Talk-Polywell.org

This on line poll needs some help.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1612

Stuffed. Actually I think fusion is much more likely than any of the other items.

A cure for cancer ... well, that is such a broad grouping of separate malaise that it defies belief. If they said, "Breast cancer", or "glioma", or "pancreatic islet cell carcinoma" ... I might give it a better mark. But the term cancer applies to so many different things ... there's no magic bullet for them all (as far as I can see).

Discovery of alien life ... that's gonna be hard too. Any probe that lands on Mars is going to have its own share of earth bugs. Separating them will not be easy. Communicating with aliens (SETI stuff) has been going for a while and they've had just one chunk of something that might have been a comms ... and might not. We'd need serious data transfer to establish the presence of alien life.

The origins of life? Hmmm. Seems unlikely too. Miller and Urey's expts brewing up amino acids in primordial atmospheres ... nice, but a long way from a lipid bilayer and functional cellular apparatus. That will take centuries to prove (and especially centuries to establish that it didn't come from contaminating bugs).

True AI? well, Halo III might make a good candidate other than that, the Turing machine definition kind of means most humans would fail the test as well as most machines. Hmmm.

The Higgs boson? Bigger colliders are required. Unlikely to be funded.

So bring on the polywell!

Regards
Tony Barry

Not that I know that much about this but isn't the Large Hadron Collider going online early 2008? There's a big fat chance it'll uncover the higgs boson as well. So out of that list the higgs boson is most likely to be found first.

- Indrek

Going on line is just the first step.

Then they have to calibrate the eqpt. Ramp up the power. And hope they get lucky. i.e find the particle in the first few runs vs 10 years from now.

Don't forget the time it takes for data reduction and also confirmation by numerous experiments.

It is also possible the LHAC doesn't have enough energy to "create" a Higgs.

Fusion is a better bet.