You are quite right that I should have emphasizes the pro-immigrant side, which I very much share!

I must quibble though. We have been demonstrating tokamaks since I was a kid. But they don't actually "work" because they don't generate power, and the longest we ever ran one for was 6.5 minutes...

I did totally miss the whole "like in a tokamak" thing and that's my bad reading.

To be honest, the bloom is off the rose for me and space travel. I was a big fan from before the moon landings, but 50 years later, it's clear that we have to direct our attention to not destroying the planet and that prodigiously expensive projects like space travel should be be put onto the back burner in order to not kill the only biosphere we know of.

The current plan seems to be to kill the Earth, and then to fly to the cold, dark, arid, airless, lifeless, poisonous deserts of Mars and somehow turn it into a second Earth. It's madness: if we can't keep a warm, wet, pleasant planet alive, how can we make a dead one live, let alone be comfortable for us?

So I'm sure my feelings of doom for the future colored my response. I still love science, and discoveries like this still make me happy.

Thanks for an interesting article and a polite rebuttal!