Amid all the doom and gloom of these genuinely scary times, maybe the biggest and most optimistic headline of our lifetimes has just lit up our lives.

“Fusion Energy Plant Announcement Signals a New Day” is the version of the headline in my Falls Church News-Press, being our lead story this week. It features the reaction to the news of Falls Church’s U.S. Rep. Don Beyer Jr., who is the founder of the Congressional Fusion Energy Caucus and who by virtue of his unique interest and role in the caucus, has provided my paper with many exclusive stories on the topic in recent years.

News-Press pages were also filled many times with reports by the late great Tom Whipple on the subject, although he focused on a different method.

My personal interest in “controlled thermonuclear fusion energy” dates back to the 1970s when it became obvious to me that this process was by far the most promising, and game changing, hope for major progress by the human species.

Most people are still unaware of the most basic realities involving this technology. First, it is what the sun is. That is, the sun is really only a gigantic fusion reaction. The heat it generates comes from the compression by gravity of hydrogen atoms. More than just our modest sun, it is the way the entire universe generates heat and light. Second, fueling it requires something of which we have in virtually limitless supply, namely, water. Third, the amount of energy, as in a conversion to electricity, that can be generated from a controlled reaction is also almost limitless. Fourth, it is safe and clean. By contrast to a nuclear fission reaction, which is the only form by which we have nuclear energy today, fusion does not harbor the risk of a plant meltdown since a malfunction would only shut down the compression of hydrogen atoms and render everything harmless.

Fusion has never gotten the government or private sector funding that could have led to its development much sooner than now, and the reason is generally Big Oil. There have also been skeptics who didn’t believe the technology could be mastered, and they are being proven very wrong.

Visionaries like Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, crafted the Enterprise and other space travelling ships as being powered by onboard fusion reactors, and its true that once more fully developed, fusion reactors producing mindboggling amounts of clean energy can be fit into very small spaces, the size of a basketball floor, for example.

So, this technology can take us to an entirely new level of human development. It will be the precondition for, effectively, the end of shortages of virtually any kind, of an abundance of dirt cheap energy that can end lack as a human physical condition for good. 

Insofar as the terrible economic conditions for human beings exist in this nation, much less the world, create the means by which the super rich can effectively drive divisions among the rest of us, they will disappear thanks to fusion. Humankind’s suffering for lack of a decent income, nutrition, housing, education or health care will be a thing of the past, and nefarious politicians and their overlords will no longer be able to sew division among us as a method of keeping themselves in power at the expense of others.

(How’s that for solving the problem of someone like Trump ever getting elected again!)

The political task we all face is getting us from where we are on this important date in world history to where we need to be in such a manner as this date will be recognized as the birth of a whole new era, perhaps of everything.

 So we should all take heart as we look into the dark days immediately ahead. With the promise of much better days in our future, we can be the cheerful warriors that is our nature, the doers of good, the beacons of light, armed with the light of fusion reactions, just as Mom Universe uses them, for a better, more loving cosmos. After all, she gave us the brains to figure out how to do this!