231–240 of 310 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not even 29 picograms. It’s zero: > Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second.
Aaaaaaaaand it's gone.
The view we have from science fiction is largely of colonizing planets (eg Star Wars) but this makes almost no sense. Alien worlds are likely to be hostile. Just look at any rocky world in our Solar System other than Earth. Gravity wells are incredibly inconvenient. So if you have to live in a habitat anyway because of a hostile environment, you may as well live in space.
And that's where we once again return to the Dyson Swarm.
In this future, stars become incredibly valuable and planets are little more than a source of raw material. The energy output from a star is almost incompehensibly high. It's estimated that human civilization uses between 10^10 and 10^11 Watts of energy. Roughly 10^16 Watts of energy hit the Earth from the Sun. That would be a Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization. But the Earth only gets less than a billionth of the Sun's output.
If you used all of the Sun's output, that would be roughly 10^26 Watts of energy, called a K2 civilization.
We simply cannot comprehend what you could do with this much energy. One application is simply to turn that energy into heavy elements that may not otherwise be present around that star in a method that is basically a scaled up particle accelerator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish. So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.
Sort of like how witches weren’t maiming newts for their potions. Eye of newt is mustard seed.
As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there, but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and…
Pah. The singularity is scheduled for around next Tuesday and we haven't even made a Dyson sphere yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, except for in particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae, atoms are never created or destroyed, so if they're creating gold, it's here for good.
> particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae I have no clue about this stuff, but don't black holes also change matter... somehow? I mean, with all that gravity and stuff, crazy things must happen in there, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x 10^27 joules is too abstract. It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances. Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provide…
And remember, 1 AU is about 997.3 billion bananas laid end to end.
I have already mentioned that, but such a grandiose waste of money is terrible. We pour billions in these accelerators without any hope of using the findings. At the same time other branches of science (even physics) are scrapping some money around. CERN is a fabulous place (I did my PhD there so yes, shitting my old bed), but this is the fabulous of a First Class or private jet flight around the world without any co…
Not to mention the indirect benefits such as education and networking of the scientists (which, if you talk with people there, seem to be an integral part of the mission even if maybe not explicit as it could be)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x 10^27 joules is too abstract. It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances. Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provide…
And remember, 1 AU is about 997.3 billion bananas laid end to end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.
I definitely will mis-speak/mis-write, but my mathematic (also flawed) tells me that if Gold + 1 = Mercury, then Something + 1 = Gold, so we can find that "something" add 1 of the thingie, and booya!! gold!! (right?) (please read the above with silly humor) In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previ…
The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.
(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)