Chapter 283: The Economic and Population Trap
Given this trajectory, the overall progress of their society seemed incredibly smooth, lacking any unusual anomalies. Even humanity’s historical footprint followed a similar path...
With technological advancements and improved living standards, it is only natural to pursue peace, democracy, and equality. After all, does anyone truly enjoy endless war and slaughter?
So what exactly hindered the development of controllable nuclear fusion, causing it to be delayed by fifty years, over and over again? Was it the extreme difficulty of the technology itself, or a lack of awareness regarding potential long-term risks? Was it their social system, or something else entirely?
The conference room fell dead silent. Jason was lost in deep thought.
A heavy sense of despondency permeated the venue. Because many of the people present were senior scientists, engineers, and nuclear physicists, they could easily connect the dots to a much more terrifying reality... Many were already sitting frozen in their seats, their faces pale, staring blankly ahead.
Controllable nuclear fusion had always been a relatively low-profile project for the Nix, never receiving significant investments of time or capital. Because the Nix planet possessed incredibly abundant and cheap uranium resources, even if fusion were successfully developed, the initial power it generated couldn’t possibly be cheaper than their existing fission plants in the short term. Thus, from an economic standpoint, fusion was deemed dispensable.
Occasionally, a minor news article about fusion research would pop up, only for the topic to immediately fade back into obscurity. The Nix public was so caught up in the exhilarating wave of general scientific progress that they practically overlooked this critical technology altogether.
Misled by the media, they firmly believed they were living in a golden era of technological explosion, with science advancing at an exponential rate. They assumed that nuclear fusion was easily achievable and that the occasional positive news snippet proved the research was progressing steadily.
Sure, there was news—maybe a research lab managed to ignite some plasma and sustain it for a fraction of a second. But that had absolutely no practical application for generating commercial electricity. Commercial power generation requires absolute stability, and long-term stability at that. If simply igniting the plasma was this monumentally difficult, how could they possibly build a functional power grid out of it?
These news stories were just published periodically to reassure the public and prove to taxpayers that the researchers weren’t just sitting around wasting funding... and that was it.
A leading Nix scholar studying superconductivity once stated in a public interview: "Nuclear fusion will be ready when society truly needs it!"
On the surface, this statement sounded like a confident guarantee that fusion was achievable and that the public could rest easy knowing future energy crises would be handled. In reality, it was a bitter complaint. He was quietly stating that the technology was stagnating because the government refused to invest enough money into it.
Sadly, no one caught the subtext.
Everyone was immersed in the euphoria of their "technological explosion," making the threat of an energy crisis feel impossibly distant.
By this point in the Nix Civilization’s societal evolution, all traditional privileged classes had been eliminated—including the historically revered Great Sages. Capital had begun to completely dominate their civilization.
It was impossible for an absolute dictator to suddenly emerge and mobilize the entire nation’s resources for a single, long-term scientific project. Any government that attempted such draconian overreach would have been overthrown immediately. After all, this wasn’t wartime anymore. They lived in an era of democracy and peace, where everything revolved around economic development and boosting immediate productivity. The happiness and financial stability of the voters were the absolute top priorities; everything else took a backseat to the economy.
But capital has one universal defining trait: it is entirely profit-driven.
Researching nuclear fusion? That cost an astronomical amount of money! And where did that money come from? The taxpayers’ pockets! If taxes were raised too high to fund it, public services would inevitably decline, and the voting public would never tolerate it.
Research funding had to be allocated carefully; it couldn’t be "wasted" on something as seemingly irrelevant as nuclear fusion. After all, surface uranium was incredibly abundant and dirt cheap—enough to last them a hundred thousand years! So why bother pouring trillions into fusion research right now? Why not just wait until their general technology base was more advanced and it became cheaper to research?
The master scientists, a class that had successfully triumphed over harsh nature and fanatical religion throughout their history were ultimately defeated by the almighty money.
Without funding, you were nothing. Without capital, a physicist couldn’t even afford to buy basic research materials. True scientific progress was effectively paralyzed by economic constraints. And this phenomenon wasn’t just limited to nuclear fusion; it infected every fundamental science.
The public was completely unwilling to sacrifice their current quality of life to fund research that seemed to have no immediate, practical value. Ordinary citizens only cared about their immediate livelihoods; to them, "good science" was exclusively science that served economic development and produced consumer goods.
Many Nix citizens simply couldn’t understand why massive budgets were being spent on abstract projects like their equivalent of a Large Hadron Collider, when that money could be used for welfare programs to help impoverished areas. This ideological clash even led to widespread protests and demonstrations against "wasteful" scientific spending.
This was especially true for monumental challenges like nuclear fusion. Since they had already studied it for decades without any commercially viable breakthroughs, it was deemed a financial black hole. Politically and economically, it was far more cost-effective to let rival nations sink their budgets into the research, and then simply copy the technology later once someone else finally proved it was feasible!
For a democratic government, public opinion was the supreme deciding factor. It dictated the election and removal of all high-ranking officials. No politician dared to go against the will of the voters to force an unpopular initiative forward. Not even a global president could do it, due to the strict checks and balances of their congressional systems.
However, there were still a few insightful individuals within the government. Even though the scientific elite were no longer treated like infallible sages, they still wielded a respectable degree of political influence. Thanks to their intense lobbying, many critical scientific endeavors that lacked immediate economic impact were allowed to progress, albeit agonizingly slowly. The funding provided was meager and tightly restricted, but at least there was a trickle of financial support to keep the lights on.
And so, time flew by. Two centuries passed, and controllable nuclear fusion technology entered its fifth consecutive "give us fifty more years" cycle!
Over those two hundred years of absolute peace, devoid of any existential threats, the total Nix population exploded, increasing tenfold from 230 million to 2.3 billion. New mega-cities didn’t even need to be built near active volcanoes anymore; they relied entirely on centralized nuclear fission power plants for heating and survival.
But it wasn’t just the population that surged; the per capita electricity consumption also multiplied by a factor of ten!
In the past, a Nix household only needed a simple light bulb and basic heating equipment to meet their daily needs. But in this modern era... they possessed a vast array of high-tech electrical appliances, personal vehicles, immersive entertainment systems, and countless consumer goods. To supply these goods, millions of massive automated factories constantly drained astronomical amounts of electricity from the grid.
One day, the Nix statisticians ran the numbers and made a horrifying discovery: their initial calculation of a "100,000-year" energy reserve now had to be divided by 100!
Thanks to the exponential compounding of population growth and individual consumption, that vast timeline was brutally slashed down to a mere one thousand years... and as their consumption rates continued to climb, that window was still rapidly shrinking.
One thousand years...
"...Would any of you actively worry about an energy crisis a thousand years in the future?" Professor Hazel asked from the stage.
The senior scientists and Federation elites in the audience couldn’t help but laugh, a bitter, incredibly wry laugh.
In comparison, how long could fossil fuels have supplied humanity back on Earth? Global analysts had given estimates ranging from 40 years to, at the absolute most optimistic, 200 years. However, those models rarely accounted for the exponential growth in global energy consumption, meaning the true timeline was significantly shorter. Under normal circumstances, Earth’s fossil fuels alone wouldn’t have even sustained humanity through the 21st century.
Let’s average it out to 100 years. Even facing a 100-year deadline, the masses of humanity hadn’t been strongly aware of the looming energy crisis until it was almost too late.
So how could anyone expect the average Nix citizen or even the native Lizardmen they were observing now to worry about a deadline a thousand years away? Their lifespans were comparable to humans, if not slightly shorter.
A thousand years from now, when my ashes have long scattered to the wind, who will even remember I existed? Why should I sacrifice my comfort today for people a millennium away?
"Yes, it makes perfect psychological sense," Hazel sighed heavily. "Humanity barely had a sense of urgency regarding an energy crisis a century away. Expecting a society to mobilize for a crisis a thousand years away is impossible."
She paused, gripping the edges of the podium. "But consider this... What if the final breakthrough for the controllable nuclear fusion project inherently requires an unfathomable amount of raw resources and energy to complete?"
"We are talking about a truly astronomical amount of capital. For example, what if building a functional prototype required an investment equivalent to a hundred or even a thousand times the entire global annual GDP?!"
The room went dead silent as the horrifying implication settled in.
"So, when the energy crisis finally, truly arrives, and their power grid is actively failing... how could the Nix people possibly handle it?" Hazel’s voice dropped to a grim whisper. "Faced with this ultimate bottleneck at the eleventh hour, they would no longer possess the surplus energy, the economic capital, or the societal willpower required to complete the project! How could they possibly accomplish it then?!"
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