301–310 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
money is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
You might be right — we threw enough money and put humans on the Moon. The Manhattan Project was well funded and produced results as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia has pretty conclusively shown that they aren't even close to the same league as the US in terms of warfare. Like comparing an amateur pickup basketball team to the Chicago Bulls.
Uh what US warfare have you been watching? Your analogy only works if it’s the like the 2000-200 Bulls (15-67).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones. I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may…
I don't think a pure fusion bomb will have any form of advantage compared to the current hydro-bombs. They wouldn't produce more energy, but will need more gear to reach ignition.
I'm not in any way saying that using lasers would be a plausible route to such a weapon, since the NIF facility is huge, but if it turns out that the research needs to focus on how to get more output per shot, which I think it inevitably would since a typical conventional or nuclear power plant generates on the order of 1 GW thermal power (To match that with a 1 Hz repetition rate, likely a stretch for a MJ class laser, you would need to generate 1 GJ per shot, comparable to the energy in a ton of TNT.), it would probably be touching on areas that are highly classified.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.
Why are they using these "flash pumped" lasers if more efficient ones are available?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
money is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad
yeah. But some are apparently working at Livermore Nat. Lab still. Also, I feel like there is a bunch at SpaceX, Tesla, NASA, DeepMind and OpenAI
I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler
I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs. I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.
Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you…
And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google.
> All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This sort of work is not easy to do well.
Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…
Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Uh what US warfare have you been watching? Russia is struggling with Ukraine and the NATO weaponry they've been gifted. 100 mile supply lines proved too much, and they failed entirely to achieve air superiority. There's zero reason to think they'd do better against the US more directly.
Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then struggling not to starve to death
US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam without nuclear holocaust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.
Without the accessibility of their public library, and public workers to guide them, they would have never been able to acquire the required knowledge in aeronautics