
- Ship, train and semi industry/union lobbyists (that transport the insane amounts of coal and oil-related products)
You'd also possibly see the unions that cover anyone working with power lines as you'd be able to set up a bunch of independent grids and stop servicing/repairing, and start removing, high transmission lines that blanket the country which also could get various metal worker unions lobbying against it as production of these massive amounts of cable (if done domestically) would drastically be reduced as why bother crossing vast stretches of land when you can just drop a reactor in a rural area and just serve the region.
When/if we develop fusion reactors that are economically viable, you will remove thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively short period in the United States alone. Voters aren't too found of losing their jobs and the lobbyists of their industries have lots of money to burn fighting such changes (this is why you'll never see the IRS thrown out in exchange for something like a federal income tax only, it would cut 75,000 federal jobs over night and their union + the voting power of them and ever tax preparer, CPA etc would fight hard to prevent it).
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AS far as secrets, there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles. Those remain extremely closely guarded secrets where a very small number of people know at any given time where that stuff is stored/warehoused, how much, what variety etc. That's not conspiracy, that's just cold hard fact, and that's stuff like vaccines/medicine/fuel etc.
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A hypothetical stretgic use:
The strategic value of keeping such a reactor/technology secret. If you can power your known underground bases/alleged DUMBs (deep underground military base), without needing any energy input from the surface you'd want to keep that very hush hush because it gives you far longer backup power capabilities than generators and fossil fuels stored onsite could provide.
Having such a technology also allows you to actually create DUMBs. You can make an electrically powdered tunnel boring machine, go to something like a known cave or mine site, point it in a direction and go for mile after mile if you felt so inclined. If you're doing this in an area with known caverns/an old mine you never even need to bring what you bore out up to the surface, you just fill caverns/mine shafts. Such tunnels and bases have been alleged to exist since the cold war days and they may or may not exist, but if you had a compact fusion reactor technology that was classified from the start, the longer you keep it a secret the longer you have to exploit it for such hypothetical situations as this.
Looks like he's previously worked on systems for 'Hybrid Aerospace-Undersea Craft' for something to operate both underwater and as an aircraft a compact fusion reactor would probably be what took it from being a novelty (like the various goofy boat-cars and car-planes) to an effective vehicle.
That's an interesting idea on its own. You could travel fast distances, presumably quite rapidly, through the air and drop below radar, slow down to enter the water and submerge, then proceed to whatever. Or you could act as a sub, if you're detected launch out of the water and accelera...
Unlocking new cheaper energy grows the economy more than anything else. Can you think of an example in the past where a new source of energy has caused a negative effect on productivity?
Fair question. In hypothetical situations I tend to think more towards the darker consequences/outcomes that get pushed aside or forgotten for an article/story/daydream so here's how I see it:
Increasing productivity means more resources are needed though. During previous expansions, this wasn't much of an issue however now it could be the genesis for a new world war so 'the powers that be' whether our known governments and militaries or some 'secret shadow government' both would likely be hesitant to unleash really cheap and bountiful energy.
It would be great for powering our homes sure, but you'd suddenly get every major automotive manufacturer seriously looking at EVs because who wants to pay 2.85 a gallon of gas when the equivalent in electricity is ten cents? So great, EVs for everyone... but where do you get the precious metals and the lithium and other rare earths from when you suddenly increase the demand one or more orders of magnitude?
Then electronics developers stop worrying about being as energy efficient as possible, so you start generating a ton more waste heat and you've got people being more liberal with their air con or heating at their homes which goes through refrigerants faster and goes through heating elements faster.
And with cheaper energy people start driving more for road trips, even with EVs, you start to see more and more rubber going into the environment via the tires. And with that cheaper energy, fuel prices go down and more people start flying places and further disrupting resource allocation/logistics globally.
And with that cheaper electricity, those autonomous EV delivery vehicles become the norm and you're always 30 minutes away from Uber eats or Amazon Prime Now and "oh man, I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet, well I'll order another and it should be here while I shower" and that's 20 miles more of rubber deposited onto the roads, another cardboard box, another insulated container because once you got out of the shower you decided you wanted some ice cream and placed a second order which is another 20 miles worth of rubber and an insulated container into your trash...
Dirt cheap, clean, unlimited energy would be the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity and quite possibly the worst thing to ever happen to humanity as it would be a genesis for even greater amounts of disposable goods.
The impact it would have on mining alone could be incredibly damaging to the planet. A lot of mining equipment is still fossil fuel powered which severely restricts how deep/far/etc you can go and at what concentrations mining a given location stops being worth it. When you effectively remove the energy costs, you can mine much lower concentrations and go much deeper and even mine far more remote (and pristine) areas because you could fly in a reactor in cargo containers and assemble it on site.
I'm all for fusion, for space exploration alone it would be monumental. We could send probes to nearby stars and have return missions within a decade or two if you spend the bulk of the first half accelerating with ion propulsion, then flip and start reversing thrust, get some data in system, slingshot around the local star and start accelerating back...
But I see a lot of potential bad that would come from affordable and scalable fusion (or magical zero point energy for the sake of argument) as we've become a "use my phone for 18 months and throw it away for a new one" and "let's fly to see the pandas/tigers/whales/elephants/penguins next week for our third international exotic animal trip this year" society.
We're generally pretty poor stewards of our planet as a species and while unlimited clean energy would certainly get us off fossil fuels, it wouldn't stop the many other ways we harm our natural and man made environment.
If you have energy that is magnitudes cheaper then you can do things that were not possible before such as terraforming, you could scrub the atmosphere and clean up the oceans.
As a reminder, we are already terraforming the Earth. Or rather, we are making it less Earth-like; anti-terraforming.
We can terraform this planet by greatly reducing our generation of greenhouse gases, plastics, and other materials. This sort of terraforming does not require magnitudes cheaper energy.
How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?
We can look at other projects, like Bussard's Polywell. Either all of these lobbyists could figure out that it wouldn't work out, so didn't fight the development, or there isn't a major lobbyist effort as you describe it. I strongly suspect the latter.
Or, consider nuclear power during the 1950s, when the fossil fuel worker union was far more powerful than now. What lobbying effort was there, and it doesn't seem that effective.
Or, consider whale oil, which once a major industrial oil. Despite the number of people involved in whaling, and the money involved, it was replaced with other oils. (Wikipedia says it was used in transmission oil until the 1970s!)
The strategic effort you mentioned are essentially the same as those used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program . Mining requires more than just electricity - look at how much work the Gotthard Base Tunnel took, and those were all electrically powered. Where do the spoils go? Where are the ventilation shafts?
>How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?
In a situations here this is rolled out for use to replace power plants and not for classified military applications, thus the various civilian industries and their lobbyists mentioned. I thought this was pretty obvious given I mention a laundry list of civilian industries that the bulk of which are comprised of private and publicly traded companies that are not defense related industries.
>As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" - what are you talking about?
Stuff like the SNS which is 1 (more likely than not there are multiple locations with only public acknowledgement that 1 warehouse exists given a natural disaster or nuclear attack to a single region could effectively destroy the only stockpile) plain, unmarked, warehouse that the location to is a closely guarded secret due to the fact that someone simply driving a tanker full of a flammable material, then igniting it, through one of the doors of the warehouse could destroy the government's strategic stockpile of antibiotics, vaccines, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, PPE equipment, respirators and other critical medical supplies making it a highly valuable target to both foreign governments and terrorists.
And the things that simply aren't public knowledge at all.
I mean, every few years someone stumbles upon Cold War stockpiles that had been forgotten like back in 2006 when stockpiles of rations and medical supplies were found in the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.
But I'm happy for you that you can google 'strategic stockpile' and link me to a helium supply that the government has already order shut down and sold off (which has been covered by podcasts like Planet Money this year).
No, it's not obvious. dangerface was talking about highly secretive projects.
Your statement was only "if we had a relatively small fusion reactor".
Nothing in what you wrote marked the transition from having a highly secretive small fusion reactor to one which was being 'rolled out for use to replace power plants'.
Please don't be so snide. I'm not completely ignorant.
I mentioned those strategic stockpiles because they were the ones I knew about, from years ago. I also know about Quebec's maple syrup reserves because of the theft a few years back.
And, the "any" in your statement "any of it's various strategic stock piles" typically means all of them, not some of them. Which is why I asked for clarification. And the National Helium Reserve is still around, making it is a valid example.
> but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power
Thorium reactor's are supposed to deliver more cleaner energy than uranium reactors but the technology was ditched because you cant fit a thorium reactor in a sub.
When it comes to nuclear power the needs of the country have always been second place over giving the military an advantage, there is no reason to believe this has changed.
The US isn't the only country with nuclear reactors. Some of them, like Sweden and Japan, have high technological capabilities, and existing nuclear reactors, and don't have a nuclearized miliary to influence policy.
Plenty of legit projects are working on fusion reactors but that doesn't mean this patent isn't nonsense. Given the other patents filed by the same person, that seems likely.
A comment from r/fusion: "I read through the patent application and it seems like total bullshit to me. It's filled with technobabble and unimportant details while explaining nothing about the proposed fields and ion motion."
Well the patent office didn't see that to be a problem, and I'm no fusion expert so I can't say that that is a valid criticism.
My point being that I haven't seen any criticism that seems credible or any at all outside people treating fusion like it's fairy technology or armchair physicists. The same could be said about praise, to be fair.
The patent office has approved all sorts of weird patents including some that violate known physics, and some of those by this same author.
I agree it'd be nice to see commentary from a non-anonymous fusion researcher. But it's possible to be skeptical of vague claims from people who've "invented" both working fusion and inertia manipulation, without thinking fusion is fairy technology. There are lots of fusion projects with real experiments and clear publicly-known details on their physical principles. Here are some:
ITER (the big dog, a giant tokamak)
Wendelstein 7-X (stellerator)
Tokamak Energy (high field tokamak)
Commonwealth (same, from MIT)
First Light Fusion (inertial confinement with fast projectile)
HB11 Energy (petawatt picosecond laser for boron fusion)
TAE (formerly Tri Alpha, boron fusion with magnetic confinement)
Helion (deuterium/he3 fusion, with funding from YCombinator)
General Fusion (compression by acoustic shockwave from steam-driven pistons)
LPP's focus fusion (uses a plasma configuration that collapses itself into high compression)
If you knew a foreign entity/government had this working it might be prudent to publish a "we have it too", even if it didn't work. Then it's just a matter of stealing the tech and letting Lockheed, etc. produce it for your nation state so that you are not held hostage. Something this big, if not released to the public as generic technology could potentially start wars.
If people remember recently Russia told the world it has the worlds fastest unstoppable nuclear missile? Well this is the response... Your Missiles no good now, if there's an impenetrable shield utilizing one of these patents thats been proven already.
Conspiracy theory... This is not a good reactor design, and therefore they files a patent for it, hoping to mislead foreign countries into using it.
Another idea is that by filing a patent, Congress could give that kind of patent extra long protection, extending the amount of time it could only be used by the US Navy.
> Current reactors are approximately the size of a building; a relatively portable compact fusion reactor, one designed to power relatively small vehicles, would be a game-changer.
Ummm... Isn't it more important to say that current reactors don't even work (at least not yet)? A working one would be a game-changer, never mind how big or small it was.
... This site is a joke, right? You can buy a "fusure core" now, with a 4-week lead time, for $3000. The description gives some vague hand-wavey stuff about "thousands of nanoscale tokomaks [sic]", allowing the "Coulomb barrier to break via quantum tunneling".
Is it just an experiment to see who's dumb enough to give them their credit card information?
Hi, former and possible future fusioneer here, with disposable income. Care to post any specifications? If I just want some neutrons I can do that myself.
Same here. Those idiots have never come up with anything new or revolutionary, only stupid run of the mill stuff like nuclear submarines and carriers, planet spanning underwater listening systems, spy subs that can sit on the ocean floor, drones that can land on carriers, electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles at mach 6+, and other worthless crap.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] thread> According to the patent, Pais’ plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a “concentrated magnetic energy flux” that can squish the gases together.
If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to make?
Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume it's a stable equilibrium.
I was under the impression there isn't a fusion reactor of any size anywhere yet, am I wrong?
Barring some random research breakthrough by a small team somewhere, ITER is probably the best bet for reaching positive net energy first: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
The problem is none of those reactors produce more energy than they consume.
There's are also bioreactors and chemical reactors. It seems to me the term reactor is just used for a device that induces reactions.
The definition of “reactor” doesn’t require generating net positive power.
Most of these devices use hydrogren most of the time, meaning the cross section of fusion even in high temperatures and densities will be low. If the goal of these devices was fusion energy they would all be using deuterium, at the very least.
The fields of plasma physics and materials have progressed to the point where a future reactor likely wouldn’t be a failure. Just look at W7-X and (in 10 years) ITER. Q=10 operation will likely be a very stressful test on ITER and it will likely only happen towards the end of its life (2035). Q=1 shots should be pretty early into tritium operation.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
It doesn't seem to have been examined yet.
Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator" (which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor".
All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank.
[0] https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais
- A compact energy generator;
- A device that generated gravitational waves;
Is the Navy in on the joke?
But yet again... I wouldn't bet on that.
You have plenty of real world scenarios of companies wasting resources on the pursuit of something that looks trivial: like electric vehicles. Yet a lot of them are pulling the plug on something that looked easy, after dumping millions into it, right? "It's just electric motors, a battery and wheels".
If any government goes on a spiral to pursuit these devices it surely is a money furnace.
On the other side, if this is clearly non-sense... don't they have smart people in Russia, China, etc, claiming the same?
Maybe that's the genius of it all: it's so obviously propaganda non-sense that's too much obvious to be propaganda.
I mean, if I worked on secret stuff for years, maybe I would develop that kind of humor, and file a patent application for a Flux Capacitor, just to tease my friends about the time machine we are building...
I'm apparently not familiar enough with the patent system. It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.
Yup patent trolls make millions through this flaw they get the most vague patents they can and then sue everyone they see, they only need to win one case with a sleepy judge to make their money back.
Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.
1. The assignee is the US Navy. He won't personally profit.
2. Protection is given for the claims, not for the abstract, diagrams or specification. The claims have to describe something relatively concrete or they'll be rejected. You can't obtain patents for titles or elevator pitches.
3. Even if it's granted and you think GE infringes, they might disagree. Welcome to patent litigation, which is super expensive.
4. Even if it's not granted, it might be successfully cited as prior art against GE's application. You won't get royalties on nothing.
5. Patents expire. If you're patenting science fiction, yours might expire decades before it's actually possible.
I have filed a patent on my own time and dime. It is much harder than it looks. ~$50,000 USD and hundreds of hours of work over 5+ years.
Did it cost you ~$50k to file your patent?
There will be more expenses. $50k was the get as far as the US patent. I've spent another $3k since then on costs arising from other paperwork around it.
Also is that typical for supposedly cutting edge things from a defense perspective to get patented before a functional use case is demonstrated?
I’ve no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent system, though.
And there are criminal penalties for knowingly supplying the patent office with false information[1]:
>1) All statements made therein of the party’s own knowledge are true, all statements made therein on information and belief are believed to be true, and all statements made therein are made with the knowledge that whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the Office, knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact, or knowingly and willfully makes any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or knowingly and willfully makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be subject to the penalties set forth under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and any other applicable criminal statute, and violations of the provisions of this section may jeopardize the probative value of the paper; and ...
[0] https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible-to...
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
Nominative determinism?
Seems like the HN community expressed scepticism/doubt about the science behind patents filed by this guy? (Also commented in the posts regarding the ufo sightings by us navy pilots).
(See: Alstom purchase by GE)
To protect the invention from commercial patents?
Sounds sensible to me.
prior art.
Prior art is only difficult to prove if you're relying on something along the lines of folk knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lands where the Jumblies live.
It's non-obviousness that is notoriously difficult to prove.
Can you elaborate on this? Japan, for example, requires you to disclose any prior art during application similar to the U.S. Israel recently adopted similar rules. These disclosures frequently include US and foreign (WO, EP, etc) patents and patent publications.
> A country that is first-to-file can file the patent then stop your domestic company from using the tech.
Assuming you filed first in your domestic country, then you just apply in the foreign country and claim priority from your domestic application - thereby granting your application an even earlier effective filing date.
If you publish a design, it becomes prior act, and nobody can patent it. You can even do that in the patent office without filling a patent, making them the registration of your design, without patenting it.
It seems clear to me that what they want is to appropriate someone else design because I do not believe they have a working prototype of this.
If they wanted it, they would get it, no?
We're talking about bending gravity powered by a small fusion reactor.
I would assume or at like to believe this is true with federal government patents, but it's not true for state governments, government-funded universities, etc. It would be nice to have a law or official policy to point to that states outright that the federal government can't or won't sue anyone for using the technology in those patents (or the opposite).
It is quite rare that government R&D is sufficient to demonstrate that a particular technology is commercially viable. Without a patent to license to a private entity there is little changc such an entity will invest the time/money to perform this R&D. They need that patent protection to raise funds.
I have personal experience with this process.
every superyacht owner should have unfetterred access to clean nuclear power
It's really either papers or patents, and patents are generally counted equivalent to two papers.
I'm not sure what other metrics could be used.
If I invent something and don't patent it, Bob might come along and patent it instead.
Alternatively I can file it as a trade secret, where there's documentation I invented it, but no public disclosure. So I don't get patent monopoly protection, but I can prove prior art if someone else tries to patent it. This wouldn't work for public research that isn't a secret.
Government research filings mean that someone else who didn't invent it won't be able to patent it, or at least as easily.
Patent examiners rely quite a bit on earlier patents to determine if something is new. They are not experts in all unpatented but invented research taking place in all fields, so filing this patent helps the PTO block similar patents filed later by other parties.
Also, having a patent portfolio of impressive things as the inventor of record, even if some other entity owns the patent, is very useful to your career. It's comparable to having a track record of published papers in prestigious journals. So allowing inventors to document their inventions with patents is likely useful in terms of attracting talent. A government agency, as employer, being owner of the patent, also prevents the inventor from going off and patenting it on his own after no longer working for that agency and thus privatizing the invention.
[1] https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu...
[2] https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/matters/matters-9004.h...
> Related Videos XXXXXX YYYY Dash Cam Captures Accident
Seems popularmechanics.com needs to tune their what-is-related algorithm a bit. Or is it a subtle jab at "yes my boss says I need to publish this even though it's an obvious crank and it's just clickbait"?
It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these patents at face value.
As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc.
Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?
The answer is they want to.
There are factions within the US government and it seems that the "tell them, but take it real slow" faction is presently in the ascendant.
You seem to be leaning toward an extraterrestrial explanation. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but it seems like a very low probability explanation and one that defies the principle of parsimony.
They have been sitting on this stuff. They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption. They are choosing, deliberately, to gradually change attitudes. Part of the gradualness is maintaining intentional levels of ambiguity that can be slowly, slowly dialled down.
All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on. Doesn't have to be ET.
Link? Who are these people? Are they credible? Do they seem rational, reasonable, and (highly) skeptical?
> They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption
There is nothing reasonable about this assumption.
> All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on
Huh? How? Why?
This is all veering into conspiracy-theorist-cum-crackpot territory. You are doing some extreme extrapolation from very thin and inconclusive evidence.
Decommission the internalized cover up ("If you see a UFO you are a kook and will lose your job"). This gets in the way of receiving useful intelligence reports.
(Partially) decommission the external cover up, at least enough that the public sees UFOs as a known but unexplained phenomenon. And as military business.
Paradoxically, cover up the cover up itself, by acting like all this stuff is new to them and hasn't been under observation since the 1940s.
Obtain funding due to the public not liking UFOs poking into their airspace without permission.
Bring technologies out into the mainstream, commercially or militarily. Looots of funding.
It feels looking in from outside, as if there are "pro continued cover up" and "pro managed disclosure" factions, and they are in a bit of a stand-off. The recent disclosure that the videos were genuine, for example, felt like the one faction had bought the release of that shocking information with the apologetic concession that "but they were never meant to be released to the public" which was included in the same statement.
That somebody on the internet (or an organization full of cranks like TTSA) can say they watched the "full video", and you don't even question it, is telling. Unfortunately this, like the entire recent narrative of some sort of a "disclosure", seems more like a fantasy invented by UFO enthusiasts that really wish it to be true, than something based on reality.
And by reigniting the UFO narrative, they are more likely to receive reports and data from the public who may be looking for Aliens.
Interestingly, if this were true, it might imply that there is some pretty funky military tech out there, not owned by the US, that might have some interesting capabilities.
Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object, be eerily silent.
Eh, if you have an LED screen in the sky, you can create the appearance of a lot of things.
* https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...
* https://www.metabunk.org/are-the-navy-ufos-real-or-just-in-t...
* https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...
* https://www.metabunk.org/ttsa-videos-declassification-email-...
This echoes the 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP/USO incident:
* Aguadilla Infrared Footage of 'UFOs' - Hot Air Wedding Lanterns
https://www.metabunk.org/aguadilla-infrared-footage-of-ufos-...
... While "real," those videos in fact show (as the Navy must be well-aware) easily explained FLIR artefacts; e.g. distant jet fighter exhaust ports. Wittingly or unwittingly, the US Navy / TTSA / Elizondo et al. apparently are part of an elaborate, ongoing disinformation campaign.
----------------------------------------------------
* $21 Trillion Missing From US Federal Budget
https://www.globalresearch.ca/21-trillion-missing-from-us-fe...
Military-industrial complex / "threats" / USAP black budget funding:
Communism | Cold War >> asteroids (SDI) >> war on terror >> AATIP (Advanced Aerospace THREAT Identification Program): unexplained aerial phenomena? >> Oh no! ETI threat!! >> $$$$
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=35m50s
[A cube floating into a spherical force field]
It made me thought of Salvatore Pais other patents on the subject.
At the end of the day, they're either trying to convince other world powers that we have tech we don't, or they're warning others that we do. The only other possibility is, as you suggested, some kind of hoax or prank.
Who knows where the truth really is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Which, with how it panned out, does fit: "1) luring foreign militaries down blind alleys of expensive research" most aptly, albeit not put into the wild via a patent and more case of funky CGI graphics pushing a dream as reality.
Remember this was still with the whole Moon landing era fresh in mind for so many, that was also a President's speech dream, that seemed equally as wild and fantasy at the time. Yet that happened. SDI was, given the media mindsets of that era, easily to latch onto as - it's going to happen.
Today, we are more cynical/pragmatic/realistic in mindset and with that, do question things and able to do so en-mass more easily with the internet than ever before.
But 30 years later, and only starting to see lasers deployed upon very large ships - shows how long it can take from feasible towards practical and dare say, still kinda in the flintlock stage of it's evolutionary cycle. But then, we may well see power generating inventions born out of the need to power these things, trickling down into consumer hands, which would tie in with the title most aptly.
The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re declassifying it.
Maybe they think world security will be better with this public, maybe the secret is already leaked, maybe they think a bigger advantage will come from having this commercially available, maybe this is useless for defense because it is trivially detectable, or maybe they’re filing patents to mislead adversaries on operational details and delay them, or maybe knowing how it works is unimportant because there is some impossible to acquire secret sauce . There are lots of ways to think about it, and obsessive grabs on technology secrets is not the only one.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much... there's a strategic advantage to having more advanced tech than your enemies, but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power.
Not to mention that such a discovery would have been worth trillions of dollars to the energy industry, and the Navy has plenty of civilian firms working with them that would have pushed hard for this tech to be exclusively licensed to them if it worked.
AND it's unlikely that the tech wouldn't have been stolen in that time frame. It would be a major, major coup for whatever country got it, and in the past 20 years almost every secret military tech the US has created has ended up in the hands of the Chinese or others... the US military just isn't that good at security, and you can't keep all the docs needed for development of something like this offline or in paper form.
The Glomar Explorer is an example of the US Military doing exactly that, they made a boat specifically for recovering a sunk sub and told every one it was a research vessel they kept it a secret for over 20 years.
There are countless other examples of this like the black bird.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
They were only able to keep the project secret for less than 5 years - the operation leaked and details were published in the LA Times and other newspapers in Feb. 1975, which forced them to cancel plans for a second attempt to recover the rest of K-129.
There's no corresponding big advantage to the US for having the Glomar Explorer be public.
BTW, the CIA has paramilitary forces, but is not formally part of the military/armed forces.
Not to go tinfoil hat here but... if we had a relatively small fusion reactor, lobbyists would do all they could to make sure they never became operational for connection to the grid.
- Fossil fuel lobbyists
- Power company lobbyists
- Fossil fuel worker union lobbyists
- Ship, train and semi industry/union lobbyists (that transport the insane amounts of coal and oil-related products)
You'd also possibly see the unions that cover anyone working with power lines as you'd be able to set up a bunch of independent grids and stop servicing/repairing, and start removing, high transmission lines that blanket the country which also could get various metal worker unions lobbying against it as production of these massive amounts of cable (if done domestically) would drastically be reduced as why bother crossing vast stretches of land when you can just drop a reactor in a rural area and just serve the region.
When/if we develop fusion reactors that are economically viable, you will remove thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively short period in the United States alone. Voters aren't too found of losing their jobs and the lobbyists of their industries have lots of money to burn fighting such changes (this is why you'll never see the IRS thrown out in exchange for something like a federal income tax only, it would cut 75,000 federal jobs over night and their union + the voting power of them and ever tax preparer, CPA etc would fight hard to prevent it).
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AS far as secrets, there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles. Those remain extremely closely guarded secrets where a very small number of people know at any given time where that stuff is stored/warehoused, how much, what variety etc. That's not conspiracy, that's just cold hard fact, and that's stuff like vaccines/medicine/fuel etc.
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A hypothetical stretgic use:
The strategic value of keeping such a reactor/technology secret. If you can power your known underground bases/alleged DUMBs (deep underground military base), without needing any energy input from the surface you'd want to keep that very hush hush because it gives you far longer backup power capabilities than generators and fossil fuels stored onsite could provide.
Having such a technology also allows you to actually create DUMBs. You can make an electrically powdered tunnel boring machine, go to something like a known cave or mine site, point it in a direction and go for mile after mile if you felt so inclined. If you're doing this in an area with known caverns/an old mine you never even need to bring what you bore out up to the surface, you just fill caverns/mine shafts. Such tunnels and bases have been alleged to exist since the cold war days and they may or may not exist, but if you had a compact fusion reactor technology that was classified from the start, the longer you keep it a secret the longer you have to exploit it for such hypothetical situations as this.
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Edit: Previous HN comment about him/his work
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229721
Looks like he's previously worked on systems for 'Hybrid Aerospace-Undersea Craft' for something to operate both underwater and as an aircraft a compact fusion reactor would probably be what took it from being a novelty (like the various goofy boat-cars and car-planes) to an effective vehicle.
That's an interesting idea on its own. You could travel fast distances, presumably quite rapidly, through the air and drop below radar, slow down to enter the water and submerge, then proceed to whatever. Or you could act as a sub, if you're detected launch out of the water and accelera...
Increasing productivity means more resources are needed though. During previous expansions, this wasn't much of an issue however now it could be the genesis for a new world war so 'the powers that be' whether our known governments and militaries or some 'secret shadow government' both would likely be hesitant to unleash really cheap and bountiful energy.
It would be great for powering our homes sure, but you'd suddenly get every major automotive manufacturer seriously looking at EVs because who wants to pay 2.85 a gallon of gas when the equivalent in electricity is ten cents? So great, EVs for everyone... but where do you get the precious metals and the lithium and other rare earths from when you suddenly increase the demand one or more orders of magnitude?
Then electronics developers stop worrying about being as energy efficient as possible, so you start generating a ton more waste heat and you've got people being more liberal with their air con or heating at their homes which goes through refrigerants faster and goes through heating elements faster.
And with cheaper energy people start driving more for road trips, even with EVs, you start to see more and more rubber going into the environment via the tires. And with that cheaper energy, fuel prices go down and more people start flying places and further disrupting resource allocation/logistics globally.
And with that cheaper electricity, those autonomous EV delivery vehicles become the norm and you're always 30 minutes away from Uber eats or Amazon Prime Now and "oh man, I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet, well I'll order another and it should be here while I shower" and that's 20 miles more of rubber deposited onto the roads, another cardboard box, another insulated container because once you got out of the shower you decided you wanted some ice cream and placed a second order which is another 20 miles worth of rubber and an insulated container into your trash...
Dirt cheap, clean, unlimited energy would be the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity and quite possibly the worst thing to ever happen to humanity as it would be a genesis for even greater amounts of disposable goods.
The impact it would have on mining alone could be incredibly damaging to the planet. A lot of mining equipment is still fossil fuel powered which severely restricts how deep/far/etc you can go and at what concentrations mining a given location stops being worth it. When you effectively remove the energy costs, you can mine much lower concentrations and go much deeper and even mine far more remote (and pristine) areas because you could fly in a reactor in cargo containers and assemble it on site.
I'm all for fusion, for space exploration alone it would be monumental. We could send probes to nearby stars and have return missions within a decade or two if you spend the bulk of the first half accelerating with ion propulsion, then flip and start reversing thrust, get some data in system, slingshot around the local star and start accelerating back...
But I see a lot of potential bad that would come from affordable and scalable fusion (or magical zero point energy for the sake of argument) as we've become a "use my phone for 18 months and throw it away for a new one" and "let's fly to see the pandas/tigers/whales/elephants/penguins next week for our third international exotic animal trip this year" society.
We're generally pretty poor stewards of our planet as a species and while unlimited clean energy would certainly get us off fossil fuels, it wouldn't stop the many other ways we harm our natural and man made environment.
We can terraform this planet by greatly reducing our generation of greenhouse gases, plastics, and other materials. This sort of terraforming does not require magnitudes cheaper energy.
We can look at other projects, like Bussard's Polywell. Either all of these lobbyists could figure out that it wouldn't work out, so didn't fight the development, or there isn't a major lobbyist effort as you describe it. I strongly suspect the latter.
Or, consider nuclear power during the 1950s, when the fossil fuel worker union was far more powerful than now. What lobbying effort was there, and it doesn't seem that effective.
Or, consider whale oil, which once a major industrial oil. Despite the number of people involved in whaling, and the money involved, it was replaced with other oils. (Wikipedia says it was used in transmission oil until the 1970s!)
The strategic effort you mentioned are essentially the same as those used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program . Mining requires more than just electricity - look at how much work the Gotthard Base Tunnel took, and those were all electrically powered. Where do the spoils go? Where are the ventilation shafts?
As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" - what are you talking about? The strategic oil reserve locations are located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U... , the National Helium Reserve is listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve with lat/long even.
Again, the benefits of secrecy you mention are far, far outweighed by the benefits of it being public.
In a situations here this is rolled out for use to replace power plants and not for classified military applications, thus the various civilian industries and their lobbyists mentioned. I thought this was pretty obvious given I mention a laundry list of civilian industries that the bulk of which are comprised of private and publicly traded companies that are not defense related industries.
>As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" - what are you talking about?
Stuff like the SNS which is 1 (more likely than not there are multiple locations with only public acknowledgement that 1 warehouse exists given a natural disaster or nuclear attack to a single region could effectively destroy the only stockpile) plain, unmarked, warehouse that the location to is a closely guarded secret due to the fact that someone simply driving a tanker full of a flammable material, then igniting it, through one of the doors of the warehouse could destroy the government's strategic stockpile of antibiotics, vaccines, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, PPE equipment, respirators and other critical medical supplies making it a highly valuable target to both foreign governments and terrorists.
And the things that simply aren't public knowledge at all.
I mean, every few years someone stumbles upon Cold War stockpiles that had been forgotten like back in 2006 when stockpiles of rations and medical supplies were found in the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.
But I'm happy for you that you can google 'strategic stockpile' and link me to a helium supply that the government has already order shut down and sold off (which has been covered by podcasts like Planet Money this year).
Your statement was only "if we had a relatively small fusion reactor".
Nothing in what you wrote marked the transition from having a highly secretive small fusion reactor to one which was being 'rolled out for use to replace power plants'.
Please don't be so snide. I'm not completely ignorant.
I mentioned those strategic stockpiles because they were the ones I knew about, from years ago. I also know about Quebec's maple syrup reserves because of the theft a few years back.
And, the "any" in your statement "any of it's various strategic stock piles" typically means all of them, not some of them. Which is why I asked for clarification. And the National Helium Reserve is still around, making it is a valid example.
Thorium reactor's are supposed to deliver more cleaner energy than uranium reactors but the technology was ditched because you cant fit a thorium reactor in a sub.
When it comes to nuclear power the needs of the country have always been second place over giving the military an advantage, there is no reason to believe this has changed.
A comment from r/fusion: "I read through the patent application and it seems like total bullshit to me. It's filled with technobabble and unimportant details while explaining nothing about the proposed fields and ion motion."
https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dga6yc/the_navys_pa...
Id like to see something more than random internet people saying it looks like nonsense without much for selling why.
Getting to the bottom of if this guy is really working on these things in the Navy for example
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/en?invento...
My point being that I haven't seen any criticism that seems credible or any at all outside people treating fusion like it's fairy technology or armchair physicists. The same could be said about praise, to be fair.
I agree it'd be nice to see commentary from a non-anonymous fusion researcher. But it's possible to be skeptical of vague claims from people who've "invented" both working fusion and inertia manipulation, without thinking fusion is fairy technology. There are lots of fusion projects with real experiments and clear publicly-known details on their physical principles. Here are some:
ITER (the big dog, a giant tokamak)
Wendelstein 7-X (stellerator)
Tokamak Energy (high field tokamak)
Commonwealth (same, from MIT)
First Light Fusion (inertial confinement with fast projectile)
HB11 Energy (petawatt picosecond laser for boron fusion)
TAE (formerly Tri Alpha, boron fusion with magnetic confinement)
Helion (deuterium/he3 fusion, with funding from YCombinator)
General Fusion (compression by acoustic shockwave from steam-driven pistons)
LPP's focus fusion (uses a plasma configuration that collapses itself into high compression)
Sandia's Z-pinch
ZAP Energy (a private z-pinch effort)
Another idea is that by filing a patent, Congress could give that kind of patent extra long protection, extending the amount of time it could only be used by the US Navy.
Ummm... Isn't it more important to say that current reactors don't even work (at least not yet)? A working one would be a game-changer, never mind how big or small it was.
* Keeping the reaction going indefinitely in a controlled way
* Doing so without the system power input being greater than the power output
They don't work as in produce power.
Teenagers build "working" fusion reactors.
No one has built a fusion reactor that produces useful power.
Is it just an experiment to see who's dumb enough to give them their credit card information?
Also, it’s a patent application, not an issued patent.
See Google talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg