Welcome to the imminent 2024! We may be heading into the most consequential year for the planet since that six-mile-wide meteor slammed into the Yucatan peninsula slightly over 66 million years ago and wiped out all the dinosaurs on Earth.

Then, of course, the most advanced of our sentient forebears to our knowledge had no idea what was coming. These days we do. Also, the crisis now is of domestic origin, a meteoric-sized wrecking ball known as MAGA or the Trump movement, which if not shut down in 2024 could bring on a nuclear winter and send everyone on this planet back to the drawing boards.

It would be such a shame, too, because it would come as we are now just short of mastering and deploying in a usable form the fundamental power source that drives the universe, including our own sun: nuclear fusion energy.

According to our very own Congressman and Falls Church native son Donald S. Beyer Jr., who is the foremost expert on this subject in the U.S. Congress, mastering the fusion process is now only a few years away and he’s promised a game-changing essay on the subject to this newspaper, hopefully in time for next week’s edition, to spell out what it all will mean for us.

In an exclusive interview with the News-Press this week, Rep. Beyer stressed that achieving this capability will truly be the “silver bullet” that will shatter all wrecking balls, real or potential, threatening to get in the way of a bright and happy future for us all going forward.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Labs have begun to repeatedly produce the critical results demonstrating that controlled nuclear fusion is doable, and depending on how optimistic one is, the inexhaustible and incredibly powerful energy source could begin to feed into the national energy grid by the early 2030s.

This would rapidly outrun not only fossil fuels but all varieties of existing alternative clean energy sources currently feeding into the grid. The only fuel it takes to make it work as water. This is all just 10 to 15 years away.

It will, our visionary and prophetic congressman contends, reverse and get rid of carbon pollution and rapidly fix all the ailments of humankind that derive from lack, including most critically, in its form as human poverty. Of course, it also speaks to the issue of peace.

This all may sound too optimistic to really be true, but if one steps back and looks to the ways in which the discovery and universalized use of fossil fuels has transformed the potential of humanity in the last century or so, and then applies the same potential to controlled thermonuclear fusion energy, one can begin to get a glimpse of what‘s possible here.

So, fellow Earthlings, let us find the resources among us to eradicate Trumpism from our world, and look forward to such better things ahead. Coming right up, 2024 will tell the tale.