> Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%.
>> This claim has little substance and credibility.
The efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus battery vehicles is considered in some detail in this video [1]. The conclusion [2] is that, in the best case, the energy efficiency from power generation to road for existing or near future hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is about 25%, compared to about 65% for typical existing battery vehicles.
Continuing my review of the predictions from the 2010 thread, here are my last set of judgments — the Hits (the predictions I think the commenters largely got right):
Hits:
2010 Prediction: Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel
—JulianMorrison
2021 Review: Electric cars are now fairly common, if not yet dominant, and the governments of several large countries have legislated to phase out fossil fuel vehicles completely.
2010 Prediction: Still no fusion power.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Accurate for now, though progress slowly continues.
2010 Prediction: Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Prophetic. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO the following year due to his health and died shortly afterwards. Apple went on to become the first publicly-traded company to reach a market capitalisation of a trillion dollars in 2018, and the first to reach two trillion dollars in 2020.
2010 Prediction: Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Arguably accurate.
2010 Prediction: I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime soon, even across a decade.
—adw
2021 Review: Sounds right to me.
2010 Prediction: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are. he politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
—kngspook
2021 Review: The author of this prediction might not have had precisely what we see today in mind, but in broad terms this was very prescient.
2010 Prediction: A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth like planet is discovered by 2020.
—kf
2021 Review: This still isn't known with complete certainty, but the science has progressed enough to identify many plausible candidates.
2010 Prediction: My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013.
—kf
2021 Review: Accurate. The Kepler Space Telescope had identified hundreds of Earth-size planets by late 2011.
2010 Prediction: I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.
—jsz0
And...
2010 Prediction: By the end of the decade, the phone is the personal computer.
—ericb
2021 Review: Sounds more or less right to me.
2010 Prediction: Googles turnover exeeds Microsofts by 2015, if not earlier.
—jacquesm
This happened around 2016.
2010 Prediction: People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
—ericb
And...
2010 Prediction: privacy as an issue for the common user
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: Correct, though not specifically due to concerns about facial recognition, even though that technology has been widely deployed for surveillance, particularly in China.
2010 Prediction: KidneyExchange.com has 10,000th successful transplant
—edw519
2021 Review: Non-profit kidney exchange is now a viable option for some patients and their families.
2010 Prediction: The Apple Tablet to Launch 1st Quarter 2020
—edw519
2021 Review: The iPad was launched in April 2010.
2010 Prediction: Trevor Blackwell's Robot Collects Rocks on Mars
—edw519
2021 Review: NASA's (not Trevor Blackwell's) Perseverance rover is currently digging up rocks on Mars for later return to Earth.
2021 Review: This has arguably come to pass, if Virtual Reality headsets count as spherical displays.
2010 Prediction: Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly specialized cores
—10ren
2021 Review: Multiple cores haven't been abandoned, but there has been a definite shift towards coprocessors/accelerators and ASICs.
2010 Prediction: By 2019 newspapers may still exist, but will be a niche and relatively expensive retro media format for fashionistas.
—motters
2021 Review: Pretty accurate.
2010 Prediction: America will pull out from Afghanistan, and the central government will fall before the decade ends.
—varjag
2021 Review: A couple of years too early but otherwise prophetic.
2010 Prediction: Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: A nearly perfect prediction. Facebook was not displaced by another social network, and the IPO took place in May 2012.
2010 Prediction: Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: All correct. Twitter became profitable towards the end of the decade, though Facebook is much larger richer. Twitter remains independent for now.
2010 Prediction: Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: IsaacL is the Nostradamus of the 2010 thread.
2010 Prediction: Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: There is a strong consensus — though not universal — that Moore's law is failing. No new paradigm capable of sustaining advances in general purpose computing faster than Moore's Law has been clearly demonstrated, though something of that kind might conceivably be in the early stages of development. Quantum computing might be such a technology, and quantum supremacy has been demonstrated in principle (albeit only as an academic exercise), but more advances in both theory and engineering are still needed for it to be practically useful (e.g. algorithms with the potential for universal, rather than problem-specific, speedups on the theory side, and easily scalable error correction on the engineering side).
2010 Prediction: An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: Another eerily prescient prediction from IsaacL. The Paris Climate Accords were agreed in 2015; both China and the US were parties to the agreement, though the US officially withdrew in 2020 before being readmitted earlier this year.
2010 Prediction: Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: Spot on again. IsaacL noted at the end of his post that he would save a copy of the predictions and look back at them when the time came (presumably last year), writing that he was 'probably laughably wrong on at least 2/3 of them'. I hope he did look back and congratulated himself; I think he deserved it.
2010 Prediction: Both solar and wind power will be produced at a lower cost than power from coal and natural gas plants
—DaniFong
2021 Review: This is now correct for many well-situated installations.
2010 Prediction: Internet will become for most people in developed countries as important as it used to be for "early adopters" in the past.
—antirez
2021 Review: I'd say this is right, but I think it was already true in 2010 to a large extent.
2010 Prediction: continued problems with islam, terrorists
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: There hasn't been another terrorist attack in the West on the scale of 9/11, but there have certainly been 'continued problems', and many lives lost in terrorist incidents.
2010 Prediction: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing the un/under-skilled and unemployed.
—lallysingh
2021 Review: This is difficult to assess, but my sense is that rising resentment about employment opportunities, related to concerns about offshoring and immigration, was indeed a significant factor in the 2016 US presidential election.
Continuing my review of the predictions from the 2010 thread with those I consider to be Hit and Miss (a bit right, a bit wrong):
Hit and Miss:
2010 Prediction: Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust.
—JulianMorrison
2021 Review: High street book sellers had a very hard decade, but people are still buying plenty of paper books online.
2010 Prediction: Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.
—JulianMorrison
2021 Review: Driverless cars have appeared, but the software is not yet reliable enough for them to be operated without human oversight under typical conditions. Small trials of fully driverless cars are underway in some places.
2010 Prediction: BPA and pthalates are finally banned from the food and personal grooming categories.
—ericb
2021 Review: Some legislation was passed and BPA use did decline markedly for some applications, but this seems to have been mostly due to commercial decisions rather than a direct result of regulation.
2010 Prediction: The technology that will eventually 'cure' cancer is invented--essentially a find and kill tool for a genetic signature. Signature creation is built for more and more cancers and becomes more dynamic with added logic over time.
—ericb
2021 Review: Progress has been made in this regard across a number of promising technologies, particularly immunotherapy, and there is some hope that the MRNA technology used for some of the coronavirus vaccines might revolutionise cancer treatment, but this remains to be seen.
2010 Prediction: By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.
—artagnon
2021 Review: Internet Explorer's usage share is insignificant and Chrome's is estimated to be over 60%, but Firefox's is only a few percent.
2010 Prediction: Quantum computing will start to surge around the third quarter of the decade. It won't be a general tool and it won't be used for cracking crypto - it will be doing things like data mining, bioinformatics, and solving variations on the travelling salesman problem.
—JulianMorrison
2021 Review: There has been substantial investment in quantum computing in recent years and quantum supremacy was demonstrated in 2019, so the prediction of a 'surge' around the third quarter of the decade was arguably right, but quantum computing still hasn't quite yet become a practical tool.
2010 Prediction: In 2020, AMD's 3rd generation holodeck isn't quite like Star Trek, but the future video games and videoconferencing/telepresence systems make today's tech look like something out of the stone age.
—kf
2021 Review: Telepresence has not advanced much and videoconferencing has only improved incrementally, despite many millions of people being forced to use it for the first time during the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual Reality headsets are impressing people however, and ILM's StageCraft technology looks set to change the visual effects industry after being used successfully by Disney in the production of its Star Wars spinoff series, The Mandalorian. Raytracing and other technologies are also pushing video games increasingly towards photorealism.
2010 Prediction: The media as we know it now will fade away from people’s lives like the Oldsmobile and the Pontiac. Perfectly viable businesses, self-destructed, not important enough to qualify for taxpayer bailouts just gone from the scene like the horse and buggy. They had a good run but now it’s over.
—Scott_MacGregor
And...
2010 Prediction: Death of traditional news industry.
—Slashed
2021 Review: Social media has become the primary news source for many, and print media has continued to suffer serious declines in circulation and influence, but major national newspapers around the world have largely managed to survive by improving their online offerings, and they remain mainstream sources of journalism. Television audiences have also declined further, but the major networks are still around and influential, and, like the newspapers, have adapted by shifting their attention to the internet audience.
2010 Prediction: WIFI will be free for everyone in all major metropolitan areas and it will be 100% taxpayer supported.
—Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Taxpayer-supported WiFi is not provided freely to everyone in all major metropolitan areas, but it is widely available free of charge from commercial establishments, and city governments do subsidise it in some places.
2010 Prediction: The first real AI is created, but isn't taken seriously until it comes up with a revolutionary way of promoting soap powder, which advertising executives describe as "blindingly obvious" in hindsight. However, its success is tragically short-lived, as advertising is mmediately redefined as not requiring genuine intelligence. The search for real AI continues....
—10ren
2021 Review: This has a ring of GPT-3 to it.
2010 Prediction: Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace.
—brfox
2021 Review: Gene therapies are beginning to bear fruit, but they remain relatively rare.
2010 Prediction: Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: Chrome OS's usage share is estimated to be around 4% at the moment, though the major commercial developers are clearly trying to move more towards making their operating systems reliant on web access.
2010 Prediction: Augmented reality becomes a major entertainment system. You wear something like an EyeTap device and 3D content is projected into your field of view. The device also contains a accelerometers (same as the Wii controllers) to monitor head pose. Highly compelling 3D content, including games, business charts, street directions, ads, and even "adult content" can be interacted with at any location using the headset, which is wirelessly linked to something like a mobile phone or laptop.
—motters
2021 Review: Augmented Reality has definitely developed substantially, and it achieved widespread public attention around 2016 when the Pokemon Go game became popular. Aside from some early adopters of headsets, however, it's still mostly confined to the screens of handheld devices and vehicle interiors. The prediction got the use of accelerometers etc. right. There are many practical uses of AR now of the kind the prediction envisaged, but adoption is uneven and a lot of applications are still regarded as gimmicks. Many people in the developed world are now carrying around devices with them all day that have quite sophisticated AR abilities, but at the moment it's still a peripheral feature for most.
2010 Prediction: Augmented reality could also be used for political purposes. I imagine that as part of an election promotion campaign a photo-realistic avatar of the candidate sits opposite to you in your living room and says "look Bob, it's like this...". The avatar has access to your data and can completely customize the political message to your individual circumstances. This ultra personalized campaigning could be highly effective.
—motters
2021 Review: Personalised AR avatars might not have become a feature of political campaigns, but personalised targeting of political advertising over social media, and the use of data harvested from internet users to monitor and improve its effectiveness, certainly has; that aspect of the prediction was very prescient.
2010 Prediction: growth of a chinese middle class with a voice and some balls and independence
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: The Chinese middle class has continued to grow, and they have a voice on social media, reacting to various issues and cultural trends. Their independence, however, is heavily controlled for now. The Chinese government seems to use social media to monitor and influence public sentiment, and there is strict censorship of politically sensitive speech, which seems to have increased in recent years.
I enjoyed going back through the 2010 thread too. Just for fun, below are my judgments on some of the predictions, as an all-knowing resident of the 2010 commenters' misty future.
For anyone who is really into making clear predictions, the Long Now Foundation has a website where people can place 'accountable' bets at https://longbets.org/
I've divided my comments on the 2010 thread into three categories: Hits, Hit and Miss, and Misses. I'll start with the misses.
Misses:
2010 Prediction: Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.
—DanielBMarkham
2021 Review: Iran's power structure is largely unchanged for now.
2010 Prediction: During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: This hasn't happened yet, though growth does appear to be slowing in China. I think it's interesting to note the use of the word 'populist' here; perhaps what the author had in mind was 'more responsive to popular opinion and less repressive' as opposed to 'nativist rabble rousing', which tends to be what people mean by 'populist' in 2021. Xi Jingping arguably is more populist by the latter definition, but not the former, and he isn't significantly younger than his predecessors.
2010 Prediction: Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Chavez died in 2013, but his party and his chosen successor are still in power, despite an economic and political crisis that began in 2014, and a disputed presidential election in 2019.
2010 Prediction: Megan Fox or Jessica Biel is nominated for best supporting actress.
—kevbin
2021 Review: If this referred to the Academy Awards, it didn't pan out. Both were nominated at the Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Supporting Actress however, and Fox won for her role in 2015's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2010 Prediction: Still no Duke Nukem Forever.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: It was released the following year.
2010 Prediction: Unauthenticated free wifi becomes nearly extinct after a major hacking incident is traced to Panera Bread (or similar) and a court rules that companies are liable for the actions of those on their free wifi networks. Realizing this, companies force authentication on everyone or turn off their wifi all together.
—ericb
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: External brain-computer interfaces make progress, and typing begins to be replaced by the end of the decade.
—ericb
2021 Review: Brain-computer interfaces are still mostly laboratory projects for now, and typing shows no signs of being replaced yet. Even voice interaction remains impractical for anything other than simple commands.
2010 Prediction: Boeing Dreamliner Delayed Until 2022
—edw519
2021 Review: The first Boeing Dreamliner commercial flight took place in 2011, though this was a humorous prediction.
2010 Prediction: Facebook will be gone in 5 years, just like MySpace.
—InclinedPlane
2021 Review: Facebook was still very much around in 2020 and the company's market capitalisation is approaching a trillion dollars.
2010 Prediction: No more airline travel hassles in the USA, people will be able to board and fly without government restrictions or searches.
—Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: Taxes in California will be the lowest in the nation.
—Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: Politically, Generation-X will be in power--look out.
—Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: The current US President was born in the 1940s, as were both his predecessor and his strongest competitor in the primaries.
2010 Prediction: Everyone will have their full genome sequenced if they need some sort of medical treatment.
—brfox
2021 Review: This hasn't happened yet, but it does seem plausible for the not-too-distant-future, and relatively inexpensive SNP-based sequencing kits for ancestry and basic health insights are widely available to consumers.
2010 Prediction: Healthcare will start to become cheaper due to personalized medicine and more data based decision-making.
—brfox
2021 Review: Healthcare costs are still exorbitant in the US and personalised medicine is generally expensive. This prediction might yet come to pass further in the future, but the timescale wasn't right.
2010 Prediction: Telerobots become commonplace. These will be not much more than a wheeled or tracked base with a pole and holder for a mobile phone. It allows you to visit people in their homes, visit companies or customers, provide some kinds of medical service and carry out inspections of remote sites.
—motters
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: the first terrorist small nuclear detonation
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: Fortunately this one was a miss for the last decade.
I've often heard it said that a particular prediction of Quantum Electrodynamics [1] may be the most precise experimentally confirmed value in physics [2], with an accuracy in the region of one part in a trillion (10^12).
I haven't heard the same claim made for the LIGO experiment yet, but I understand it is capable of detecting distance changes smaller than one part in a billion trillion (10^21) [3].
If this LHCb result is confirmed, given that it involves the detection of a mass difference of one part in a hundred million quadrillion quadrillion (10^38), would it qualify as a new precision record in physics? I'd be grateful if anyone familiar with the field could comment.
This isn't a ratio of one part in 10^38; it's an absolute difference between the particles' masses of 1x10^-38 grams. The ratio implied depends on the mass of each particle. I presume this is far less than a gram, which means the radio is also far less.
Measured in grams like the 10^-38, there would still be lots of zeros first, so not 38 significant figures.
Besides, relative measurements are often easier than absolute ones, so even if you could determine that the masses of two objects of ~1g differed by 10^-38g, that wouldn't necessarily tell you the absolute masses to anywhere near that accuracy.
> The main contributions in rationalism and empiricism are not French.
Are you certain of this? I can think of many contributions to rationalism and empiricism made by French speakers that I feel are important. The metric system, for instance, was in large part a French project [01].
Here are a few French rationalists and empiricists that came to my mind when I read your comment:
Alain Aspect
Contemporary exerimentalist known for work in quantum optics [02]
Louis de Broglie
Quantum physicist known for pioneering wave-particle duality [03]
Nicolas de Condorcet
Mathematician and leading figure of the enlightenment [04]
Rene Descartes
Philosopher and mathematician known for the Cartesian co-ordinate system [05]
Pierre de Fermat
Mathematician known for his eponymous last theorem [06]
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Mathematician and astronomer known for Lagrangian mechanics and Lagrange points in astronomy [07]
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Polymath known for Laplace's Demon, among much else [08]
Antoine Lavoisier
Experimental chemist who named hydrogen and oxygen [09]
Blaise Pascal
Mathematician and inventor of an early mechanical calculator [10]
Louis Pasteur
Chemist and microbiologist who developed the germ theory of disease and invented Pasteurisation [11]
Henri Poincare
Mathematician, theoretical physicist and engineer [12]
"The main contribution in rationalism and empiricism are not French" does not equal "French speakers did not contribute relevant knowledge in rationalism or empiricism"
Hindu and Greek philosophers, Islamic golden age, Italian renaissance, British empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment, Austrian/German empiricism, US Pragmatism, ...
I'm not trying to neglect French rationalists and empiricists. Of course they exist, ... together with the many other scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, ... from many other cultures. Each single culture contributed less than the sum of the others simply because rationalism and empiricism are the fruits of global knowledge.
When detailing reasons for pushing the adoption of French in Europe, Macron acknowledged the work of Victor Hugo, who "believed that French would be the language of Europe, would today perhaps be a little disappointed" and promoted the re-examination of past colonialism in Africa, seeking to use the language as a tool to "reset a complex history in the continent".
The reasons for pretending the use of French in Europe are nationalistic. In an incident, European diplomats defined "overly dramatic, a statement of anger that clearly need no translation" when a French diplomat left his chair empty after the Council decided to use only-English in a working group.
This development was foreseen in 2017 (pre-Brexit) when Mario Monti said "The EU, when the UK leaves, should take the decision of upgrading the use of the English language in EU affairs. I think we should upgrade the ways we use English and it should become the language of the EU. I exaggerate a bit - there should be a bit of French. It will be a very appropriate gesture to the UK. It would help us Europeans to become more competitive by using fewer languages."
The statements of Mario Monti was pragmatic, it defines an issue and propose a solution. The behaviour of French diplomats is stubborn and nationalistic.
I wouldn't dispute much of what you wrote above, but I do think the French contribution to empiricism and rationalism qualifies as major (difficult as these things are to measure), and that that contribution is at least similar to the other large European nations.
I understand there is a common perception that French academic culture has literary preoccupations, but I don't think the idea that those preoccupations have disadvantaged French science holds up to much scrutiny, much as one might want it to after listening to a fruitless monologue about Derrida.
It's heartening to me that there are people in the EU arguing in favour of pragmatic gestures of friendship to the UK as you point out; I'm all for it and hope it is continued and mutual, regardless of whether the UK is legally part of the organisation.
I'd add that the article does not state that there have never been cases of accidental releases of pathogens from laboratories, only that such accidents had likely not led to a 'global epidemic' as of the date the article was written (2015).
The article's abstract opens with the statement 'The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event'.
A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].
A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].
This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.
This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:
'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;
'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'
The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.
Briefly it's a genuine, and scientifically uncontroversial, form of 'cold' fusion enabled by muons — a more massive relative of the electron that was in the news recently thanks to the potentially interesting results coming out of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab [2].
Like conventional 'hot' plasma fusion, in all experiments to date the energy input needed to sustain the process has exceeded the output, but it may be possible to use it to generate power. Unlike conventional fusion though, it receives relatively little attention, and there is no well-funded international effort to tackle the associated technical challenges. As with conventional fusion the technical challenges seem formidable, but it could be an interesting technology if a way could be found to make it work.
Listeners of Lex Fridman's podcast may recall that it was briefly mentioned in the episode he made last year with his father, Alexander Fridman, who is a plasma physicist [3]. As someone who has been interested in the idea for years and barely hears any mention of it, I was pleasantly surprised it came up.
It was also covered on the MinutePhysics YouTube channel in 2018 [4].
Bonus fact: Muon-Catalyzed fusion was first demonstrated by the Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, who, with his geologist son Walter Alvarez, later proposed the 'Alvarez hypothesis' for the extinction of the dinosaurs by asteroid impact.
I thought research on it had stalled (I looked it up for a high-school project… 20-odd years ago). I'm glad to see otherwise (or that at least more people see it as interesting), I always thought it looked promising.
There's an on-going project right now with ARPA-E's "BETHE" program to experimentally study the potential for MCF in higher-density plasmas. IMO, this is one of the better choices that ARPA-E's fusion program has made -- it's low-cost, high-risk, high-reward.
The MinutePhysics video you linked seemed pretty firm in saying we had no clear path to reducing the energy input required to create muons or increasing the energy output of the fusion, thus never generating net energy.
Are there recent developments in this field that change that?
>> This claim has little substance and credibility.
The efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus battery vehicles is considered in some detail in this video [1]. The conclusion [2] is that, in the best case, the energy efficiency from power generation to road for existing or near future hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is about 25%, compared to about 65% for typical existing battery vehicles.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=651&v=f7MzFfuNOtY