Can We Build Stars from Scratch? Should We?

by N. E. Davis

This essay appears in Issue 1 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and The Race to Power the Planet

by Arthur Turrell

Scribner, 271 pp, $17.99

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'La técnica no cumple los viejos sueños del hombre, sino los remeda con sorna.' (Technology does not fulfill man’s perennial dreams, but craftily mocks them.)

—Nicolás Gómez Dávila

In a footnote to The World’s Last Night, a book of essays on modernity and faith, C. S. Lewis suggests that the view of history as progress derives via the German idealists from the alchemists: “a gigantic projection of the old dream that we can make gold.” Nuclear reactions realize the dreams of the old alchemists, although the result of these processes is not gold. Instead, our modern magi produce energy. They do this two different ways, depending on whether the elements they’re working with are heavier or lighter than iron—a boundary known as the iron valley. The transmutation of matter lighter than iron into something heavier is known as nuclear fusion, while the transmutation of matter heavier than iron into something lighter is known as nuclear fission. The most energetic reactions, those of hydrogen and helium and other very light elements, release the most energy but require excruciatingly coddled conditions to perform: basically, starlike plasma.