While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?
I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.
This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.