Stars in Jars: The relativity of High-Magic

A couple of things turned up recently… one was this:

Touchable holography – which I saw on Technology Review at about 2am last night… and thought “far fucking out, that’s mind blowing, I’ll write about that tomorrow”… then at 8am the next day saw it on Reddit and thought “Meh. Old hat”.

I wonder how high the resolution is? There’s about a million potential uses for this if it’s got really fine resolution, and given that porn was a driver for both video recorder and internet commerce (of various sorts) it’s a fair bet that teledildonics could well take a quantum-leap. Not that I’m interested in that sort of thing of course. I don’t even have a telly.

Anyway… the other thing was this:

Which ought to get the DIY Fusion community a-buzzin – yes, there is a DIY-Fusion community, and they do kindof seem to know what they’re doing though to my own poor, confused, drug-raddled brain-cells, the only difference between them and the Perpetual-Motion-Machine community is that they aren’t attempting to break the laws of thermodynamics.

But then this is high-science to me. High-sorcery. Although I kindof understand the fundamentals, the mechanics I shrink in horror (and awe) from… but one man’s meat is another man’s gravy, and other people seem to be picking it up with relative ease… I mean the open source fusor research consortium‘s site does mention the reactor above… but it’s been usurped by a 17 year old kid making a Star in a Jar, as he calls it.

I’ve been harbouring notions of high-science and low-science… the high-science bit being the frozen-light, and genomics and nuclear fusion… and even touchable holograms and whatnot, while low science is more immediately useful, and is more to do with successfully growing your own tomatoes or being able to find your keys.

But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s all easy… or more accurately, maybe someone who’s a Gandalf in one field is a total Bilbo in another… and really, there are enough Gandalfs within any given population not to wind up with what I was imagining earlier…. a super-race of people dressed in shiny silver clothes, gliding about in white light, doing mysterious things with gadgets that look like luminous salt-shakers etc.

Which would be good – because the big problem I have with fusion reactors, isn’t that they’ve been in the permanently shifting, rainbow’s-end of the future for as long as I can remember, but that if they cost a gazzilion astro-dollars to make, then all this power is (once again) going to be concentrated in a few hands – and that’s one of the reasons the 20th century was such a fuckup.

I’m kindof worried about a meritocratic/technocratic class-system evolving. They’re not good for us.