Trinity was a paradox. It was a quirk of history that at that moment the energy of the atom was engineered to kill. The longer legacy of that day will be much greater than “the Bomb.” 80 years ago the world stepped into the epoch of the galactic.
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Most of the commentary today will center on the geopolitical, but in the future history of humanity the Trinity test will mark much more.
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Trinity was about harnessing energy. From the earliest days, the scientists working on fission were thinking about energy producing reactors. The bomb was an implied possibility, not the original goal.
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The explosion at 5:29 put us on the brink of self-immolation, but the power at the heart of that situation is also the power to power a completely different world.
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If we keep surviving the capacity to kill ourselves that was unleashed in the high desert of New Mexico, it’s that same power that will allow us to emerge as a species with radically different technology and the social structures new technology has always created.
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The fission bomb was a necessary step to reach fusion power, which we finally seem near to controlling. Fusion will put cheap, near limitless power into the geopolitical and social structures of our lives.
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The effect of this can’t be underestimated. In some ways the whole of human history has been a story of the contest for, and cooperation to increase, access to energy. Changing that changes everything.
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Fusion energy makes power-hungry Ai feasible in the long term, and it’s likely that the the computational power of that tech, alongside human genius and cooperation, will eventually allow us to swerve out of the way of total climate apocalypse.
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That is, the technology to kill the planet, may, in the end save it.
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Beyond that, the power of atomic energy unleashed in the New Mexico, will power the human+Ai era to transform our lifespans, fabricate the material to put payload into orbit cheaply and routinely on elevators into space, and explore the galaxy in a real and deep sense.
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For instance, imagine the effect of figuring out the way to get to and mine an asteroid that ends the competition over rare earth minerals. Rare “earth” won’t matter anymore. All that with a population that increasingly lives close to twice the lifespan we do now.
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Oppenheimer’s famous reference of the Bhagavad Gita quote years later is true in a much deeper way. Atomic power could yet be a destroyer of our world in a literal sense, but it’s already destroyed our world as we’ve known it for millennia.
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