"This is political" => Physics ?
"Many do not believe fusion to work" => also in the Sun?
"this could turn into a flame war about fossil fuels" => not unless someone wants to start one, I get paid Koch shills have to keep busy.
An article on engineering the beam tube or on how the control software or embedded systems were developed would be appropriate for here - and as dang said the point is to avoid all topics which might offend people and turn political.
Relativity was banned in China for decades because Einstein was considered a counterrevolutionary. All science is political, if you choose to view it as such.
This is an interesting example of 'seeing what isn't there'.
If you read dang's post[0] again you won't see mention of offence or instruction to avoid topics that might turn political.
You've erroneously extrapolated that from a pretty egregious misinterpretation of what was said.
In fact, with regards to 'topics that might turn political', the instruction was explicitly to flag threads within the topic and not the topic itself.
With regards to offence, dang never mentioned the word. Instead the focus was very much on promoting civility and avoiding the 'primitive brain'. The intent was nicely summed up in this sentence:
> The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control.
See, it's not about offence, it's about promoting intelligent discourse. You've added the offence angle yourself because of what you personally think offence to be in this context, but it wasn't part of the original intent of dangs post and in fact it's at best a secondary or tertiary consideration to the primary one of keeping HN a civil and intellectually stimulating place.
But it's because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404