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It's a new idea of a global rapid response ( or sth like this ) - the idea is to drop a 16Ton weight ( actually a small stone would do ) on the tents of the bad guys somewhere in the desert without the need of tracking them with drones (which require servicing and airspace over enemy terrain.

I thought rods from god was a good idea until I did the calculations... turns out dropping a 16-ton weight at 4km/sec is the same as about 30 tons of TNT. So it's like dropping a 16-ton TNT bomb except twice the power. Not really worth it...

Of course, with the aliens towing in the spaceship, that might be off a bit :-)

>>>bill

Last time I checked, energy required was a product of mass and velocity. http://www.1728.com/energy.htm

So a ship that HAD to reach a non-trivial escape velocity would take a lot more energy than something that could be slowly ratcheted. As I understand it, as you approach zero speed, you actually approach zero energy input (I may be wrong about this).

Also, a ship must contain its own fuel, an elevator could be powered by electricity or some matter being sent up the tether. This requirement is a HUGE percentage of the total fuel requirement (and the new fuel required to lift the mass of the fuel must have it's own fuel...)

Also, compared to today's shuttles, it would be incredibly quick (From the planning stage, how long do you think it takes to send a ship into space now? Isn't it still years? Even if it were 6 months which I seriously doubt, a lift would be much quicker)

>> and it STILL takes just as much actual energy to put anything in orbit...just it does so pathetically slowly.

So, no it doesn't take as much energy (but your solution does), and it's not terribly slow (your solution requires a more sturdy construction and would probably be much slower)

I think your whole theory is quite incorrect.

Might I put fort that perhaps you have become religiously attached to this laser idea and are adjusting, creating and/or forgetting facts to match the way you would like to see the situation? This happens to many people constantly (esp conservatives because it's the nature and definition of conservatism to hang on to concepts and not challenge them)--I'm not trying to be rude, just making a suggestion that you challenge your personal precepts a bit more.

Typical microwave oven wavelength is about 12.2cm. You are two orders of magnitudes wrong. A typical microwave owen operates around 2.45GHz. Handy calculator for such stuff and more info at wikipedia. Last time I looked at my microwaveable pop-corn, the corns were definitely smaller than 12cm.

try the first search result on Google for "deriving the quadratic formula"

"Now, do you really think you can tell me how the rotation of various polar molecules in a biological sample will affect an organism from first principles, while considering all possible resonance effects?"

My understanding is that there isn't much chance of resonance, because below the surface of the skin, the energy of 2400 MHz is quickly broadened by the constant vibration of the molecules. Also, the energy of room temperature heat is much higher than the leakage from a cell phone tower. (We are considering a case in which the energy must go through skin and skull bone to cause brain cancer.)

The problem is the wavelength of the 2400 MHz energy. The formula for the wavelength of electromagnetic energy is:

Wavelength (in meters) = 3 x 10^8 (speed of light) / Frequency (in MHz)

The wavelength of 2400 MHz is about 12.5 centimeters, and each photon has an energy of about 10^-6 electron volts.

The huge mismatch between the size of the wave and the size of a molecule means that the effect of the electromagnetic energy is generalized heating. There are apparently no resonance effects. The heating is caused by friction of the molecules against each other.

And there are many, many more buzzword generators out there, implemented using open-architected dynamic algorithms by organic radical policies...