It was the very end of 2019 and, one evening, on 8kun’s /x/ board, an anonymous post came in concerning a legitimate scientific topic rather than the usual paranormal garbage that usually clutters the board. If this site’s Paranormal board is like an unfashionable nightclub populated by exclusively ugly, overweight males, 8kun’s version is like taking that same nightclub and moving it to the North Pole. Posts on that board frequently remain on page one for three to four weeks, with fewer than 60,000 historical posts on the board at the time of the evening in question.

The post concerned the topic of fusion power. The post detailed a suggested pathway to achieving net power generation or “ignition” with a new approach involving harvesting gluons, something that hadn’t been tried before. Gluons form the basis for the strong nuclear force and are the force that hold protons and neutrons together, as well as binding the quarks that make up subatomic particles. The theory held that if enough gluons could be liberated from collisions of protons and contained within a rotating plasma, it would act to ‘pull together’ matter rather than trying to ‘push’ it together. A quick search showed that this had never been tried before and I was intrigued.