Slashdot Mirror
The Quest For Fusion
Richard Finney writes: "Michael Paterniti, writing for the UK's Observer , writes about a machine called Z : an inertial confinement fusion machine. This is a well written explanation for the lay person and a philospophical look at the personalities driven to create the power of the Sun on Earth. Can these dedicated heroes reach 1,000 trillion watts and high yield fusion?"
You're right that everyone will benefit from this, but we're going to benefit the most.
Yep; everyone will benefit, and the people who spent the hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen will benefit the most.
Is that somehow a bad thing?
If a hunter shoots a deer, and cuts it up into enough portions for the entire family plus two for himself, is that somehow wrong?
Of course we should benefit the most; we spent all the money. Of course others should benefit as well; we're human beings.
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The initial investment to give any region fusion power will be enough to keep it out of reach from third world nations for a long time.
Irrelevant. The more fusion power we use, the more oil will be available for those third world nations to generate their own power, and the cheaper that oil will be (due to decreased demand.)
In the long term, the cheaper power will decrease the cost of American goods, which will increase the ability of the First World to aid the Third.
The people using the non-renewable resources will benefit from this. EVERYONE will benefit from this.
Assuming it works.
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Umm. No. No, it's not. It's beside the point anyway, because the heat of the reactor is contained by a magnetic field. You see, it has to be that way - people don't react well to temperatures found on the surface of the Sun.
Actually, you do get a heat pollution problem with any power source that isn't recycled solar (i.e. solar, wind, biomass). This is due to the fact that whenever power is _used_, the energy usually winds up as heat at the end of the road. Already, this causes local problems (cities heat up their local environment and any adjacent body of water), and when/if humanity consumes an amount of power comparable to that received by the earth from the sun, it will become a global problem.
That having been said, by the time this is a concern, we'll have the industrial capacity to get rid of it. It's straightforward to dump this heat into space; just set up a few square kilometres of piping and mirrors next to each city, and put it on the "hot" end of a heat exchanger. Compared to the cost of the city, it's cheap, and it solves any heat pollution problems associated with the city.
But the desire to hold back fission technology has a lot more to do with the arms race and the inherent dangers in fission, not some mercantalistic conspiracy.
There's what, maybe a dozen countries in the world that have fission power and three of them have had serious accidents -- Three Mile Island, which was serious but not catastrophic, Chernobyl which was about as serious an accident as you can have, and Japan's Tokaimura uranium processing plant which ultimately killed a few people. This doesn't count the untold thousands of deaths from "everyday" hazards like the Hanford site and other low-level contamination workers and nearby residents have been exposed to.
Of the dozen or so with fission abilities, two of the three are probably considered the most technologically sophisticated in the world. If they have screw-ups and "perfect" knowledge of their own abilities, how eager do you think they are to pass out fuel rods to places that still think DDT is great for indoor pest control?
This of course is completely ignoring the other major contributor to fission holdback, nuclear weapons. Tons of countries would love to get ahold of nuclear power plants so that they can use them for their weapons programs. All the world really needs is another Iran-Iraq war, this time with nukes.
If there's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy of silence to hide the gross incompetance in the operation and maintenance of places like Hanford. I don't doubt that ANY radioactive matieral can be worked with safely, I do doubt that places that fucked around with transuranics in any capacity during the cold war probably have a lot of "untold" stories about employee and community contamination which has probably resulted in fatal cancers.
Let's also not forget the extent to which organizations like Kerr-McGee were willing to go to silence people like Karen Silkwood who wanted to expose their sloppy, profit-happy management.
All of this only underscores the rationale for keeping these kinds of materials out of the hands of third-world states where corruption and incompetance are rife.
If the scientists do have that kind of attitude, it's a recipe for failure. You don't want people who sit back in awe and say "My god, this could really work" when they achieve 20% of the required power. You want them to say, "Shit, we've got a long way to go! We're doing something wrong. Must try harder!"
That said, though, a working fusion reactor would be a Pretty Damn Big Deal. It could give us the ability to power the globe without pollution, without contributing towards global warming, and with ultimately lower cost. The role of electricity would change: it would probably no longer make sense to heat our houses with oil or gas. Battery-driven cars would get their energy from a clean source, rather than ultimately from dirty hydrocarbon-powered plants. The dependence on oil could be dramatically reduced.
Is it going to cure all of society's ills? Obviously not. However, it represents a kind of wealth which allows us to concentrate our energy and resources on other, more important things. As other technological advances have allowed us to build societies which are healthier, more free, and better educated, so this has the potential to allow us to take another step forward in a direction that is actually, for a change, sustainable.
No, it won't solve all our problems, but it has the potential to make our lives easier and better, if we let it.
I think this is a very simplistic view. Go and spend some time in a poor African country, say, and see the problems involved in lifting "much of the lower-class portion of our billions from their squalor and ignorance", and you might come to a different conclusion. You can't fix someone else's problems from the outside, any more than technology can cure all society's ill's. All you can do is help to enable people to help themselves.
And if cheap, clean power isn't an enabling technology, I don't know what is.
No such thing as a "Dyson" ring (and a ring is unstable even in literary daydreams), and a Dyson sphere is not a solid structure, but rather a myriad of habitats and other artifically constructed objects in orbit around a sun so as to capture most of the radiated energy.
If they were a blackbody, they would be invisible, but we're looking for them (do a search for "Dyson").
Obviously they would encounter the issue of radiating waste heat[...]
Actually, that's not a huge issue. Especially when you consider that you can choose the distance (and thus energy per square unit of surface), and deal with radiating that amount out the back for each section of the sphere you build.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
and they haven't even reached break-even yet.
Actually that is not correct - several of the protype machines have reached or exceeded break-even. The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.
Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off. There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, or accidental critcality events like the one that occurred in Japan this year.
Cost is perhaps the biggest long term issue - but the potential impact of the technology is so great that we are foolish to not be spending more on it.
You have hit upon one of the key limitations to the advancement of civilizations. Ultimately this is why science fiction writers have speculated on structures like Ringworlds and Dyson spheres - ways to allow for dissipation of immense amounts of waste heat.
Air polution is a problem, and requires solutions which curbs air polution.
However, to suggest the carbon pollution (including methane gas from third world farming concerns) we've thrown up in the last century will affect the weather in a substantial way, while one good volcanic erruption which throws out more carbon pollution in a few weeks than we have in the last century will not cause weather pattern changes strikes me as incredibly silly.
I have always been concerned with the politics of global warming, because it could distract attention from the environmental problems that really do need fixing, such as local air quality and local water quality.
Dumping waste heat wouldn't be much of a problem for a highly technological civilization - there's a 3K heat sink available. You just have to radiate away your excess energy at a wavelength that isn't absorbed by your atmosphere; much much easier than building a Dyson ring!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
right along with references to God every chapter.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Paterniti is an award winning writer. His style is over the top - but his approach of looking for meaning where maybe there is none is most appropriate to the subject matter.
The same author wrote Driving Albert's Brain. He isn't a reporter - he's a *writer*, and an excellent one at that.
In my opinion - the piece is brilliantly written and is easily on par with Douglas Coupland. To be honest - I >>WISH I could write this well.
The original poster's comments were appreciative and insightful - your reply is the usual kneejerk reaction that twits make when look at a painting beyond their comprehension.
Turn your computer off for a week - you need to go read a real book - something not published by Tor, okay?
.Robert
.Robert
I will say that I feel there are legitimate issues regarding pollution that can and should be addressed, and local pollution problems should clearly be addressed. The point I'm making is that most climate models that are being used to proclaim "Global Warming" don't usually take into account the factors I mentioned. This is even worse when you get "global warming" stories in the popular media (which in regards to climatology you must regard Slashdot as a general news source).
One particularly disturbing instance of fraudlant data collection is in the case of current weather data gathering systems: When temperature data is recorded, for the most part the weather station data is recorded on paper logs. This is going more toward automated systems, but many historical records (as in most of them) are done on paper.
Anyway, when somebody writes down the daily high and low temperatures for a station, sometimes the numbers get inverted (a daily high of 92 degrees gets recorded as 29 degrees... in July for a North American desert) Based upon what surrounding weather stations are recording and historical records for that station (including the previous day's data) a determination is made to accept or reject this data as accurate. If the data is rejected, sometimes an approximation is made for that station and date, or it is simply not including in calculations (for temperature averages, ect. based on the intended purpose of the data)
Where the real problem comes is that much of the weather data used in these models has to be painstakingly entered in by hand one daily temperature at a time. A very expensive and slow procedure at best for what is not immediately useful information by itself. This also means that most climate data before 1950 (and 1970 as a real benchmark) has not been digitized for some serious number crunching, although there are some remarkable exceptions. In many cases researcher are aware of this fact and try to do alternative forms of data collection such as ocean floor sediments, glacial core tests, and geologic queries to try and pull some longer-term information.
Now imagine if you would, that the algorithms trying to determine if the recorded temperatures are accurate, as listed above, had been tweaked by a somebody trying to prove the point of global warming. (And don't tell me that scientific data doesn't get faked or bent... even in peer reviewed journals) How could you prove that the data was fraudlent? By challenging what was rejected.
Here is the real killer: The original unmodified temperature data for most of the United States has not been preserved, and instead the researchers are using filtered data to make all of their calculations. The original data is available in paper form... usually, but imagine the expense of having to re-enter the data all over again. For very little real value besides trying to prove a poltical point.
The other aspect that I question regarding data collection is the location of the weather stations. Many times the monitoring stations are placed in locations that are:
Near population centers - Much of the weather reporting is done by volunteers, many of whom even pay for the equipment themselves. Even if the equipment is donated, it is placed near schools or businesses that have a steady supply of consistant volunteers who can constantly monitor a station. This becomes a problem in rural areas in particular (even though some land-grant universities do have rural weather station programs.... still, you gotta consider how many grad students really want to trek out to the middle of nowhere just to get a bunch of weather data)
What I'm getting at is that the collecting of the weather data can be problematic, even if everybody is sincerely trying to do their best and report the data honestly. I sincerely believe that there are _**SOME**_ individuals that have a political beef and believe that the ends justify the means, so at least some of the data may not be as accurate as you may want to believe.
Does this mean you can sit back and dismiss global warming completely? Absolutely not!
Does this mean we have to immediately shut down the entire petroleum, automotive, avation, and any other industry that uses or releases any chemicals that are proven to produce greenhouse gasses (which also includes mass genocide because you can't have all of these people breathing CO2 into the air either)? Absolutely not!
This is a public discussion that requires accurate information, and as an ordinary citizen who as a minority actually understands the scientific method believes that the researchers discussing global warming and climate changes should do a better job of convincing me that we should undergo massive changes in our society with new laws and customs.
The reporter's writing style destroys much of the credibility this project has, IMHO. This really sounds like pulp science.
Besides, there is two important issues I didn't see addressed in the article.
It is one thing t create fusion circumstances for a very short period of time, using huge amounts of energy.
But once your wires have exploded, how are you going to maintain the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion?
And even if you reach sustainable fusion, how are you going to channel the produced energy into electrical power?
Roland
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Infinite Energy magazine seems to keep up to date on cold fusion research. It's not exactly a main-stream scientific journal, so take it with a grain of salt.
There's couple of older articles on research at SRI here and here.
Allegedly there are reports of fusion byproducts from cold fusion experiments. Dr. McKubre from SRI has reported elevated levels of helium-4 in cold fusion cells, for example. Of course, he's merely an electrochemist and not a *ahem* real physicist, so his experiments can be discounted.
// TODO: fix sig
After that incident when two guys said that they had gotten cold fusion to work but it turned out they hadn't, cold fusion has been a taboo subject. However, there is research going on and they are getting results (more energy out than in), though nobody seems to know why.
No matter how you slice it, 1000 trillion is 1.0e15. There! no more need to argue about how to say it. Isn't scientific notation great?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I need to interject here, I think "usually" is a pretty strong word to use about Li walls in a layperson discourse. The implication is that a molten Li wall is common. It isn't. Molten lithium has only been used in very theoritical reactor design mock-ups and has not been place in any large-scale plasma experiments yet.
I'm currently working on CDX-U, a small spherical torus at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, which will be the first device to seriously look at global plasma/molten Li interactions. I have great concern over how a liquid metal such as molten Li behaves in a large plasma device. The molten Li can be pushed around by currents and fields, and could potential be pulled off the walls into the plasma core. In the core Li is an impurity and serves only to reduce energy output. Not to mention that having Li coating all the diagnostic windows is a huge problem, even in a well understood reactor.
Don't get me wrong, molten Li has been theorized to have several nice properties. But one needs to remember that molten Li walls are untested experimentally. The least interesting property to me is tritium production. More interesting are the great thermal and MHD stability properties that a flowing molten Li wall surface provides.
This reminds me of a valid scientific point, that any good litle nerd should be familiar with.
In the late 1800's, there was DC, the virtual child of Thomas Edison. He founded the Edison Electric Light Company based upon it. He made ridiculous amuonts of money off of his idea, being the only provider, even though there was nearly no demand. (Especiially compared to California now, see my previous comment).
After Edison's company had been founded, there was another scientist continuing the search for power, though Edison had already found it. It was Nikolai Tesla, and he was developing AC (the current standard). He couldn't get funding for his project because Edison used much of his sway in the business to fight him,or what little he actully had to do since Tesla was a minor scientist, albeit with a great idea. Eventually his idea was discovered and his ideas overcame Edison's, but wouldn't it be a shame if fusion went the way of the dinosaur? It is possible, it happens on the Sun constantly, we just have yet to reproduce the effect.
I suggest reading about Tesla on your own, they're tend to be quite fascinating, especially "The Philadelphia Project", even if they do seem a bit outrageous.
My opinions are better than yours.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
One important technical detail that the article lacked was how is the energy going to be converted to electricity. I don't see how houses and factories are powered with immense pulses of radiation. Technically there's still long way to go before one of these machines produces steady flow of juice.
On the other hand, I find the idea of fusion power as a source of wealth and egalitary for the whole world to be naïve bs. The reasons of poverty are political and are not swept away with technological solutions, quite on the contrary. There's no way the rich governments and corporations which have invested gazillion dollars in this technology are going to just hand it over to the poor. It'll rather end up to be a new and powerful gadget in their toolbox of economical oppression. What the third world countries must do is to build dispersed power networks utilizing various sustainable sources (wind, solar, bio, hydro...) to make them indepedent of the fuel recources and technology possesed by the first world.
---------------
Fire Your Boss!
Actually, a sustainable fusion reaction is quite possible. Perhaps you've heard of THE SUN. Of course, I suppose you could argue that several billion years isn't sustained.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I believe that figure is actually what it sucks down (which may, in your mind, be worse). On the other hand, what the machine produces, according to the article, is 80x what the entire planet produces now (for a very short period, anyhow). The scary part is, they need three times that and then some before the "Machine" is supposed to work.
I don't suppose there's anyone around who knows much about fusion, huh? How much of this energy would be sucked back into maintaining a steady...um...fusing...and how much would actually be usable?
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
This is truely beautiful writing. I haven't read anything this good in a long time. This guy has a future. (no puns)
Who is going to attempt to patent this?
"The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement."
Crap, cause i've been seeing smaller versions of these guys running around on my desk. Maybe I need to get some sleep or raise my refresh rate.
And not all third-world nations have these fuels in their soil.
New technology doesn't automagically make the world better, and fusion isn't going to be any different. All in all, if adapted all over North America, it's going reduce emissions, stop some kinds of resource extraction, make energy much cheaper.
And not every sector will be able to switch to fusion power right away. Transportion already accounts for the bulkshare of fossil fuel consumption, and it will be along time before everyone is driving electric cars (just because of the infrastructure changes needed to be made... the cars would need someplace to charge, which requires some sort of industry adoption of electric cars.)
But who knows, maybe in process of discovering that free market economies are disasterous, we'll all learn how to live and work together, poverty and environmental degradation will be eliminated, and fusion will be one of the tools.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
They banned nuclear power, banned coal and petroleum fired plants, hydro is out because it threatens [insert cute cuddly fish of the day], and anything else has to meet impossible-to-meet emmissions standards. What's left has all their eggs on natural gas. Which is now in short supply and sending energy prices through the roof.
Way to go, your air is still no cleaner than elsewhere and now you're running out of electricity to boot. Well, stay the fuck away from our power. Hoover Dam belongs to Nevada.
CA needs to starve for a while to learn a lesson. Namely, that legislation can't fix your air quality problems without causing other worse problems. Stop trying to STEAL people's cars and crush them into cubes (see: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1223/sb42/smo gflyer_5.html). Start drilling for oil again, both on and off shore. Don't just plunder other people's oil. Want energy? Then you have to get a little dirty yourself.
Emissions are already as low as possible of cars that can still do work. More laws can't make them any cleaner. Stop trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.
You want less smog in L.A./S.F./S.D.? Block industry and business from expanding in existing commercial areas and create new commercial areas at the rim of the city. Decentralize business and industry and you won't have so much smog all in one place. In fact, you'll have less because people will be able to get to work faster when they're not all trying to cram into the same place every day.
In the mean time, suffer, you wanted to play in the sun and beach while we stockpiled acorns for winter. Now you wanna leech off of our supply? Screw you CA. You made your mess, now lie in it.
Hi,
2D -> He-4 + E is not correct. There are actually two different reactions that may occur, and neither is the one you have stated. These are:
D + D -> p + t + 4.1MeV
D + D -> n + h + 3.2MeV
Where the first byproduct is a proton, a tritium nuclei, and 4.1MeV of energy, and the second is a neutron, a Helium-3 nuclei, and 3.2MeV energy.
Both Tritium and Helium-3 are good fusion fuels in their own right, making the D-D reaction ever more valuable, as it's products may fuel subsequent reactions.
Also note that D-D fusion is the second easiest reaction to produce, after D-T.
This information is mostly from _Principles of Fusion Energy_, by A.A. Harms, K.F. Schoepf, G. H. Miley, and D. R. Kingdon.
I regard Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times Of Cold Fusion, by Gary Taubes, as the definitive reference on Pons and Fleischmann's "cold fusion". It's exhaustive, but a must-read if you call yourself a scientist and are interested in this subject, or just want insight into the whole "bad science" process.
(Of course if you are bent on believing a conspiracy theory, you will find it entirely unpersuasive...)
"Can these dedicated heros reach 1,000 trillion watts and reach high yield fusion?"
I think that a better question is if they can keep the plant from self-destructing every ~100 years or so, like they tended to do in Sim City 2000... That was the most annoying problem when "no natural disasters" was set, unless of course you were also using microwave power beaming *shudder*
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Where to begin.
...).
But if we can create as much power as we want, that isn't exactly going to help global warming (well it is, but that's the point
Global warming has hardly been proven to exist. I doubt very much it's existence. I am not an 80 year old Senator from the 80's. I am VERY skeptical though that humans are affecting the temperature of the Earth. I am a bit perplexed how (With little in the way of meaningful studies) Global Warming is no longer talked of as a possibility, but rather an inevitability.
Even if we get rid of the gases that contribute to the glass house effect, simply releasing any amount of heat to the environment is going to hurt it (and already does).
Umm. No. No, it's not. It's beside the point anyway, because the heat of the reactor is contained by a magnetic field. You see, it has to be that way - people don't react well to temperatures found on the surface of the Sun.
So such a power source might not be such a desirable thing after all
Yeah. Who really wants fushion power anyway? The promise of limitless, cheap and clean power. What a silly thing to wish for.
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Sounds about as safe as amateur explosives to me!
Sure, I guess this is technically feasible, but really, fusion isn't going to be that cheap... one of them fandangled "Z-Machines" is still going to cost a bundle. The initial investment to give any region fusion power will be enough to keep it out of reach from third world nations for a long time.
Look how the pre-initial costs (research) are being resisted by the gov't of the USA (the richest nation in the world).
Fusion power would be a wonderful advance for the whole world, but to make it accessible for the whole world, there's more to consider than just the technology. We have to start re-thinking third world debt (ie. loaning them more money is not the solution) and reconsidering free-trade in favour of fair-trade.
Only then will we be One World.
Jeremy McNaughton
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
"The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion. The idea is to take two isotopes of the hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium - and mash them together with a little energy, which in turn releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of a single neutron."
That doesn't seem quite right. The neutron is also a biproduct, and D-T fusion is just a step on the way.
This is what happens in Deuterium-Tritium Fusion.
D + T = H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + E
The result is helium (He-4), neutron (n), and energy (E) in the form of part gamma radiation and (a smaller) part kinetik energy.
That is not the end goal of fusion. There are a couple of reasons for this, first of all Tritium (T or H-3) is not a good fuel source. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that in addition to a proton and an electron also contains two neutrons. It's radioactive, very toxic, and most importantly EXTREMELY expensive.
A better, but more difficult, solution is to use Deuterium-Deuterium fusion. Deuterium (D or H-2) is a hydrogen isotope with only one neutron. Deuterium is much cheaper to produce than tritium and is perfectly harmless. Furthermore the fusion reaction would look like this.
2D = 2H-2 -> He-4 + E
No free neutron is produced. This is a good thing. Neutron's can't be magnetically confined, so they simply fly out until it hits something, usually the physical confinement of the fusion reaction, wearing it down over time. The energy is released as gamma radiation.
Deuterium is the fuel source we assume will eventually be used when fusion becomes a commercial alternative.
-
But the most effecient form of fusion is neutron fusion. This is when a protium (P or H-1) is used as fuel. Its two components, a proton and an electron, fuse into a neutron.
P = H-1 = e + p -> n + E
This is partly what the sun does, it produces helium from protium. The sun takes two steps, first producing two neutrons and then joining them with protium to produce helium.
4P = 4H-1 -> 4e + 4p -> 2e + 2p + 2n -> He-4
___
Unfortunately, the temperatures necessary to drive the proton cycle are not attainable by any foreseeable human technology, either controlled or uncontrolled.
All of the reactions considered for fusion power require isotopic hydrogen as at least one component (not a big problem, since deuterium is pretty common in ordinary water) and generate copious neutrons (a much bigger problem, as they degrade the structure of the apparatus and induce secondary radioactivity).
This is poetic misinformation, similar to the early line about H-bombs being "clean" because they were driven by fusion. It took Howard Morland to make it public that so-called H-bombs actually derive 80% of their energy output from the dirty fissioning of U238 in a fast neutron flux created by the fusion reaction. Take away this final step, by using a secondary tamper that won't fission, and the neutrons go out into the atmosphere -- making what is called a "neutron bomb." (Remember those?)
Fusion may indeed be an important power source one day, but not if we gloss over the real drawbacks and hazards as the early champions of fission did. No technology that requires high energy densities can ever be entirely safe, and if we promise people that it is then we are only setting it up to be massively rejected in the bitter disillusionment that will follow the first big accident.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
If you want to be a smart ass... at least be smart.
Unit........ USA............. UK
Million..... 1000000 (6 0's). 1000000 (6)
Billion..... 1000 mill (9)... mill mill (12)
Trillion.... 1000 bill (12).. mill bill (18)
Quadrillion. 1000 trill (15). mill trill (24)
quintillion. 1000 quad (18).. mill quad (30)
sextillion.. 1000 quint (21). mill quint (36)
septillion.. 1000 sixt (24).. mill sixt (42)
octillion... 1000 sept (27).. mill sept (48)
so... 1000 trillion is 10exp21, in USA would be a sextillion.
when you read this big numbers in the press you have to be very careful about who wrote it and where. In other countries, like Spain, for example,10exp24= 1000 trillion (UK) would actually be a thousand million billions (Spain)
Damn! Did this guy write romance novels in a previous career?
If I'd have known physics was that exciting, I think I would've chosen a different major in college.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Scientific American gave a much more scientific review of the Z machine in 1998, and I saw no change in the numbers from that publication. They have been insisting that they are 30 years away from high-yield (read: energy-efficient) nuclear fusion since they came up with the theory in the first place. They are still about 30 years away from it.
I can almost hear Bullwinkle saying "This time, for sure". Every time they take another step forward, someone moves the finish line.
It's a really cool story, though.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
One thing to note about all of these items: There is practically nothing that an industrial society could possibly do to even affect any of these things from occuring.... even with a Manhattan Project style concentrated effort to even try.
Furthermore, there are strong indications that at least some of the meterological data has been manipulated to some extent to "promote" a radical change of public policy to change global warming, when in fact not all of the facts are in.
The only "substantive" climate data that I've seen that would suggest there is some sort of impact on the global climate by the current global civilization is from the ice core samples from Greenland, which can document air pollution levels in Greenland for more than 1000 years. I would like to point out that Pittsburg Pennsylvania used to have air pollution so thick that you couldn't see more than a block (and that was in the 1890's) There are some notable improvements in many industrial centers of production... but that is for another argument at another time.
To suggest that the jury has made its verdict regarding global warming is really not seeing the whole picture.
After a horrific accident at this lab in New Mexico, Freeman Gordon had to fight his way out against aliens from another dimension.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The article IS interesting, I'll give it that... but the writer is sadly misguided (in addition to having diarrhoea of the metaphor).
/. But please, don't go around hailing it as the ultimate solution for world peace and ending man's inhumanity to man. It's not. We already have the technology AND the resources, as a race, to lift much of the lower-class portion of our billions from their squalor and ignorance, improve their lifestyles, and improve mankind as a whole thereby. We haven't, not because we cant, but because we just don't care to. We just can't be bothered, and to tell the truth, many of those in high places prefer things this way.
The "Machine", as he capitalizes it, may well be a fascinating invention, but all these references that seem to call for its worship as some sort of god really disturb me. He never comes out and says that, but he gets into the subjects of religion and deism, dropping smug references to "Waiting for Godot" and in general, clearing a path for the Lord in the desert. =P
It's just a tangle of wires and some reaaaaally high-tech gadgetry. It's not a god; it's not the final solution. Free, safe, clean power is a Good Thing, that is true. But it won't answer all the problems, and he holds to one of the most common fallacious beliefs in existence today. I quote Poul Anderson, from his short story "Superstition", set in a post-apocalyptic future :
"...But the superstition is this, son: that science could understand everything, and do everything, and make everything good... I wonder how they could have held so odd a belief, even then."
It's a good idea, and a great new technology, and so it deserves a reference on
Before a technological advance can "cure all of society's ills", it first needs to cure the common flaw of society - human nature.
And there's no cure for that.
-Kasreyn.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger