ScienceBlogs has a new feature where all the bloggers answer a question. Today's question:
"If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?"
Easy. Cold fusion. Don't get me wrong --- I think it's great that I can run my whole house off one little "Mr Fusion" unit. And we'd probably be facing problems from global warming if we were still pumping out CO2 like in the old days. But it's just too easy to turn cold fusion devices into bombs. I don't have to list all the destruction that terrorists have caused with them.
More like this
To the uninitiated, chromosome number may appear to reflect genome size -- more chromosomes would mean a larger genome. This is not necessarily the case if we measure genome size by the number of base pairs in a genome.
“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.” -Robert Zubrin
A couple of weeks back I wrote about dynamins and mitochondrial fusion. Well the latest piece of the puzzle came in ...
What's the application? The goal of laser ignition fusion experiments is to heat and compress a target to the point where the nuclei of the atoms making up the sample fuse together to form a new, heavier nucleus, releasing energy in the process.
What? "Cold fusion"? There is no such thing.
Is this a joke?
Haha
Well, the scientific consensus is that there is no such thing, but by [Brignell's Law](http://timlambert.org/2005/06/brignell4/), that means it's real. So there.
now look what you've done! your wish was granted!
Must be the new version of Movable Type. I'll put in a bug report.
What? "Cold fusion"? There is no such thing. Is this a joke?
It isn't if it needs to be explained to you.
It's a shame you couldn't answer the question seriously.
I'm thinking the lambada. That, after all, is the forbidden dance.
The 200 mpg carburetor, the suppression of which has caused so much covert assassination and regime change by the International Oil Cartel.
After thinking about this for a while, and setting aside even the good jokes, the question points out a fundamental problem with technology in general: the more wonderful it is, the more it allows you to consume. Even a completely limitless, non-polluting energy source would make it easier to bulldoze, pave, pump out, overfish, and otherwise destroy resources. And every tool is a weapon.
That's part of why simple conservation, the act of not consuming every bit that you can reach, becomes so important.
Now if I could only figure out some way to encourage it . . .
Reminds me of an old joke.
It's a shame you couldn't answer the question seriously.
It's a shame they could not ask a serious question!
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be?
Computers.
Why?
This comment thread. At least CO2 disperses.
Incidentally, why don't ScienceBlogs allow superscripts and subscripts?
Jade asks:
What -- you want to enter something like, oh, I don't know, "CO2", and have it come out right? You commenters are so demanding!
I contacted Seed, and Tim Murtaugh[1] fixed it right away.
[1] All hail our Seed overlords!
I'm thinking the lambada. That, after all, is the forbidden dance.
Well at least it wasn't your fellow contrymen who came up with the damn thing. And I'd guess no one of the readers had to stand two years of it blasting from every sound apparatus virtually every day, and a slightly shorter time when it was the only soundtrack and dance in every party.
You guys should be glad that pagode or axé never made it to the US of A.