A few days ago, Gail Heriot at Instapundit linked to a paper intriguingly titled “Artificially Selecting for Intelligence in Dogs to Produce Human-level IQ Within 100 Generations”. The author’s thesis was that sedulously mating the most intelligent male and female dogs would eventually lead to canines with human-level IQ’s. A pleasant idea to dream about, reminiscent of Clifford Simak’s City (a novel that I read in grade school; somewhere, I still have the 25 cent paperback that I bought from the Scholastic Book Club), though it’s hard not to share Miss Heriot's sentiment : “I think I like dogs just the way they are.”
Whatever one thinks of the idea of Fido Einsteins, bringing them into existence would require more than selective breeding. To see why, consider a parallel project.
The human world record for running a mile is a bit under four minutes (3:43.13, to be exact). The equine record for the same distance is over two minutes faster (1:31:23). Still, human times have improved. The record in 1865 was almost a minute slower (4:36.5) than the current mark. Suppose that some track-obsessed tyrant bred the fastest male and female runners in each generation. Is it conceivable that a human would eventually race on equal footing with a horse?
No. Not unless human muscles and limbs were reshaped more dramatically than natural selection will allow. Mutations would be needed, and they can hardly be counted on.
That is obvious for running. We can see the intimate linkage between velocity and physique. It isn’t so instantly evident with IQ, because the purely physical side of intelligence is obscure.
What brings all this to mind is the news this week from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which succeeded in igniting a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was put into it. That is a genuine engineering breakthrough, inspiring visions of making energy scarcity a relic of the past. The fuel for the Livermore experiment consisted of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which, while much rarer than ordinary hydrogen, are abundant enough to (hypothetically) power the Earth for eons.
Does it follow, then, that refining the fusion process is simply an engineering problem that we can expect to solve in time, just as primitive semiconductors gave birth to modern electronics in less than a century? Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity, who isn’t a nuclear scientist but seems well-informed, points to reasons for “Fusion Wariness”:
Fusion suffers from a sequencing problem. The easiest kind of fusion to get going is called D-T fusion, which fuses atoms of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction yields helium, a free neutron, and a bunch of energy that keeps the reactions going. The free neutron, which can’t be contained in the plasma, veers out of it in a random direction. It slams into either the reactor itself or into a barrier designed to capture the neutron, producing heat. This heat is then used to boil water and produce steam, which is used to drive a turbine and produce electricity.
If you think this sounds like a complicated and expensive way to boil water, you’re right. In fact, this issue may make D-T fusion permanently uneconomical. After all, the steam turbines used in D-T fusion are basically identical to those used in coal, nuclear fission, and geothermal plants. The only way that D-T fusion can compete with these other modes of electricity production is if it can produce steam more cheaply.
Those other modes are, however, relatively simple.
In contrast, burning plasma at millions of degrees while confining it with one of the most complicated and costly machines ever built – that is an expensive way to produce steam. Worse, neutrons from the fusion reaction will occasionally bombard the machine itself, slowly destroying it and making its parts radioactive. Maintenance of the D-T reactors will be frequent and expensive; robots may be needed to avoid human exposure to radioactive parts. In addition, confinement failures, while not as catastrophic as fission meltdowns, are likely to be more common and will require costly cleanup efforts.
In short, D-T reactors are as likely to compete successfully with coal, oil, fission or geothermal power as human limbs are to outpace a horse.
As the author observes, the D-T reaction isn’t the only route to fusion. Maybe one of the others will someday prove to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, we aren’t at the point of being able even to test the concepts. Still less do we have a glimmer of how they might be applied in practice. And – perhaps the most immovable obstacle – we can’t be confident that, if ever fusion becomes a practicable energy source, environmentalists won’t find a way to stymie it.
Abundant, almost free fusion power may be impossible, but one is allowed to believe impossible things before breakfast.
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