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Antimatter Propulsion
er333 writes "A group at Penn State is building prototypes of antimatter storage for space applications, and makes a good case that with the amount of antimatter that will be produced in a few years, "omniplanetary" missions will become practical, including manned missions to Jupiter.
They have some images describing possible missions and a concept craft design called the ICAN II."
It's because he used the word "apt". Some /. moderator got confused and thought he was referring to a linux distro of some sort.
It was called an Orion, and NASA did some preliminary tests using conventional explosives on a scale model. Unfortunately, the explosives didn't blow up evenly, causing lateral thrust and resulting in a rather jittery flight.
The History Channel had a show that covered it, as part of their "History Undercover" series, called "Code Name: Project Orion". It was also written about in the novel _Footfall_ by Niven and Pournelle, and was the technology used in the movie _Deep Impact_.
Why don't they use matter-antimatter converters? Not anything fancy dilithium powered, but good old black hole device. You know, if you take a small black hole it vaporizes in Hawking radiation thereby loosing mass. If you feed the same mass while it looses the mass from a garbage heap, the black hole essentially converts garbage to Hawking radiation, consisting half of matter and half of antimatter. The antimatter you keep and the matter goes into the garbage dump, where it eventually reaches the black hole again.
A decade ago, I worked as a lowly graphic artist at a nationally recognized think tank. I was looking for some Apache helicopter clip art in some files (paper files) when I came across some misfiled documents with the "Antimatter" heading. (These files were intended for graphics only, but someone had left the text on these particular docs - a security breach).
:-D
Anyhow, the documents matter of factly listed current positron output of the nation's accelerators, and output when taking into account accelerators coming on line in the next few years. They did mention antimatter as a fuel source for spacecraft, but more ink was devoted toward offensive weaponry.
Unlike some of the posters here, the military was not interested in creating antimatter bombs that could crack open the planet. Rather, they saw antimatter as a means to create extremely small devices with great destructive power, for "stealth" attacks. Imagine mailing an atomic-level letter bomb to an enemy leader! Actually, don't bother- someone already has imagined it.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons
Looking back to the past from the present, we tend to forget the psychology of the day, instead seeing events through a filter of modern opinion and judgement.
:/
The Japanese (at least their military) were fanatical. Their country had never been successfully invaded by a foreign nation. They had the samurai mindset of death before dishonor. Even the Mongols who terrorized Eurasia couldnt do it: They sent the largest force of soldiers over water in the history of the world (unbeaten until WWI) and what happened? The Japanese gods intervened, sending a "Kamikaze" or "divine wind" that wrecked the Mongol ships after the first few battles. (And since the Mongols made the error of sleeping on their ships rather than making camps on the shores, they were all killed.)
Thats why in the end of the war they had suicide pilots (named after the supernatural forces they believed defended them). They were training civilians, women, to fight the Americans when they came. Running out of metal, they resorted to building balloons out of cloth and wood with incendiary payloads, and tried to float them over to North America to start massive forest fires. In short, they were doing absolutely everything they could to win. The Emperor knew things were lost, but go read what he said he was dealing with in the end: A pack of generals who were still adamant that they would WIN the war, not just successfully defend Japan.
But by dropping the atomic bomb, a weapon of unforseen destructive power, their mindset was broken: They realized that if they persisted in fighting, it wouldnt matter how hard they fought, they and their land and everything they were would be obliterated for all time in an atomic blast. Like a slap in the face to wake someone up from a delusion. So whenever you weep for those slain by the bomb (and you should), dont forget that it likely saved a lot more human life on both sides of the conflict, by bringing a swifter end to the war. (I admit though that I dont know why the second bomb was dropped.)
Sorry for the offtopic post.
Yes, many have noted that, including myself who is not an American and not as prone to many of their delusions. (Sorry guys.) Youll find the argument for the dropping of the bomb not only made by American historians, but by British and others if you look.
While you cant ignore the subjectivity introduced by the background of the person making an argument (or that of the sources they use), but also do not throw aside a persons argument in the hasty thought that they are not intelligent enough to make an effort at objectivity themselves.
It's funny how when this trait is present in our armies, we call it "courage" or "tenacity" isn't it?
Except that the level of fanaticism, or "courage" or "tenacity" or whatever else you wish to call it, wasnt there in, say, the European theatre. Theres a difference between fighting courageously and fighting a completely hopeless cause.
See the contradiction? If they were training all of these suicide pilots, what were they going to suicide in?
Planes that were already built, and modified to be packed with explosives perhaps? Those modified planes were extremely good bang for the buck: If one got through, you scored one sunken ship. All it took was one hit. Simple economics when youre in dire straits.
Ah, they were suicide balloonists, trained to float through the skys like a deadly horde of jellyfish, waiting for the chance to swoop down on helpless American fighters and explode.
Well, more details just to be serious: The balloon idea depended on the time of year: summer. During that time, prevailing winds blew from west to east, and also, the American west coast was experiencing a drier than normal summer, so their forests were like a tinderbox. The balloons were given enough helium to make it to North America, where they would run out and descend. When they got below a certain altitude, the charge would go off and an incendiary burst would result. No really expensive components, no fancy guidance systems. Did they work? No. :) Some balloons DID make it to the states, but most failed to detonate. I think one DID detonate, but it landed in the middle of a ploughed field and caused no major damage. At the time, the farmer and authorities had NO IDEA wtf was going on. :)
Along with a fair old chunk of the civilian population.
Regrettable, but as I said, perhaps that loss of life prevented even greater losses. Just something to consider.
Oh, further: Although some American generals really did just want to "blow stuff up" Im sure, they WERE considering it as a psychological weapon and not just a physical one. They were planning to blow up Kyoto (Japans former capital, and a spritiual center, it wouldve been like dropping the bomb on the Vatican) to really send a message to Japan but recalled that idea, fortunately for us all.
I wont deny that Hiroshima was a test. (It was selected since it hadnt been bombed much until then and would reveal best the results.) But I wont accept that it was only a test. The drop had a purpose, and that was to end the war. That was by far the primary reason for its use.
It's fairly clear why the second bomb was dropped, although these reasons don't stand up brilliantly in hindsight.
The Japanese civilian leadership wanted to surrender after the first bomb was dropped, but the more powerful military leadership refused. One of the reasons for this was that news didn't get from Hiroshima to Tokyo for at least a day after the first bomb was dropped, something that the american leadership failed to predict. The americans were therefore surprised that the Japanese didn't sue for peace immediately.
Another reason for dropping the second bomb was that Stalin declared war on Japan just after the Hiroshima bombing, and immediately attacked Japanese positions on mainland Asia. The Americans didn't want Stalin to win too much against Japan (the mindset of the cold war had already started at this point), so it was deemed necessary to get the Japanese to surrender immediately.
Throughout this you have to remember that six months earlier, the allies had won a war against Germany, with German divisions generally surrendering or retreating after 30% casualties. When the Americans invaded Guam and Saipan, the Japanese troops didn't surrender at all, and after ~90% losses, forced Japanese civilians on the islands to commit suicide rather than be captured, before committing suicide themselves. This event appeared in the American press, and the feeling was that if the Japanese defended a captured territory that strongly, then there was no chance of invading Japan.
A blockade on Japan would have hurt even more civilians, as food and fuel would have been cut off. Japan gets very cold in winter, and civilian deaths from a blockade would have been much higher than from the two atom bombs.
Most of this view is explained in "The Making of the Atom Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, which I admit takes an American viewpoint for most of the book, but I would say is fair at explaining the reasons the Americans had for dropping the two bombs.
Some balloons DID make it to the states, but most failed to detonate. I think one DID detonate, but it landed in the middle of a ploughed field and caused no major damage. At the time, the farmer and authorities had NO IDEA wtf was going on. :)
It came down in Oregon. Killed six people. The only deaths as a result of an attack on the mainland during WWII. http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/jbb.ht m
In 3001, Clarke writes about an eerie explosion destroying an entire civilization due to mishandling of an extremely powerful energy source 500 lightyears from earth. Contextually, I think that was one of the few bits of the book that moved me much.
-l
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Yeah, I should've been more clear. I'd trailed off from the measly 1kg, thinking of larger bits, and didn't type all that out. Oh well.
-l
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In the article they are talking about 1 to 1000 grams of antimatter.
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One kilogram of antimatter let loose anywhere on the surface of the Earth, or in the atmosphere, will be enough to destroy an entire continent.
And I mean thoroughly destroy, like vaporize. That at least was what my sub-atomic-physics professor told me, and he works at Cern. He knows what he's talking about.
Any macroscopic amount of antimatter is so hideously dangerous to handle, that I can't imagine that it will be stored or produced anywhere on or even NEAR the Earth.
They will have to produce and store it in orbit.
And not even in Earth orbit, but rather in Moon orbit.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
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UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
all I am saying is if a little plutonium upsets people imagine how they would protest a anit-matter launch that could prolly destroy the state of Flordia
;)
Well, now that you put it that way, it has my wholehearted support!
Hell, I'd send 'em even MORE money if one of those launches could take out California
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
No message here, either :)
Nothing gets out of sun's core fast, and that's where the fusion happens. Even the photons need about a million years until they reach the surface because of the dense gas. If there were any usable anti-particles created there, they wouldn't get far.
Actually the neutrinos get out without being slowed down, IIRC they are even anti-particles. But apart from their scientific value they are quite worthless.
At least anti-hydrogen was built, I don't know if they succeeded with heavier elements.
That still wouldn't solve any storage problems. It may be electrically neutral, but as soon as it comes to contact with a common atom, the electrons and positrons around the nucleus would annihilate and then the anti-matter nucleus would shoot straight at the matter nucleus and also be annihilated.
Yep, putting anti-matter into a storage ring wouldn't mean that it will stay there forever. But with a good enough vacuum you can keep it long enough so that you can use it. If in doubt, take an extra portion for safety.
Be careful, you don't want anyone farting on the antimatter, it might cause an explosion the likes of which have never been seen outside of drunken beer bash BBQs.
Yes, antimatter as it is currently produced is quite inefficient. However, it is the most compact fuel that exists (in fact, it's the most compact fuel that can exist), so you don't need a whole lot of it. Since your efficiency starts going down exponentially once the mass of fuel is similar to the mass of the payload (and all current rockets are way beyond that point), even a very small amount of antimatter can replace an awful lot of fuel. Of course, what we really ought to be doing is to work for better antimatter manufacturing techniques -- now there is an example on what until recently was nothing but "pie in the sky" basic research now having an obvious application.
The laser accelerator you link sounds very interesting, and if it becomes widely used, my wild guess is that it could reduce the cost of the accelerator by maybe an order of magnatude (if you're lucky). But we're still talking a huge chunk of change, and then there's all the hardware to collide the beam with a fixed target and filter the products for anti-protons, the cost of which isn't changed by having a cheaper accelerator.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Antiprotons are currently created by slamming a proton beam into a fixed target (Beryllium, IIRC), which creates a shower of hadronic junk. A very small fraction of that is antiprotons. The junk is filtered to keep the antiprotons, and dump the rest. It's an extremely inefficent and expensive process.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Or, there's the California definition:
For what it's worth, all full-auto weapons (capable of firing multiple bullets in sequence with a single trigger-pull) have been heavily regulated in America since the 1930s.
Clary, I guess this just means I'm agreeing with you...
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
According to our current base of knowledge of physics, antimatter is the end all of power generation. As far as propulsion goes, the biggest, baddest anti-matter drive that we can build can would only theoretically be able to travel us just shy of 1/2 the speed of light.
Actually, you can get to as high a speed as you like, just like with any other reaction drive. It just takes exponentially more fuel (the 1/e point for the cargo:total mass ratio happens when your ship momentum per unit mass equals the exhaust momentum per unit mass ("momentum per unit mass" is just velocity, for non-relativistic speeds)).
As for being the "end all of power generation", you're ignoring efficiency of power capture. Most of the energy from matter/antimatter annihilation comes out as gamma rays. You can't focus or reflect gamma rays. The best you could do for an antimatter rocket would be to use a big block of concrete to absorb all of the gamma rays going in one direction, pushing the block (and ship) in the other direction. This is far from being perfectly efficient.
Some proposed schemes use the mesons and other crud produced by proton/antiproton annihilations as reaction mass, directing them with magnetic fields, but most of the annihilation energy still goes into gamma rays, so you're only capturing a small fraction of the energy for useful thrust.
According to my own calculations, you *just might* be able to build a fusion drive that's more efficient in practical use than an antimatter drive (because it's not stuck with the very low thrust per unit energy of a photon drive, and can divert most or all of its exhaust in useful directions). Regardless of which is more efficient in practical use, fusion drives will be much, much, much cheaper (production efficiency for antiprotons is *extremely* horrible, and won't be getting much better).
All of this is ignoring drives that use an external power source, like laser sails or the Bussard ramjets mentioned by another poster.
Found this late while browsing through your comment history for signal processing posts. Hopefully you check for replies now and then. A couple of pieces of relevant information:
Indeed, its manufacture is highly inefficient. In fact, its maximum possible manufacturing efficiency is a mere 50% yield, and such a yeild is beyond the wildest expectations of most scientists. But, there is a much greater inefficiency involved here (actually two of them): acceleration energy and relativistic effects.
The problem is that antiproton production is something like a million-to-one inefficient. You could still do it, but it would cost far less just to build a laser array to remotely propel a solar sail (for interstellar travel), or to use fusion or fission drives (for interplanetary travel).
Assuming 100%-efficient magical synthesis of antimatter from electrical energy at 10 cents per kW/hr, it would cost $2.5 trillion per tonne. An antimatter-powered ship capable of interstellar flight within a lifetime would need to have about half its weight as fuel. Antimatter drives have great mass efficiency, but horrible energy efficiency. They work as photon drives; most of your momentum comes out as gamma rays, even with meson production from the antiproton reactions.
This gives a fuel cost of about $1.25 trillion per tonne of unfuelled craft weight (only half of the fuel is antimatter).
Plugging in realistic numbers for the cost of antimatter production gives quintillions of dollars. An array of lasers the diameter of Neptune still costs less.
Re. relativistic effects, you can avoid most of them by limiting your craft velocity to, say, 0.7-0.8c. That gives you a factor of about 1.5 mass increase and time dilation, which doesn't throw off your numbers much.
Re. carrying your reaction mass with you, you do indeed require exponentially more mass to gain velocity once your fuel mass dominates craft mass. What this in practice means is that instead of picking a speed and finding the required fuel ratio, you should pick a feasible fuel ratio and then find the resulting speed.
It turns out that a really-well-engineered fusion drive could give you tolerable interstellar travel times (a few generations), for far less cost than an antimatter drive. Or, you could use externally powered systems like solar sails or Bussard ramjets and still save money. The laser sail, at least, could be built with current technology (though it's still expensive as heck).
For interplanetary travel, a fission or fusion drive is more than adequate.
Thus, I don't think that antimatter will ever be a practical spacecraft fuel.
Now, a real issue to be investigated from the sun is (and, please, all ye experts on particle accelerators and animatter production, step in and comment (probably badly, sure, but its an idea)) whether or not you could produce antimatter from solar rays, which travel at a good percentage of the speed of light (sorry, no numbers on me right now). Most high-energy particle emissions from the sun are light nucleii, such as hydrogen and helium, but the sun does eject some denser nucleii. It'd be a free source of high-energy collisions, and you might be able to filter anitmatter from that in a fairly simple, low-weight, free-power (the main reason), low maintinence method, if you could set up simple automation.
The problem is that in order to produce antiprotons, you need particle energies greater than twice the rest mass of a proton - i.e. greater than about 2 GeV. The particles in the corona and solar wind are almost all of far lower energy, if I understand correctly.
I've never heard of lunar mass drivers before, but I'm quite interested :) Care to elaborate?
A mass driver is a ground-based device that accelerates cargo to escape speeds. Usually they're based on electrical, magnetic, or electromagentic principles (configured as giant railguns, coilguns, or other such devices).
The advantage to this is that you don't need to carry any fuel at all with your cargo, so the only energy consumed is that imparted to the useful cargo. This would be atou 60 MJ/kg launching from Earth, or about 3 MJ/kg launching from the moon.
On Earth, you'd have to worry about heat shielding on the cargo, keeping a barrel around the launch path so you can take out the air or otherwise reduce turbulence, powering the device, and just finding somewhere to put it. On the moon, you have no atmosphere to interfere with things, lots of space to build, and lots of space for solar power generators of various types. Sending material from the lunar surface to lunar orbit or interplanetary space is beautifully easy. This is why the moon is often proposed as a source of raw materials for space-based construction.
Moving material in from the asteroid belt would be expensive, because there's a great difference in gravitational potential energy between the belt and earth's orbit. You could use a near-earth asteroid to reduce this problem, but the moon's in a very convenient location and facilities there would be useful for many purposes, so IMO it's probably the best choice to supply any construction near Earth.
Re. mining, it would actually be pretty easy to attach a mining facility to an asteroid, either on the surface or inside the asteroid itself.
If the asteroid is in danger of crumbling, you can always turn some of its material into fiberglass rope and wrap the asteroid in webbing to keep material from drifting.
The weak gravity of the asteroid itself is still enough to cause most crumbled material to return eventually (a few hours for a medium-sized asteroid).
The way we put men on the moon would be like 15th-century Europeans building a giant slingshot to shoot explorers over the Atlantic. It's an incredible achievement, and it's something to be proud of, but it's not useful.
Today, we have the technology, knowledge, and infrastructure to do it right. We just don't want to go badly enough.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It's called time dialation jackass. The closer something gets to the speed of light the more ship relative time dialates compared to Earth relative time. If you were traveling at 99.99999%c to someplace. It would seem to you only a couple years went by but to somebody on Earth LOTS of years would have gone by. Fast clocks run slow.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Stop crying about antimatter for chrissakes. It would take beaucoup amounts of it to turn into some sort of continent destroying weapon. And a funny thing about particle annihilations is THE VAST AMOUNT OF GAMMA RADIATION RELEASED which basically ionizes just about everything. High energy gamma rays can cause stuff to start transmuting, one caveat of antimatter ractions setting off lithium hydride fuel pellets is the lead shielding slowly starts transmuting into gold after a while and you also end up with fucked up equipment do to the Cherenkov effect. So anyways, antimatter bombs would cost upwards of a hundred billion dollars to produce just one. Even if AM production increased tenfold the price wouldn't drop too much. So a hundred billion dollars for a 40Mt bomb thats not quite as useful as a clean fusion bomb? Yeah right.
Aside from it not being used as a bomb, antimatter is a very good idea for use in spacecraft. It is the only way to get the energy you need for really long distance travel. And of fucking course any long term exploration projects will have AM production facilities in orbit, not because they're afraid of blowing themselves up but because its more efficient to not have to drag a heavy AM containment bottle up through the atmosphere. I think this will probably take around 50 years even if you account for increased levels of technology. The transition manned orbital stations to high tech production facilities on an extra terrestrial body is very large and requires a good deal of infrastructure to be built up. Before you have regular lunar travel you need craft capable of cheap hypersonic flight; this is the first step which gets alot of mass out of the signifigant part of the atmosphere. Once we're regularly scheduling flights from New York to Tokyo that take under two hours we'll have the capability to start building permenant and industrialized lunar bases. This is still 15 to 20 years off. We're well on our way but it will take time because there is little driving need to enter space in any hardcore fashion; political pressure got us to the moon. In an era of cooperation in space we'll be hard pressed to launch any crash space development projects in the near future. By the way a Saturn-V rocket carries no typical propellent, merely a pressurized container filled with hot air collected from the general hubub caused over the soviets beating the Americans into space.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
FYI, it's because I have a Karma of over 25 so anything I post automatically gets a +1 rating right from the start (unless I check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box, as I did for this post, since it's not on the article topic). That post wasn't moderated at all, or there would have been a reason given after the number.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
It's those pesky social engineering issues again. If people are apt to go critical over nuclear power (like I mentioned in comments to the Mars and coffee story a couple weeks back), just think how they'll react to a proposal like this after decades of science fiction and Star Trek conditioning them to think of antimatter as insanely dangerous.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Because that's useful.
-k
this is known, as far as i can recall,
as a DYson drive. Yup, just like the guy who thought up the solar dyson sphere.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
It's worth noting that an antimatter drive would be efficient in the same way that an electric car is a zero-emission vehicle.
Once the electricity is in the car or the antimatter in the spacecraft, the system is very efficient/nonpolluting, but the preparatory process of making the electricity/antimatter is still fraught with regular industrial-age inefficiency and pollution. Of course, for a spacecraft this is ideal, as it's a lot more effective to have all the hardware on the ground instead of carrying it with you. I only say this to forestall people talking about such a drive as an ecologically friendly alternative.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Will it ?? Duration of a spaceflight depends on three variables: orbital path chosen, mass of probe, and the level of accelleration required.
Lets consider a trip to the "heart" of the Oort Cloud, roughly 20 trillion Km out. In such a trip, Earth-Sun distance is trivial. Accellerate halfway, flip, decelerate. Assume flip time is trivial.
At 10m/sec^2, it's a bit under 3 years (~1035 days). At 1m/sec^2, it's around 9 years (~3270 days).
Real question is, what kind of acceleration can you get for such a drive, and how much antimatter will you need for antimatter-assisted fission/fusion to sustain such accelerations over the required time. . .
I believe a school teahcer and a couple of students were killed or injured with the balloon bomb.
But I agree with most of your points. If they hadn't used the bombs, the war in Japan would have been something like Vietnam. Could have been worse in order of magnitude (for both the Japanese and Americans). The battle in Okinawa should also be in perspective when we deal with the decision to use the bombs. If I were in charge of American military, I wouldn't dare to risk my soldiers' life to fight with such a military force who do not care the life of enemies, themselves and even the civilians they are supposed to protect.
Besides, I am not sure if my father could have survived if the war had not ended in August 1945. He was 14 and his brother (a couple of years older) was being trained for a suicide attack by a wooden boat.
From what I hear, there was a bigger chance of being starved to death than being killed by bombing, if the war had prolonged.
He was in Nagasaki on that day. He was supposed to get rations for his family. He was pulling a cart near downtown Nagasaki, when he saw a lone B-29 (should have been three, but he only saw one) flying away after releasing what looked like a canister with a parachute.
Next thing he knew was that he was blown to a narrow path between buildings by a blast. (Well, this actually saved his life.) He thought there was a bomb exploded right next to him, which it didn't. It was 2.5 km away.
He was keeping a journal in those days, and he had an entry for that day. The most impressing thing I read there was his completing remark:
``What a shame I could not get the ration.''
They were starving, and he did not know the significane of the event he was experiencing. Or, being able to eat was what survival was for him.
I do not want to judge what happened in the history. But I feel a little wierd that my existence might be dependent on what killed 150,000 people with a single blast.
Despite a 100% matter to energy conversion rate antimatter has got to be one of the most inefficient fuel sources out there when you look at the entire picture! We'd be conserving resources by making coal-powered spaceships...
:-)
But when you think of the sheer amount of fuel necessary to brute force REALLY long-distance missions, the numbers quickly expand exponentially. I keep thinking how big a rocket would be required to lift a saturn-5 into orbit.
However with antimatter, a kg of antimatter would take you virtually anywhere in the universe and back. Some missions would never be achievable within a human lifespan without antimatter, but with antimatter, high acceleration could be maintained for long long periods of time, significantly shortening the journey.
So looking at the entire (long-term) picture, antimatter seems like the answer.
Of course, if we can find replenishable sources of coal on other planets, maybe we'd better go that route...
Paul
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Sorry, math and physiks is not my strong suit> , but are you saying that Antimatter is only eleven times more powerful/efficient than rocket engines?(5000/452=11.06)?
11X is not so many :/ -- even my cdromz is now up to 56X!! Maybe we can use CDROMZ drives for omni-planet exploration one day (when they get to 1,000,000X!! :>)
one day... :>
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
There are other sides to this though. Eventually, as time and technology progresses, it will become a lot cheaper than it is today to produce anti-matter in quantities sufficient to fuel huge numbers of missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Such technology shouldn't be ditched because of expense when it's potential is so huge.
As regards the potential use to the military, increased fuel economy in motor vehicles is also beneficial to the military... but because it benefits everybody else also, work in this area continues apace. Nuclear power, much as I dislike it, is clean and efficient and yes it produces a byproduct that can be used in weapons of mass destruction.
We can't really complain about the potential military uses of new technologies when assault weapons are on sale to Joe Soap in the worlds more powerful country.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
"civilian deaths from a blockade would have been much higher than from the two atom bombs."
Except of course for the effects of radiation that we probably didn't anticipate (there wasn't enough time to bomb Native Americans in New Mexico over several generations to see the effects, oh well). So AFAIK we basically doomed several generations to all sorts of f*cked up genetic problems.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"The balloon idea depended on the time of year: summer."
Don't forget, us Americans had some pretty cockamamie ideas too. For instance, taping explosives to bats...yes *BATS*...and sending them over to Japan. The idea was that since most Japanese buildings were made from light wood and paper, that we could burn them down easily.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
But .5 times the speed of light still gets you across solarsystem in 20 hours and even if we assume constant acceleration of 1m/s^2 you can go from earth to pluto in one month. I think that's pretty impressive compared to 10 years on current technology.
While we're all talking about potential military misuse of the technology and the destructive power of antimatter, aren't we overlooking one of the coolest things about this research? The second page of the article talked about one of the side-effects of antimatter production was the creation of O-15 which is used in PET scans.
Storage of antimatter is a challenging task, but reaps several benefits. One of which is the generation of O15, a radioisotope used for Positron Emission Tomagraphy (PET) of the human brain. Currently, only certain research hospitals across the world have the ability to create Oxygen-15. Due to its portability, a "radioisotope generator" antimatter trap may be transported to more remote areas for patients who cannot reach these hospitals. A second medical application concerns antiproton radiotherapy of tumors. The NASA Penning trap is being designed with these medical applications in mind.
This fact would potentially offset some of the negatives that antimatter has.
It amazes me the wonderful side-benefits we get from basic research and space research sometimes. Who would have thought that research on propulsion would provide an alternative means to create a rare but medically necessary element in significant quantities?
I seem to recall writing a report on the Penn State research about 4 or 5 years ago... kinda old news.
at least it's a 43 Megaton CLEAN explosion, vs a glow-in-the-dark-til-Y3K explosion.. Still a problem, but at least it's over in a few milliseconds :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
It was called Project Orion. It ran for several years in the late 50s and early 60s and was more or less killed off by the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.
There was a considerable amount of R&D work, including building of at least one prototype (a scale model, using conventional explosives). IIRC, the Coca-Cola folks provided some expertise in desigining the mechanism to store & release the bombs; vending machines have been doing this for many years. One wonders how much change the pilot would have to carry for a trip to Alpha Centauri...
What's got me worried is the intense gamma ray burst that is (allegedly) emitted from a matter / antimatter reaction.
With a bit of shielding, you could get some astronauts there, but they'd end up with Funny Looking Kids (tm).
According to our current base of knowledge of physics, antimatter is the end all of power generation. As far as propulsion goes, the biggest, baddest anti-matter drive that we can build can would only theoretically be able to travel us just shy of 1/2 the speed of light. This assumes the fuel to generate the acceleration is carried by the drive. Obviously, we'll need to cheat relativity somewhere to get around this little problem or devise methods of acceleration which don't carry fuel.
Someone you trust is one of us.
you won't sent a probe with constant acceleration to the Ooort cloudes. ... not 50 years.
BTW: if you would do it, you would need less than a year to reach them
Constant acceleration is interesting for manned missions, giving some artificial gravity.
Of course for a probe send to Alpha Centauri you liked it to be there fast, but you pointed out correctly that you would need an imense amount of AM to have it under constant acceleration. Also you ned some extra mass, like water, as the propellant. Very fast you have hughe masses again.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's really too bad, because we had the chance to show the world a true "good guys vs bad guys" scenario, and we flubbed it
I really hate this half ass apologetic bullshit
We would have been completely justified in carpet bombing the entire country and killing every single Japanese citizen if it would have saved a single Allied life.
The thing the apologists always forget is that this was their fucking war
They murdered relatives of mine. Please spare me the bullshit about the innocent civilians as well. They put their government in power and they wanted this war. Their atrocities in Manchuria were as bad if not worse than what the Nazi's did. And don't even talk about their treatment of prisoners of war. They were (and still are to a point) absolutely convinced that it didn't matter what they did to these "subhumans" since they were so superior.
It is only the fact that the Chinese didn't have the same pull in Congress as the Jewish community that allowed them to this day to avoid responsibility for their actions.
We (the US) showed them far beyond an ideal good guys vs bad guys scenario. We Rebuilt their fucking country for them, covered all their bills, taught them how to succeed in the modern world, provide their defense. Who the fuck else in the history of the world has done anything approaching that level of charity?!?
If we had treated them fairly for their disgusting crimes against humanity, treachery, and cowardice we would have done as the Romans in Carthage and devestated their land so that nothing would ever grow there again.
But we didn't do a fucking thing out of vengeance. If they had won the war (and the after war against Germany cause you know that fight would have happened) then we (non-japanese) would all be dead or enslaved right now. They got off far easier than they deserved.
---CONFLICT!!---
An interplanetary spaceship called "ICANN" ?
Is this some sort of B Ark ?
"How's the new confinement chamber coming along?"
"Well... there's good news and there's bad news."
"What's the good news?"
"Cheap space travel for all."
"...and the bad?"
"Ermm... You'll never know about it..."
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
Anti-matter propulsion, neural-nanonics, h4wt habitat chyks, Norfolk tears... Bring it all on! Except for the undead. They might ruin it for the good kids.
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
I think you'll find that you are out by a factor of 1000. The post said 10nano-grammes - not 10nano-kilos. The other point is that should it not be 2x E=mc^2 for AM conversion - as there is 10^-9 grammes of anti-matter and the equivalent matter converted to energy.
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
Penning trap + diagram
Ah, they were suicide balloonists, trained to float through the skys like a deadly horde of jellyfish, waiting for the chance to swoop down on helpless American fighters and explode.
I sure hope that your attempt at humor since at the time there were two reported cases of these balloons making it to America. PBS' Nova did a special on this back in the early 90s (or late 80s) on the one that killed a group of people in the Pacific North West.
Anyway, on topic; I think that it's about time that the insurance companies started to take a greater look at the risks of the networked machine. Since the article didn't go into too much detail on how the risk was asset, I'm sure that an NT box behind a properly configured firewall would have the same low-low rates as a Linux box.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Wouldnt you be crushed by your own wieght??
I remember when we had the ability to put men on the moon. makes me feel old.
_O_
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Ok, first off, a number of people seem to be missing the point on this article (largely because most of them read little more than the introduction, if they made it through that), so I figured I'd cover some of the details better.
:) ). In a chaotic sea of reactions such as the sun, yes, you'll get a little antimatter, and it'll go away just as quickly. Of course, you could harness solar energy to produce antimatter by having a manufacturing station near the sun, but you could harness that energy for a lot of other things too, and we get to the economic feasability issue discussed in the last paragraph.
:) I don't see economic viability in bringing it into space at this point.
Misconception 1: Antimatter is a poor choice for a propellant because its manufacture is inefficient.
Indeed, its manufacture is highly inefficient. In fact, its maximum possible manufacturing efficiency is a mere 50% yield, and such a yeild is beyond the wildest expectations of most scientists. But, there is a much greater inefficiency involved here (actually two of them): acceleration energy and relativistic effects. Picture a system where you have 10% of the mass as propellant. Then, you're wasting 10% of your energy merely accelerating the propellant (roughly - the propellant, naturally, will decrease in volume). Now, picture a system where 99% of the mass is propellant. That's a 99% energy loss. Well, even at those weight levels, the best chemical propellants can't get you very fast. To make matters worse, we have relativistic effects which, the faster you go, the larger portion of energy it takes to accelerate you. At 1/2c, energy requirements are doubled. So, mass is an incredibly critical thing. In addition, the speed exhaust particles are propelled is, if anything, more critical, because it sets a maximum theoretical speed for the craft - and for chemical rockets, it is incredibly slow. And to get close to that speed requires massive waste.
Misconception 2: Antimatter is a great concept for a weapon.
In actuality, no. Due to the huge manufacturing difficulties mentioned before, it is a poor weapons concept. Even with the proposed efficiency increases, manufacture is expected to cost several billion per gram (a gram of antimatter has roughly the energy potential of 27 of the space shuttle's solid booster rockets). This level of explosive power doesn't really compare at all to a boosted thermonuclear weapon, which isn't that incredibly expensive to build (U235, for boosting, is incredibly cheap, and the rest is a standard hydrogen bomb core). It isn't even that good of an idea for a small stealth weapon, given our current scientific knowledge. Containment for an amount of antimatter that would be enough to take out merely a building hasn't been developed; the smallest containment systems we have for antiprotons are roughly 2m by 1m by 1m. You'd be better off with conventional explosives.
Misconception 3: Antimatter storage is dangerous
Not with the amount we're dealing with. The mars mission proposals were planning to use 100 micrograms of antimatter, to start fission/fusion in tiny spheres. If it were to detonate, it'd be a smaller explosion than the challenger had, to say the least. The real worry would be the fissionable material causing a chernobyl-like effect apon a small area (this has happened in the past when we've had nuclear weapons accidentally "detonate" - not a nuclear explosion, of course, but a conventional explosion which scatters the radioactive material around). There'd be no need to do anything like "hiding it behind the moon". We don't worry about space shuttles and satelites blowing up many miles above us. We need to worry even less about this.
Silly Misconception Someone Made: Antimatter should be manufactured in space so we don't have to ship it up.
The main concern with shipping things up to space is the mass requirement. The antimatter we're dealing with has almost no mass, relatively - only its containment units do, and they'd need to be brought up even if the antimatter was being produced in space - in addition to *an entire antimatter generation facility*, personell to run it and maintain it, power generation, etc... oy, what an economic nightmare! There are much better things to work on producing in space.
As for the issue of "converting solar energy to antimatter", well, that's a tricky question. The sun does not release antimatter; that'd be silly. Antimatter has this lovely habit of detonating virtually instant with regular matter (that's why we love it so!
Now, a real issue to be investigated from the sun is (and, please, all ye experts on particle accelerators and animatter production, step in and comment (probably badly, sure, but its an idea)) whether or not you could produce antimatter from solar rays, which travel at a good percentage of the speed of light (sorry, no numbers on me right now). Most high-energy particle emissions from the sun are light nucleii, such as hydrogen and helium, but the sun does eject some denser nucleii. It'd be a free source of high-energy collisions, and you might be able to filter anitmatter from that in a fairly simple, low-weight, free-power (the main reason), low maintinence method, if you could set up simple automation. It'd need to automatically stabilize its orbit and adjust its distance from the sun according to conditions, to eject containers from earth when its on the right trajectory, etc, but it is doable. But, in reality, I recommend sticking with antimatter production on earth for now
- Rei
Look at me, still talking while there's science to do.
>I've never quite understood this - how can you >store antimatter, why don't the >particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate each >other? I'm grasping at nothingness here, but >I've always visualized antimatter being stored >as a non-gas in a vacuum, out of contact with >the container.
The trick is to use magnetic confinement, don't allow the antimatter to touch the container.
Problem is : antimatter produced in accellerators is insanely hot, so you need extremely strong magnetic fields to confine it, at least until you can cool it down. We'll have "regular" nuclear fusion figured out a long time before we can reliably produce antimatter in significant quantities. I'm not even going to mention the safety issues connected to storing considerable amounts of antimatter. Any failure of the confinement field would result in a big badaboom (making Hiroshima look like a fart in a bottle...) - you wouldn't have to much trouble with radiation afterwards though, but when you're vaporised, you tend not to care too much...
>>Another reason for dropping the second bomb was that Stalin declared war on Japan just after the Hiroshima bombing, and immediately attacked Japanese positions on mainland Asia.
Yes, this is probably one of the least mentioned reasons that the Imperial Japanese actually did surrender; fear of the Russian invasion. Many generals would have fought to the death, even after the bombs, but they feared being totally conquered by the Soviets. AFAIK there was only one large battle between the Japanese and the Soviets, (in China?) and the Japanese overwhelmingly lost. After that they were very intimidated and preferred the Americans as enemies.
If Germany and Japan had truly committed to conquering the Soviet Union, who knows how the world would be now? Would all of Asia and Europe be one big Axis empire?
Yes state elites tend to go for more funds/power.
As such, the time must come when you either accept your servitude to the State, or reclaim your freedom through force of arms.
There is no need to fight the state when you control it. Democracy was designed for exactly that purpose. If you think that you have lost the control over the government to state elites, then ask yourself why you lost that battle. Maybe strategic mistakes where made?
The right to bear arms hasn't prevented the centralising of power in the american state in the past century. Perhaps guns give you power versus your fellow citizens (criminal or not) but hardly versus the state.
Remember in a democracy you (& the rest of the citizens) are the boss and the state is your tool.
--
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.
If you have unsafe parts in your town then do something about it. It is not normal.
If you dont like the way the police acts then do something about it. You employ them.
And no, giving out guns to senile old men is not going to make the world a safer place.
--
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.
Could you define assault weapon? The US Congress has had a hard time doing it, resorting to listing specific weapons by make and model, or enumerating seemingly irrelevant features like flash suppressors and bayonet lugs.
Hint: If you were going to say an assault weapon is a machine gun, then you miss the point. A military person might expect an assault weapon to be capable of fully automatic fire, but machine guns are not the target of the recent "assault weapon" furor in the US. Fully automatic firearms are already so heavily regulated in the US that it is inpractical for most citizens to own them.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I vote that they change 'Mostly Harmless' to 'Dumber than dirt.'
Another day closer to redwood heaven
As to anti-matter being feasible, no, not now. However, there's a sci-fi book written by Charles Pellegrino and James Powell called Flying to Valhalla in which they outline how to build an anti-matter starship.
Dr. Powell is the co-inventor of maglev trains and has the background to cover the issues you raise, and several others. At the back of the book, he lays out a design for the ship and associated technologies. He suggests using robots to build solar arrays on Mercury to provide the necessary power to manufacture and store the anti-matter. The starship is assembled in space so the anti-matter doesn't get anywhere near earth.
Without ruining the story, it turns out that the starship can be used as either a transport or as a weapon. Powell calculates that a space-shuttle sized craft hitting a planet at starship speeds would incinerate half the planet. Not from the anti-matter but just the stored kinetic energy. Moreover, at the speed it's moving, there's nothing you can do. By the time you think you know where it is, it's somewhere else. No missile defense is feasible (not that one can exist today...) If our children or grandchildren choose to misuse anti-matter, then we're all out of the gene-pool game. OTOH, if they choose wisely, anti-matter may actually be a technology that saves their butts.
If it all sounds fantastic, well it is. But then Buck Roger's trips to the moon were fantastic in the 30's. Startrek communicators were far-fetched in the 60's. A lot of the technology you take for granted was pie in the sky in the past.
Well, the last time something was called ICANN, they couldn't. I just hope these guys can...
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
John Wheeler "live[s] for the day when [he] can see a drop of liquid positronium (electrons and positrons)". As do I.
I want my flying cars!
Seems like the development of "cool stuff" has taken to a microsoft tempo.
Shuffle
shuffle
shuffle.
Chicks wearing "futuristic" clothes would kick ass too!
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I've never quite understood this - how can you store antimatter, why don't the particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate each other? I'm grasping at nothingness here, but I've always visualized antimatter being stored as a non-gas in a vacuum, out of contact with the container.
Furthermore, how is it possible to utilize antimatter for propulsion? From the method mentioned in the article, I'd imagine the system to keep the anitmatter isolated while the combustion occurs would be insanely complex - or beautifully simple. Of course, 100 milligrams of fuel would offset that particular downside!
So many questions...
Thanks,
-Medgur
You make it sound like the Japanese made a preemptive strike on urban suburbia - not the defensive tactic they actual employ.
Whenever I hear this justification, of how the American troops were inocently sitting by when they were attacked, and how the nuke was the only justifiable counter attack.
Let's look at it from the Japanese perspective instead: The Americans, a nation whose culture and political status conflicts with your current one, has just moved most of, if not all of it's Pacific naval fleet within striking distance of your homeland. Now, you could sit by and wait for the attack, or strike early and strike hard. What would you do?
There were no innocents here.
Now, I can understand why the Americans dropped the nuke, their pacific forces had been landed a shattering blow by the attack, and the rest of their military was already stretched a little thin. So, in order to stop a possibly devistating blow against America itself, the nuke was dropped.
I understand the reasons, but I can't justify them.
There is no way to describe this event beyond a single word: Genocide. Like it or not, hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered,(millions maybe, I don't know the number off the top of my head) and many more dying long after the actual event.
There was a great miniseries about this, aptly titled "Hiroshima", I recommend it whole-heartedly.
-Medgur
And if they attempted to make "Shrek" with the computers of the seventies, it would take forever, too. I think technological advances are expected.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Segmentation fault: warp core dumped.
Run the numbers. The amount of energy in any given amount of AM is given by:
E = m*c^2
You have on the order of 10^-9 kilos of antimatter, and c ~= 3*10^8, so c^2 ~= 9*10^16. Therefore, the amount of energy is on the order of 10^(16-9) = 10^7 joules.
So, if you have a spontaneous release of all the antimatter currently in existence, you're talking about the release of a few megajoules of gamma rays. Not too serious, unless you're standing right next to it or are in the immediate vicinity. Certainly not on the order of a tac nuke.
I think you'll find that you are out by a factor of 1000.
Oops. My bad. Should be 10^-12.
The other point is that should it not be 2x E=mc^2 for AM conversion - as there is 10^-9 grammes of anti-matter and the equivalent matter converted to energy.
That shouldn't (generally speaking) affect the order of magnitude of the amount of energy produced. Depending on the exact numbers, you'll only get an increase of a factor of 10.
Just as a computer was very cost prohibitive when it was started, this is also cost prohbitive in its start. Computers now save millions of dollars, make us more efficent, and give us many headaches.
This will be a start for the future of antimatter. We will have a better idea how to hanis the power, and know the problems with it. While it is quite costly to manufacture on Earth, there is a large amount of it in the universe. When/if we are able to capture it, we will have an extremly efficent machine.
R&D is expensive, but it has its grand rewards.
Their offices were on Ursa Minor Beta.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
i wish they would work on building prototypes of a better football team.
Arm yourself with knowledge.
I don't think I would call this a troll. A few comments could be seen that way. But all in all I would say that is a fair alternate view point.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
... when plutonium drops into the atmsphere, it may be shattered, killing several million people by cancer. AM, however, would - did it scatter - cause a rather violent fireball high up in the atmosphere or if it reached the surface as a whole, cause a rather big explosion. Counting in the fact that only a very minor part of the earth is actually populated, this would mean a greatly reduced risk.
An example of this might be the Tunguska meteorite that lait waste quite some area, killing only one or two people. Now imagine the potential had it consisted of plutonium; the meteorite exploded in midair, so the dust would have been blown only god knows where and it would probably have caused a lot more pain than the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did; and wer're still sorry about these.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
On the other hand it would be possible to make the ultimate in clean bombs, a microfusion powered hydrogen bomb. Remove fission from the equation and you have a greatly reduced half life.
Actually, many of Japan's later-war aircraft were made from wood... wooden frames, paper/canvas siding. All in the interests of conserving resources. When you're running kamikaze's, you're not relying on the plane impact to do the damage, rather the large set of explosives carried. I forget the names, but several of these (Ohno's?) were actually carried into the air by Japanese bombers, and then released when near American fleets; at which point the kamikaze would attempt to pilot his wooden plane at a carrier.
Nope, the Japanese actually used unmanned balloons to attack the US during WWII... and they did so successfully (more or less). They used helium balloons carrying explosives, and launched them into the jetstream, which runs over the Pacific towards N.America. They designed the balloons to head towards the forests of the western USA, and then descend and detonate. The idea was to ignite massive forest fires that would consume American resources to fight. Several of these balloons actually made it across and exploded. What the Japanese didn't understand, however, was how big these forests are in the Pacific Northwest/Sierras/Rockies. Dry as a summer might get, it's not going to create that kind of firestorm... As a side note, one of these actually killed a family... the balloon exploded near their car.
I don't want to get into a whole thing over why the second bomb was dropped. The political leadership of the Allies decided on unconditional victory, and it's the job of the military to achieve that. If they determine that the best way to do that is to drop an atomic bomb, then that's what happens. The dropping of the atomic bomb, therefore, was a political decision at heart. You may decide that you don't agree with the military's assessment that it was the best choice, but you have the benefit of hindsight. They didn't.That aside, I don't think that the reasoning was poor. We had seen the levels of casualties that the Japanese were willing to sustain. We also knew the levels of casualties that we were willing to take. We were not the Russians, who accepted their horrendous losses to the Germans in WWII because they had been invaded. The US was never at risk, so why would we be willing to sacrafice a million GI's for Japan? (that was the estimate of AMERICAN losses, not total) Furthermore, the losses to the Atomic Bomb were in the region of 35,000 (IIRC). The number of civilian losses in the Tokyo firebombings that occurred a few weeks earlier were in the region of 250,000. Order of magnitude higher. If Japanese leadership was willing to continue the war after that, why would the loss of 35,000 faze them?
BTW, if you want to debate anything about Allied strategy,
1 - Talk about the decision to conduct 'strategic bombing... not the decision to drop 'the bomb'
2 - This probably isn't the forum for it...
Until about 5 years ago, the general consensus in science was that Robert Feynmann, and K. Eric Drexler were rather odd ducks. After all, they claimed that atoms could be manipulated like Legos! What self-respecting physicist would listen to such madmen? Actually we all do now. Nanotech is a serious science with serious intentions. Antimatter is dangerous. So is taking a shower, just ask a life insurance company which one the pay more claims for. As with all human endeavor, the goal must be capable of justifying the costs. Is the ability to seed the galaxy with human curiosity and intelligence worth the risks of damaging or destroying the planet? Couldnt a big rock we didnt see do the same thing, with no potential for reward? We have all our eggs in one small, insignificant basket.
Only tyrants and oppressors need fear a well armed populace.
As regards the potential use to the military, increased fuel economy in motor vehicles is also beneficial to the military... but because it benefits everybody else also, work in this area continues apace. Nuclear power, much as I dislike it, is clean and efficient and yes it produces a byproduct that can be used in weapons of mass destruction.
That's true, but history has shown that every weapon needs to be demonstrated at least once by its creators. There was no need to drop nukes on Japan and yet we did it - the ultimate field test, every general's dream.
We can't really complain about the potential military uses of new technologies when assault weapons are on sale to Joe Soap in the worlds more powerful country.
The nature of Government is to accumulate power at the expense of the freedom of its citizens. As such, the time must come when you either accept your servitude to the State, or reclaim your freedom through force of arms. A country in which there is no right to bear arms is one in which the Government has already taken a huge step towards control.
Just look at Switzerland - the oldest democracy, and they are required to be armed.
Looking back to the past from the present, we tend to forget the psychology of the day, instead seeing events through a filter of modern opinion and judgement.
Or in your case, through the filter of modern American "history," which many people have noted is more an exercise in revisionism than genuine research.
The Japanese (at least their military) were fanatical.
It's funny how when this trait is present in our armies, we call it "courage" or "tenacity" isn't it?
Thats why in the end of the war they had suicide pilots (named after the supernatural forces they believed defended them). They were training civilians, women, to fight the Americans when they came. Running out of metal...
See the contradiction? If they were training all of these suicide pilots, what were they going to suicide in?
Ah, they were suicide balloonists, trained to float through the skys like a deadly horde of jellyfish, waiting for the chance to swoop down on helpless American fighters and explode.
The Emperor knew things were lost, but go read what he said he was dealing with in the end: A pack of generals who were still adamant that they would WIN the war, not just successfully defend Japan.
And they would still have held this belief without any means of offence or defence? Would it have even mattered at this point? Containment would have been slower, but more humane.
But by dropping the atomic bomb, a weapon of unforseen destructive power, their mindset was broken.
Along with a fair old chunk of the civilian population.
So whenever you weep for those slain by the bomb (and you should), dont forget that it likely saved a lot more human life on both sides of the conflict, by bringing a swifter end to the war. (I admit though that I dont know why the second bomb was dropped.)
Yes, it is odd how that has never really been explained now isn't it? Maybe the data from the first one wasn't sufficient... after all, a single datum isn't good statistics.
... that currently, it's really hard to produce - as the article says there are less than 10 nanograms currently produced each year, and the projected yield from Fermilab's new equipment would be no more than 140ng or so. And this requires huge particle accelerators costing billions of dollars.
And even when you've got these going, the cost to run them is prohibitive. And then there's the problem of keeping them stored for long periods at a time and transporting them. Despite a 100% matter to energy conversion rate antimatter has got to be one of the most inefficient fuel sources out there when you look at the entire picture! We'd be conserving resources by making coal-powered spaceships...
So Bush is probably going to love this :)
And an increased capacity to produce antimatter, while way out of our reach at the moment, brings new problems with it. After all, matter-antimatter reactions are far more efficient than even fusion reactions at converting matter to energy, and the military uses for this are obvious, especially to anyone who has read the Night's Dawn trilogy. It wouldn't suprise me if this sort of thing is being investigated somewhere as a speculative new military tool.
Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid. But given the military's obsession with technological superiority, I doubt it...
Well, at least when Penn State implodes in on itself and dissapears, we'll have an idea about what happened.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Ever hear of Jupiter's moons? Very interesting possible destinations by all accounts. Not that a manned mission to Jupiter seems to be a top priority. I think the idea is that if you *had* this technology than you *could* take a manned or robotted trip as far as Jupiter.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
The original CAN was built by NASA in the fifties as the prototype crew module for all of the Apollo missions.
During the late 90s, with the cold war over and budgets dropping, NASA had to make space travel more appealing. As a result, they created the iCAN. Similar to the shuttle, the iCAN's engines, the crew module and all the rest are enclosed in a single module. While it makes upgrading the iCAN harder, it does allow the iCANs to be produced at a lower unit cost. Perhaps the most important advance for the iCAN was the addition of clip on heat shielding that came in a variety of attractive, transulcent shades.
While the iCAN saved NASA at the time, Russia has been coming up with more and more powerful rockets that, while harder to use, have outpaced the once popular iCAN. As a result, NASA have re-released the iCAN in its new iCAN II form. New features include patterned as well as coloured head shielding and the ability for astronauts to listen to and rip MP3s.
Note: You will probably see the iCAN II referred to as the ICAN II. Don't be confused by the capitalisation change, it's simply NASA trying to lose the dated late 90's i feel.
Quote: A follow-up to the ACMF and ICAN is Antiproton Initiated Microfission/fusion (AIM) and AIMStar.
First of all, AOL will sue their asses for trademark dilution and then RIAA for 'possible' copyright infringement. RIAA goes space!
And, then of course Aimster for using confusingly similar trademark.
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
make it sound like the Japanese made a preemptive strike on urban suburbia - not the defensive tactic they actual employ.
Whenever I hear this justification, of how the American troops were inocently sitting by when they were attacked, and how the nuke was the only justifiable counter attack.
Let's look at it from the Japanese perspective instead: The Americans, a nation whose culture and political status conflicts with your current one, has just moved most of, if not all of it's Pacific naval fleet within striking distance of your homeland. Now, you could sit by and wait for the attack, or strike early and strike hard. What would you do?
And you make it sound like Japan was simply a peace loving country that had no interest in doing anything other than defending itself. Pick up any decent history of WWII and actually read it and you'll discover how wrong you are. By 1941 the Japanese had occupied French Indochina, a good portion of China and in less than 4 months slaughtered nearly 400,000 civilians in Nanking.
Now, I can understand why the Americans dropped the nuke, their pacific forces had been landed a shattering blow by the attack, and the rest of their military was already stretched a little thin. So, in order to stop a possibly devistating blow against America itself, the nuke was dropped.
The level of ignorance displayed here is astounding. Yes the American military was badly hurt by the attack, but it was not a crippling blow. Not a single American aircraft carrier was in port at the time, and they were the primary target of the Japanese attack. In fact, of the 18 ships damaged or sunk during the attack 8 of them were back in functional condition by February of 1942, including the battleships Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee; cruisers Honolulu, Helena, and Raleigh and the destroyers Helm and Shaw.
You also imply that the bombs were dropped in order to prevent the defeat of the US in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Again, this is completely inaccurate. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed over three years later. By that time the US most definitely was not spread thin and was in no way in danger of losing the war. However, we were in danger of suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties in the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. The loss of life inflicted upon the Japanese would have been even higher. Do a seach on Operation Olympic and Operation Ketsu-go for details on the plans of both sides.
The battles leading up to that point give a clear indication that the Japanese would not have given up willingly in the face of an invasion. The clearest indication of this comes from the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa as well as the mass suicides of Japanese civilians on Saipan.
The Americans, a nation whose culture and political status conflicts with your current one, has just moved most of, if not all of it's Pacific naval fleet within striking distance of your homeland
This is just laughable. It is 3,850 miles from Honolulu to Tokyo, and it is only 3,000 miles from New York to Hamburg, Germany. So did the Germans start WW II because they were threatened by the Atlantic fleet? After all, they were closer to American naval power than Japan was, by nearly a thousand miles.
The jet propulsion labs is into mark III of their matter/anti-matter reactor, they've already designed anti-matter "pods" for storage (they like to use star trek terminology)
:P that'd suck)
other than having a problem with producing the anti-matter, they've discovered that the reaction process isn't always so clean. and that isotopes of various materials are produced, the radiation generated also seems to have a tendancy to reduce the structural integrity of whatever is re-inforcing the reactor.
(Read about all this in the back of star trek book, an addenum written by one of the scientists working on the engine design. Quite informative, was next generation #50 'dyson sphere', anyhow the radiation makes nearby materials brittle, which means that the reactor must be distant from the rest of the ship.
Before this idea, the jpl was working on a project called orion, which was a nuclear rocket booster. (featured in the movie deep impact)
Someone better get busy inventing Anti-Matter blast shields.
There should be a pretty good market for them in Israel in a couple of decades...
If someone were travelling at v=99.99999% of c to Alpha Centauri 4.35 light years away the time involved for that someone would be 4.35*sqrt(1-(0.9999999c)^2/c^2)=0.00195 years, or ~17 hours. 4.35 years would have passed on Earth.
Yes, I ignored acceleration and deceleration. Achieving the speeds required is an enormous practical problem. But this makes 10-20 years sound not too far off.
In Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, they make antimatter in small space stations located very close to the sun. Lots of energy there :)
Ok maybe "easy" is overstating it, but anyway..
A much more interesting part of those books is that antimatter is outlawed, due to its potential for mass destruction. I'm no expert on this, but isn't that essentially correct? If larger quantities than a few nanograms are produced, aren't we dealing with something extremely dangerous here?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Oh yeah?
Go read the html spec, fuckwit
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
HUMOUR TYPE="in-joke" CLASS="slashdot"
/HUMOUR
Hmmm - looks like the ICAN II is not equipped with hexagonal jets. I guess the designers at NASA haven't been spending enough time in 1950s bathrooms to truly understand the subtle complexities of Zarathustra, Odysseyus and why the Trojan horse has "NO MEAT".
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Just look at Switzerland - the oldest democracy, and they are required to be armed.
Well actually Switzerland is not the oldest democracy. Anyone who's taken a bit of history knows that Athens was the first state to institute democracy. And even the Roman republic held elections. The first 3 Swiss cantons to create the confederation that eventually grew into the country of Switzerland first banded together in 1391, and the vikings had a system of elected chieftains and kings much earlier than this. As for where one draws the line of real "democracy" - the Swiss have always had a tradition of communal consensus in their government - but there was no established or pan-Swiss standards for this until Napoleon came and reformed the country's federal government in the image of the french republic.
As for the military tradition here, you're quite right - every man between 18 and 40 is required to do 2 weeks of military service every year. They are required to keep their military weapons and ammunition in their homes so that they can be ready to go to fight at any time. The Swiss Alps are riddled with bunkers, hidden gun batteries, underground tunnels etc. Also every building larger than a house built since the 1950s has to have bomb shelters in the basement - and the local governments maintain lists of how much bomb shelter space there is and who is assigned to what shelters.
It is interesting to note that the two countries with the lowest rates of violence with firearms in the world are Sweden and Switzerland. Sweden has the lowest personal gun ownership in Europe and Switzerland the highest. Just goes to show what culture does for people.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
I thought I had an appetite for destruction, but all I really wanted was a club sandwich. --Homer J.
Boss: You've been watching a Star Trek marathon again haven't you? How many times do I have to tell you; you *can't* build anti-matter spacecraft!
Engineer: I can too! Hey that sounds catchy..._ __
_______________________________________________
It blows my mind that we're actually discussing putting a man (or woman) on Mars using an anti-matter propelled craft that will be assembled and launched from an orbiting space station. The fact that we're capable of such a thing absolutely amazes me. It's even more amazing when you realize that space exploration is less than fifty years old.
To put things in perspective, my father remembers Sputnik. My grandfather got around town in a horse and buggy. I wonder what my kids will get to see...
This
If you're going to be pedantic, be complete.
BdosError
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
---Regrettable, but as I said, perhaps that loss of life prevented even greater losses. Just something to consider.---
Well, not anymore really, since we pretty much know that the US knew surrender was immanent, on terms that we had already judged acceptable (and, indeed, on the exact same terms that we eventually dictated TO them), but it was the pride factor that was paramount. Even though the Japanese were willing to compromise (and basically, their one key provision was that the emperor be immune from prosecution and attack), we did not want to be seen compromising, especially not in the face of the Russians and the Chinese conflict. So it's the strange, all or nothing logic of "unconditional surrender" that really makes many of our military leaders look like amoral Machaevelians rather than tactical utilitarian heroes in retrospect. It's also a little hard to support the claim that the Allies showed much more laubable compassion for human life than the Axis powers, once they started assaulting civilian targets directly. The worst part is that it turns out even the tactical rationale for attacking civilians was often lacking, as with the bombing of German cities that only managed to _increase_ German war production by destroying the civilian economy, leaving many people with nothing else to do but make panzers.
Face it, if you want to dominate your opponent, there's no better strategy than threatening civilians and demonstrating the depths of barbarity you are both willing and capable of commiting. The U.S. military leaders knew this, and did it well, but it's really hard to commend them morally without resorting to protective rationalizations.
It's really too bad, because we had the chance to show the world a true "good guys vs bad guys" scenario, and we flubbed it.
One VERY important thing to remember however, is that NO ONE knew that anyone would die of canerous radiation exposure. For a long time even after Hiroshima, U.S. scientists sincerely thought that the zone of deadly radiation would be well inside the 100% blast kill area.
Ideas like this aren't supposed to be taken seriously. They are only inteneded to get research grants for the university.
I've thought before that there must be a good way to create or collect AM near the Sun. I don't know a lot about this, but I'd guess that the solar wind must contain some antiparticles as byproducts of fusion reactions. A station in solar orbit with large magnetic scoops could collect antiprotons (which are charged, after all) and store them.
If this isn't feasible, solar energy could be harnessed in some other way and converted to antimatter. Either way, the factory could have a von-Neumann type capability to expand its collection/production capacity (i.e., its two functions would be 1. produce antimatter and 2. produce more antimatter production machinery). Very soon we'd have HUGE quantities of the stuff.
Ships could stop by the station to pick up preassembled fuel pods, or the fuel could be transported closer to Earth (might be wise to keep it away from near-Earth orbit...say, no closer than the other side of the Moon...that way, if an AM engine or fuel pod blew up, the radiation burst wouldn't harm Earth-dwellers).
None of the documents on that site seem to mention the idea of producing antimatter off-Earth. This would be cheaper (once you got your factory set up) b/c you wouldn't have to transport the stuff out of Earth's gravity well, and much, much SAFER (I wouldn't want large amounts of AM being boosted through our atmosphere, much less sitting around on the surface). I've thought before that there must be a good way to create or collect AM near the Sun. I don't know a lot about this, but I'd guess that the solar wind must contain some antiparticles as byproducts of fusion reactions. A station in solar orbit with large magnetic scoops could collect antiprotons (which are charged, after all) and store them. If this isn't feasible, solar energy could be harnessed in some other way and converted to antimatter. Either way, the factory could have a von-Neumann type capability to expand its collection/production capacity (i.e., its two functions would be 1. produce antimatter and 2. produce more antimatter production machinery). Very soon we'd have HUGE quantities of the stuff. Ships could stop by the station to pick up preassembled fuel pods, or the fuel could be transported closer to Earth (might be wise to keep it away from near-Earth orbit...say, no closer than the other side of the Moon...that way, if an AM engine or fuel pod blew up, the radiation burst wouldn't harm Earth-dwellers).
Will the ICAN (spacecraft) folks ever be able to get a domain name for their project? :)
I love this idea! but, I'm looking at what happened to nuclear [sp?] fission reactions. I don't know if our world can handle this. Right now, if "the bomb" goes off, most of the life on the planet dies (at worst). With matter/antimatter bombs, the worst would be the earth no longer being whole. with some rough calculations: 1/2 kilogram of antimatter (with equal matter) produces 9x10^16 Joules of energy. thats about a 22 megaton bomb (in TNT terms) a 20 megaton bomb kills New York. alright, I'm not going to keep ranting. This is just a comment on dumb people, I love the idea, if it can work.
Ok, what we know about modern physics is solely based on experimentation. We don't know why shit works, we just know that is does. Therefore you guys saying this is unfeasable or shouldn't be done, should stfu. Just accept the fact eventually we will be using antimatter drives and be leaving our solar system. Also whoever said it would take a huge amount of time to reach alpha centauri is an idiot. How can it take more years than miles?? Sure it would take a long time, but not billions of trillion of zillions of whatever years. Given constant acceleration and deceleration, prolly take 10-20 years. Which is a long as time, but still no huge ass number like you mentioned. Anyways, I just thought it was funny when you guys were talking like you know shit when I know nobody here does, including myself.
While researching this topic for a paper, I ran across another (very hopefully) theoretical drive for probes involving an extremely thick lead shield and a large quantity of nuclear devices. In the words of Dave Barry, "No, I am not making this up". This was actually a proposed type of propulsion, the idea being that once the ship was far enough away from earth, one would just detonate nuclear devices behind the ship and use the resulting shockwave to propel the craft.
Now I'm quite sure of the immediate reaction to this idea from the people at any space agency in the world, but when you look at that, doesn't Antimatter seem more plausible? I mean, we have the capability (rediculously limited, mind you) to create antimatter, plus the apparent Antimatter Fountains in the universe (I'm not saying we'll be able to use them, just that they are out there).
It's a far stretch, but I have a feeling that if the technlolgy advances as far as it has (think the first production of antimatter about 6 years ago) we could feasibly see antimatter drives within our lifetimes.
On the other hand, the nuclear drive does solve the problem of what to do with the combined nuclear arsenal of the world
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
Hey! I've been there already and its not a nice neighorhood. "The evil space vixens" rule both planets, and have all the men enslaved.
You can accelerate protons using a tabletop laser accelerator.
http://www.aps.org/apsnews/1200/120007.html
So the question then becomes, what is standing in the way of using these tabletop accelerators to accelerate protons to the speeds necessary to create anti-protons?
> still not enough to vaporize a continent.
True, but it's still insanely dangerous. Name one industrial process where an accident can result in a minimum of a 20 kiloton explosion (same as a WWII nuke, and that's just one gram of your antimatter). No modern corporation would contemplate undertaking such a manufacturing job without labeling it as insanely dangerous.
Let's see, 140 nano-grams would equal 2.9 KG of TNT. Are they serious about getting to mars on that? I mean I know their talking about catalysis, but I didn't think it was *that* lop sided.
Then they talk about 130 micro-grams. That's around 3 tons of TNT equivalent. And that's to get to the Oort cloud.
Let's be really serious here. We're not talking about antimatter as the power source. It's just a catalyst. The massive majority of the power is going to come from a fusion reaction that simply doesn't require a 10,000 ton reactor, because they want to catalyze it with antimatter.
That fact will not go away.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Alpha Centuri was the offices where the bypass plans were...
~www.devnull.co.uk
Wait a second, Jupiter is gaseous isn't it? I mean, they think that there might be a solid core in the middle but they're not sure. Even if there is a solid core how does that allow for a manned mission. They can't land there, if there is a core and they went there they'd get crushed. What can people orbiting Jupiter do that machines controlled by people and/or computers orbiting Jupiter can't? People say that the manned trip was a scientific waste but at least we actually go there. I'll be impressed when we land on Mars or build large enough space stations that normal people can live in for prolonged periods of time. The anti-matter propulsion system would be great but only for greater speeds in space travel. I'd say that after Mars manned missions within our own solar system are pretty useless (with the possible exception of Pluto) as even an ego booster for the country. I also wonder how many billions (trillions maybe?) could get spent on us getting to Jupiter that we could have used for purposes to benefit people rather than ultralong-term science. By the way I do support NASA, just playing devils advocate here.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
"AIMStar; 332k" Looks like another AOL lawsuit brewing...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Alpha Centauri is where the documents are on display that Earth will be demolishied because it is in the way. They better get that antimater propulsion engine done pretty wuick so we can lodge a complaint...
Contractual Obligation
Great! A manned mission to Alpha Centauri! We'll finally get to force those damn editors of the Hitchhikers Guide to moderate our review from 'Mostly Harmless' to 'Mostly Mindless to the point of Sheer Hardheaded Ignorance, Vogon style'.
...
Or did they move the headquarters already?
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Living is a way of life
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
No message.
-- Imperial units must die --
current production rate of antiprotons = 14 ng per year to get to mars (35million miles) in a month requires 140ng (10 years) to get to aplha centuri (2.5e13 miles) requires 100g (7142680 years at curren prod. rates) of fuel and the trip would take 8e16 years (& consider the mechanism required to store the 100g of rather potent antimatter) the human race will die out either making the fuel or completing the trip! hmmmmmm. I dont mean to be cynical or pessimistic (sp) but i dont think that this is going to work. --wjf
Man and Goat
Space is so vast that makes the initial sentence in the article to seem like a joke. It would be wiser to say that humankind exploring space after the first manned Mars mission.
ICANN II just uses 140 nanograms. I wouldn't want it dropped on my house, but it won't vaporize a continent.
I'm the stranger...posting to
ICANN II uses 140 nanograms of antimatter for a thirty-day run, but if we want constant acceleration/deceleleration (and I assume we do, so it can reach the Oort Cloud in fifty years), won't it need a lot more antimatter? 140 times 12 gives you the amount of antimatter used in a year, 1680 nanograms. Multiply that by fifty, and you get 84000 nanograms. That still may not sound like a lot, but that's actually a respectable bang - look at the web page mentioned in this news post. Could someone check me, and see if I'm wrong?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Okay I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this or not, but Remeber back in, was it 97?, when seemingly the entire universe was just freaking out over the idea of lauching Plutonium into space in the form of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. Now weather or not the risk was worth it is not my point. My point is, Casssini maybe would have caused a couple of thousand deaths from fallout worst case scenerio, and if I read the article right (as in they may need a kilogram of this stuff) then if this probe/ship messed up ANYTIME during shipment, thats a 43 megaton explosion from what i've heard. Now *I* am not saying we should not advance our technology and explore space, all I am saying is if a little plutonium upsets people imagine how they would protest a anit-matter launch that could prolly destroy the state of Flordia.... Just a thought
For many reasons, antimatter technology is clearly not ready for prime time. We will only get going if we focus on a realistic propulsion technique. The Advanced Space Propulsion Labs at NASA (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/aspl) under the direction of former shuttle astronaut Dr Franklin Chang-Diaz, is working on the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). It is scheduled to be flight tested in 2004, and could be ready for a manned Mars mission by the next decade. The only thing that could hold it up is the need to generate 10-15MW of electricity to power the drive on a manned mission. Like submarines, our interplanetary spacecraft will almost certainly need a nuclear power plant on board. Now, how do we get that by the nuclear wackos? By the way, specific impulse on this thing ranges from 3000 to 30000s! Totally efficient!
VASIMR to Mars!
The calculations the Penn state guys are using are assuming that they can take the output of an accelerator and using univented (but no doubt expensive!) technologies store and use this stuff. Typical NASA ""science"". Some of us are planning to use this antimatter to do real particle physics here on the ground. You know investigating the standard model and all that...not as sexy as say a mars mission but arguably much more important. If the choices are real particle physics experimentation for 10 years, or joy rides to mars, i say we choose the former.
When all else fails and there is no one about to blame....