Fusion? We’ve Seen This Movie Before.

We move into the future today. It looks like a movie.

A breakthrough has been made in the study of fusion, the thermonuclear reaction that keeps the sun shining. If replicated and controlled, it could one day provide a source of carbon-free energy, because of the news about trying to harness star power.

We have been prepared for this discovery in pop culture, where alternative versions of our present and fanciful imaginings of our future have shown us impossible technologies.

Thanks to movies, you are familiar with fusion.

In the end of Back to the Future, Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, feeds trash into a canister that is attached to the top of his car. The well-intentioned scientist Dr. Octavius was in the second Spider-Man movie. A fusion reactor is created with an artificial sun at the center. He becomes a villain when it gets out of control.

Our culture's collective dreams of safe, unlimited energy have been epitomized by some of our heroes.

The bodies of comic book characters can create blasts of energy. Firestorm, who was a regular in the CW's Arrowverse, can change the particle structures of any substance and transmute it, which is a kind of metaphor for the power of fusion. The DC Comics hero Damage has a body that works as a fusion reactor, and Tony Stark is an engineer who uses a small reactor to power his Iron Man suit.

Stark technology has changed the New York City of the M.C.U.. Stark Tower is a symbol of an alternate reality in which energy, superheroic or otherwise, can be found.

In popular science-fiction universes like "Star Wars," where there are mentions of fusion generators and fusion reactor, and "Star Trek," where the engineering systems of Federation starships use a "fusion reaction subsystem," it's the same thing.

Functional, plot-wise, but not always precise, clear or accurate, the workings of these fictional sciences are. I can't tell a parsec from a cylinder of drugstore plutonium even when I watch my favorite sci-fi films and series. Even though fusion energy may be in our future, my relationship with it remains the same.

I'm just here for the ride if we don't break any scientific laws or introduce blatant contradictions. It will take some time before we can use fusion reactor to power our personal supersuits and go where no sci-fi creator has gone before. There is no limit to the possibilities of today's science.