LewisTherin

There are no plans to do so, the whole casing has been designed so that instruments and experiments can be fed in and out of the reactor to gather various bits of data. While that must include a mechanism for cooling (I'm not sure if part of the cooling loop is experimental as well), there's no research reason to then use that for power production, as the methods are very well established already. ITER's successor DEMO will basically be a bigger version with all the experimental gear stripped out in favour of maximising return energy (for example I think ITER only plans to use lithium blankets on a few wall segments as a proof of concept, presumably DEMO will aim for near 100% coverage to make best use of neutron capture for tritium breeding). So it's not until DEMO that you should expect to see power from a reactor dumped into the grid.

Well I'll be boring and go with, over the next century or so, the development of LFTR and some form of fusion as baseload power sources, which could then in turn be used to crack hydrogen for fuel cells for automotive requirements etc. The fun, sci-fi prediction [i.e. yes I know these are ridiculous] is, at some unknown point (pending substances that, while not ruled out by our current understanding of physics, we have no evidence for) the capture / creation of black holes and the extraction of energy via: i) hawking radiation (for masses small enough that this power rating be useful, I'm not too sure on this theory, presumably as the BH decays you get 100% of matter in as energy out) and/or ii) for larger black holes, capture of energy from the accretion disk of a spinning black hole (50% mass -> energy conversion) Then the use of these sources for the production of antimatter batteries, because, as if plonking black holes all over didn't sound worrying enough, why not put antimatter in everything as well?

The standard cosmological model and observational evidence suggest that the universe doesn't have a center, rather everything is expanding away from everything else as a result of the stretching of space. It's not an explosion with objects moving through space from the middle, rather clumpy bits of matter are basically stationary and the co-ordinate system is getting larger, the wiki article on the topic can probably explain it better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space The idea that one particular direction or area of the universe would be made up of antimatter is (depending on what scale you're looking at) contrary to the cosmological principle that the universe is basically the same no matter which direction you look in or from where you look. On a relatively small scale you could have galaxies that have formed from antimatter scattered around the place, but if there was a particular bias in their location we'd have a lot of explaining to do.

I'll agree with you that it won't happen, but there's no technical reason that it shouldn't happen, as whether or not a country pursues a space program is entirely a matter of national priorities and public will. Let's take a few examples, based on the revenue and expenditure of various groups on their space agencies. I'll look at comparison relative to government revenue rather than GDP as I feel it gives a better view of what the country "can afford" based on their current approaches to taxation etc, note that the USA is a bit of an odd case to look at as their expenditure is over a trillion dollars more than their revenue, but let's just ignore that. 1) NASA (USA) Budget: USD 17.8 bln (FY2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA National Revenue: USD 2449 bln (FY2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Receipts_-_FY_2007.png % of national revenue: 0.73% 2) Roscosmos (Russian Federation) Budget: USD 5.6 (FY2013) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Federal_Space_Agency National Revenue: USD 469 bln (FY2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia % of national revenue: 1.19% Note: this estimate will be slightly inflated due to Russia's year on year economic growth and the fact they're ramping up space spending. 3) ESA (Europe) Budget: ~USD 4.9 bln (FY2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency Combined Revenue ~USD 8000 bln (FY2012) (not all European nations contribute, this is the sum of the revenues of nations that contributed) % of combined revenue ~0.06% Something similar could be done for China, but there seems to be some dispute as to the actual expenditure figures. Nonetheless these give some ballpark figures that we can compare to Australia. i) AU - Russian expenditure levels: National Revenue: $US 376.1 bln (FY2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Australian_federal_budget % of national revenue: 1.19% Budget: ~USD 4.5 bln ii) AU - US expenditure levels: % of national revenue: 0.73% Budget: ~USD 2.7 bln iii) AU - European expenditure levels: % of national revenue: 0.06% Budget: ~USD 0.23 bln To my mind we could afford to blow 5 billion a year on a space program (to be honest we could match NASA funding in dollar terms if we wanted to) but there is neither will in the public mind, nor in the minds of our politicians. On the other end of the spectrum, if wanted to make a token effort like the Europeans, then I agree a measly 200 million a year would be a waste better spent on something else. Also: Pretty sure that Equator line is closer to the top of Australia than it is to Florida, let alone Kazakhstan. http://www.mapsofworld.com/images-mow/world-map.jpg

That was all very interesting, but predictions and opinions of broad socio-economic and political trends are essentially a moot point to what the thread is about - fusion, specifically through the use of tokamak type devices. Based on the lessons that have been learned about how plasma physics and controlled fusion seem to work (a process that was far harder than initially thought - hence the parroted "perpetually 20 years away" line), in conjunction with the ability to model this physics, ITER was designed as a final test. As with every model, our understanding of what's going on with fusion needs validating conclusively, current experiments such as JET show that the fundamentals are strong, which is why the money was released to be spent on building ITER. Once it's finished in around a decade, the question is almost certainly going to change from "is it possible" to "is it economically viable" to use tokamak based fusion for large scale power generation.

The "always 20 years away" argument is a little tired. If you look at the actual developments made over time (in terms of temperatures, containment times, field strengths and ultimately Q factors) you'll see there's actually been significant progress to building a workable device over the last 50 odd years. If it turns out to be viable economically is a separate question, but the point of ITER is essentially to brute force a sustained fusion reaction to prove it can be done, while other more elegant methods may wind up being used in the future for actual power production. This would be based on your scrying abilities I assume?

Alternatively if you want space / resources etc, you can go down a similar route to that in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, tow asteroids into orbit, set them rotating and mine the minerals present, once that's done hollow out habitation space and convert it to low gravity manufacturing or some other (currently sci-fi) use.

So you mean build a ring at a given radius and then spin it faster, right? Given that the radius of the orbit is intrinsically linked to the velocity, I would have thought that would lead to immense forces acting on the ring trying to push it out to a higher orbit (stretching the ring outwards in that radial plane in all directions at once), tearing it apart in the process, but it would be interesting to check what sort of material strengths you'd require for that not to happen.

Basically this, for a circular orbit solve T^2 = 3*pi*V/(GM) and v = sqrt(GM/r) simeltaneously for GM and r (T the period, V = volume of the sphere enclosed by the circular orbit, v the velocity of the thing orbiting, r the radius from the centre of the body at which you're orbiting). Then just use F = GM/(r^2) to find gravity at some r. If you want to know the surface gravity you can again use the data from your orbiting object, just subtract the value of r printed on the screen from the value of r from the centre of the body that you calculated, this should give you the radius of the body, which you then chuck into F = GM/(r^2) to get surface gravity. (I hope that makes sense xD) The game will print out a value of velocity for your orbit, I assume to find the period, you could land one object on the planet to use as a stationary reference point, then time how long it takes for your orbiting craft to make one circuit back over the object (but the error would be on the order of minutes most likely). I'm not sure how badly the errors would compound through the calculation, really depends on how accurately you can get your orbital period timing, hopefully the overall result wont be more than 10-20km out for the body radius of something the size of kerbin. If you want to cheat for a nice circular orbit just use mechjeb, it does an amazing job. [edit] Actually ignore that stationary reference point bit, given the planet is also rotating the relative velocity would throw off the result, probably significantly. [edit 2] I suppose if you have a stationary reference point on the surface, and 2 orbiters, one going in a prograde orbit, the other a retrograde orbit, and you measured the period of both (both must be at the same altitude / velocity for this to work), then you would measure two periods T1 (prograde) and T2 (retrograde), which would correspond to the 'true' period of rotation T by T1 = T + dt, T2 = T -dt, and get a somewhat accurate result for the rotational period for the rest of the analysis.