The following is based on a note written to a journalist asking for my opinion on funding for fusion research. Obviously, these are just my opinions …

History has shown us that experts are very bad at predicting technological winners and losers.

There are only a very small number of technologies that could potentially provide energy at the scale that civilization requires without severely damaging the environment, and fusion power is a member of that elite club. Therefore, some resources should be allocated to trying to make fusion power safe, abundant, and affordable.

While I am no expert on the matter, it seems to me that even if fusion could be made to work, it might turn out to be costly.  

In any case, the question should be: What fraction of the clean energy research and development budget should be allocated to fusion?

My sense is that 1% would be too small, and 100% would be too large, and so it maybe something to which it might be worth allocating 5 or 10% of the clean energy research and development budget.

And of course, it is not just about shares of the R&D pie. The clean energy R&D pie itself needs to be much larger than it is today.

We need to adopt a portfolio approach, with some investments yielding fruit over the next years and decades, and with other investments perhaps yielding fruit only later this century.

It is never too early or too late to develop improved sources of safe, abundant, and affordable energy. Sooner is better than later, but later is better than never.

We should avoid believing that we know with a high degree of confidence what will work and what will never work. We should have humility in our own judgments and think that we might be wrong — that this technology which we believe will never substantively contribute to solving societal problems might just turn out to be the thing upon which we all depend.

Therefore, we need to be thinking about broad research portfolios, while carefully evaluating each item in that portfolio in terms of potential benefits of research investment, balancing risks against rewards.

Sea anemones are animals that are very much like corals, except they don’t make stony skeletons and they can move. They are also similar to coral polyps because they host algae, which produce food for the host when the algae are exposed to light.

Shawna Foo, a postdoc at Carnegie Institution for Science’s Dept of Global Ecology when she did this work, investigated movement of sea anemones and how it was affected by the presence of algal symbionts — and what she found was quite amazing !!

When sea anemones host algae, the algae enters the cells of the anemone. The anemone provides the algae with nutrients, and after capturing energy from sunlight, the algae provides the anemone with food. Sea anemone can survive without the food they get from there algal guests. They can wave their arms around and capture food that might be suspended in their vicinity.

Shawna found that when the sea anemones hosted algae, the sea anemones moved towards the light, but when they did not host algae they did not move towards the light.

I normally eschew anthropomorphic thinking, but in this case I want to have a little fun. We can assume that there are mechanistic pathways that explain this finding, but these observations lend themselves to thinking about explanations in terms of intentions, control, and goals.

Perhaps it is the algae that is sensing the light, and then the algae takes control of the anemone and commands the animal to move towards the light, so that it can photosynthesize more rapidly.  If this is the case, it is really surprising that a plant-like photosynthetic algae can control an animal.

On the other hand, perhaps it is the anemone that is sensing the light, and the anemone is controlling the algae and moving it towards the light so that the animal can get more food.

In either case, evolution created a symbiotic pairing that moves towards the light so that both the anemone and its algal symbiont can prosper.

Mechanisms still need to be worked out, and anthropomorphic language is rarely justified in science, but nevertheless it is possible that a photosynthetic plant-like algae is controlling the motion of an animal and causing the animal to move towards the light. Seems amazing to me.

This work was published in the journal Coral Reefs, and is available under open access.

Foo, S.A., Liddell, L., Grossman, A. et al. Coral Reefs (2019). Photo-movement in the sea anemone Aiptasia influenced by light quality and symbiotic association. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01866-w