re: #498 Bagua

With the proper effort and a little luck we can get there in very much shorter than the time scale you mention. Again, from the BBC article:

Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a “seismic event”.

“It would mark the transition for laser fusion from ‘physics’ to ‘engineering reality’,” he said.

Lets hope this experiment is successful…