41–50 of 76 posts
'natural experiment' doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I don't know enough about chemistry to tell if this alloy has potentially interesting properties, or it's just interesting because it's something we weren't previously aware of as being possible.
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Sure. 70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.
They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"
I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.
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They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity. Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful witho…
Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
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Sounds like an interesting idea and I think there are things like this being done but, couldn't we accomplish the same thing on a smaller scale without all the destruction? What about fusion welding once we get that more locked in? I know it's still a WIP but if we're getting to "millions of degrees", it could speed up the process if we're able to localize the fusion. Also, what about cold fusion? The problem on any…
A disgustingly large and powerful pressurized microwave would likely be sufficient if "all" they need to do is spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma. I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise The tiny spheres of this alloy mixed into a mess of other stuff remind me of Primitive Technology's mostly successful attempts at smelting iron the hard way. https://www…
I don't know about you, but "spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma" sounds cool. If I had tens of millions of dollars, I'd pay to see that.
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Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity. Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful witho…
They were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction. Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
The application sure, but the novelty of it being nuclear rather than conventional kept parties interested in it for quite a while!
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A disgustingly large and powerful pressurized microwave would likely be sufficient if "all" they need to do is spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma. I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise The tiny spheres of this alloy mixed into a mess of other stuff remind me of Primitive Technology's mostly successful attempts at smelting iron the hard way. https://www…
> I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise I don't know about you, but "spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma" sounds cool. If I had tens of millions of dollars, I'd pay to see that.
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No, I mean using atomic bombs to manufacture these alloys at scale. In the 50s a-bombs were proposed for all sorts of workaday uses. Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today. I am sure that somebody will take up the task of reproducing these alloys using intense heat from a non-atomic source. New alloys can be quite lucrative but developing them requires just as much experimentation as making…
Both the US and the Soviet Union actually experimented with "nuclear fracking" in oil/gas fields. The Soviet Union also used atomic bombs to put out fires in gas fields as late as 1981.
And yes, I have the same Google as you, but I'd love a link to your preferred telling of the tale of how the Soviets nuked a gas well fire just a couple years before I was born.
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What, you mean, like American Machine and Foundry building nuclear reactors? https://www.ans.org/news/article-1858/elk-river-rural-americ...
No, I mean using atomic bombs to manufacture these alloys at scale. In the 50s a-bombs were proposed for all sorts of workaday uses. Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today. I am sure that somebody will take up the task of reproducing these alloys using intense heat from a non-atomic source. New alloys can be quite lucrative but developing them requires just as much experimentation as making…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missil...
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> I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise I don't know about you, but "spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma" sounds cool. If I had tens of millions of dollars, I'd pay to see that.
Could probably get styropryo to do it for a good bit less. The stuff he's doing on his second channel recently is so damn cool https://youtu.be/0Y-9GbsS9Fg
My expectations for doing it properly would be:
- facilities. Sure, high power microwaves and pressure chambers and combining the two may not be THAAAT expensive. But doing it in a calibrated fashion to have a chance to produce predictable repeated results isn't without some details.
- staff. I'd want at least 3 qualified people on it. Preferably multiple teams competing for results exploring different paths of interest.
- timeframe. I'd expect such a thing to last at least 3 years at an absolute minimum but that might only be enough to get to the hardware to a "calibrated repeatable" stage. So probably 5 to 10 to have any hope of meaningful results.
- money. That "if I had tens of millions" is a personal view of my own monetary worth. I wouldn't want to see ALL that used up in this, but I'd put forward a good fraction of it.