By Romi Mahajan, CEO, ExoFusion
Last month I had the opportunity to go to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I’ve been to many CES events before; certainly, some of the shows in the past were more energetic than this year’s but that is simply a comparative statement: CES 2024 was indeed animated, busy, and frenetic.
As I saw people meeting, chatting, displaying, selling, and networking, my mind was fixated on one thing and one thing only: Humans are always building things and looking for ways to advance, to profit, to create, and to feed their ever-growing egos. I say this in the most clinical of ways. Though I have plenty of opinions on growth-fixation, let us leave them aside for now. Homo Faber meets Homo Economicus: that is the gestalt of the times.
As we build, sell, and consume, we do so knowing that the resources and energy-sources that allow us to do that are being depleted. The rational amongst us understand, also, that the existential conditions that have made for our culture of building, selling, and consuming are changing and changing rapidly. Entire swaths of the world’s population are already disconnected from this reality, creating an invidious duality in humankind. Those of us lucky enough by dint of demography to be on one side of this duality continue to forge ahead as though abundant energy is obviously available and could never be scarce or depleted.
As CES-goers showed off their new hardware, software, thisware and thatware, the elephant in my mental room was clear: If we are to continue to build and consume, we need abundant, clean energy and we need it post haste. Most of us, even those of us who know what is going on, do not stop doing what we do. I am guilty too: I flew to CES didn’t I?
To be sure, the conclusion was self-serving. I am lucky enough to be CEO of a nuclear fusion startup aiming to accelerate the path to “Commercially Viable Fusion” (CVF). Any energy mix of the future must include fusion and for the first time, we can see CVF on the horizon. At ExoFusion our clarion call is for the CVF ecosystem to be as cooperative and collegial as possible so that the energy future can be one to celebrate not lament. Fusion offers us clean, abundant energy. Fusion is stellar.
The human tendency to innovate is laudable but it is Janus-faced. “Innovation” has led us to build technologies of destruction and death just as it has offered us life-saving medicines and released billions of people from manual work. Innovation has allowed us to grow as a species, but that growth has put our collective future in peril. We can no longer be glib technology positivists. We need to double-down on our energy focus and to invest heavily in the science and technology of fusion.
