“When you wish upon a star”, is not just a Disney story anymore. Scientists in Livermore, California will attempt to create a man-made star on earth this summer, using the world's most powerful laser beam. The objective is to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the power of a star, which would serve as an unlimited and inexhaustible supply of energy.

The world's largest laser beam, spanning the length of three football fields, is shot through a series of plastic tubes inside a warehouse, an hour east of San Francisco at the Lawrence Livermore National  Laboratory. As the laser travels over a mile of distance, it grows in strength and then is split into 192 different rays, which all point to a BB sized sphere coated with two reactive hydrogen isotopes. Through the process of fission, the laser will join the isotopes and create a small star, whose nucleus will be even hotter than the sun's – which, for the record is 100 million degrees celsius.

Livermore's fusion project competition include the ITER lab in France experimenting with magnets and plasma and Bill Gates who is experimenting with nuclear fission, a more sustainable version of traditional nuclear fusion power, which is found in power plants and military arsenals.

The lab, home to the United States government funded National Ignition Project, has spent 2 billion dollars on the star making experiment over the last 5 years. The earth-bound star they hope to make a few months from now, will be smaller than the width of a human hair and will die in 200 trillionths of a second..... critics of the project lament that the cost of going commercial and the time it would take to standardize do not fall within the parameters of a cost-effective and timely solution. Scientists and governments alike are racing against time to solve the global energy crisis by creating sustainable sources of energy that will alleviate the rising temperatures of the greenhouse effect.

However, the project is so lofty and the mini-star is so sure to be born – one can't help but, to admire the sci-fi reality of the whole thing. Other than giving off radioactive neutrons, the lab assures us that the star does not endanger the public. Shooting the world's largest laser beam at a hydrogen filled target and attempting to harness the power of the sun, just outside of San Francisco, poses no danger at all, rest assured.

The Laser Inertial Fusion Engine (LIFE) aka the “giant laser beam” as Dr. Evil would say, is demonstrated in a lovely video on the National Ignition Project's homepage. It is actually really fascinating to watch. I hope they succeed without blowing California off the map and I'm really curious to know how they plan on converting star power into energy that we can use at home and in production. Best of luck and fire away, Livermore!