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Radio Waves Employed in Space Construction
CDeity writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology claim that radio waves could be used to shape and fuse debris in space to form massive structures according to this article. Scientists have in the past employed sound and light waves to position small particles, and every expectation indicates these techniques could work on a large scale. One engineer estimates " it would take approximately one hour to form a rubble cloud into a 50-meter long enclosed structure.""
They could seek the advice of street bums. They have lots of experience with forming structures from rubble and may provide valuable insight!
and its very cool! At the Space Camp center, there used to be an exhibit where you could suspend in midair some little white polystyrene (?) balls with sound waves. After about 10 seconds the sound would sto and the balls would fall. I was always amazed at it, and always wondered if there were any practical uses for this.
,
faeryman
OK, just tune the megatransmitter to a hiphop station for the structural elements...
classical for the smooth solar sails...
and talkback for all the crap that has to be cleared off the building site.
mi save tingting long peles bilong mi long Niu Ailan.
I imagine results visually akin to a Borg sphere. Does this work on all matter? If so, can we ship up all the stupid people and finally put them to good use?
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
Hehe,
:-)
Lets just hope the engineers aren't big Star Trek fans or they'll try building these structures with sound in outer space.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Just imagine the billboards we are going to see....
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I'm really wondering where all the energy should come from.... energy to move these "bricks"...
As a tribute to one of the great scientific minds of our time (Arthur C. Clarke), all radio waves used in space contruction should be derivatives of Also Sprach Zarathustra
Thusly ACC would be a part of the space exploration movement that he himself helped to bring about. I'm sure everyone by now has heard about the Jupiter slingshot effect that he devised and was then used by NASA.
Noob Astronaught: We appear to be flying towards that small moon.
Seasoned AStronaught: Thats no moon....
Ok,
So I haven't quite read the article but it occured to me.
Is it possible to demolish such a structure with radio waves? Or do the laws that lets you do things one way, prevent you form doing things the other way?
if you can't demolish the structures with radio waves, then what changes once you have built the structure that prevents you from doing so?
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Quite a cool idea. But consider how much output power would be required -- more than any earthly transmitter; and the zappers would require jets and fuel to keep them stationary while they zapped, and an extensive control system for the jets would be needed to shape the rubble into the astroid-sized bust of Jaromir Jagr.
What if his smiling face was looking down at us from orbit? Imagine how many astronomers we could scare!
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
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When you create a dustcloud in a closed room and ignite the dust with a simple light, it gives a big boom, because the air expands rapidly.
I bet some malicious devices could be created with this technology.
Since I'm currently watching a TiVoed episode ot The Outer Limits where this is a common theme, I have to raise the question of "the promising new technology being perverted into a weapon."
If you can form structures out of crap floating in space, why couldn't it just be compressed into a large enough object to survive re-entry, and sent on its merry way, aimed at what the aggressor wants to obliterate here on Earth?
Imagine if GWB suddenly backed down on all his we-gotta-git-Saddam rhetoric because it was getting hom nowhere and the American people were firmly against attacking Iraq, and then two or three months later Baghdad was mysteriously leveled by an nearby meteor strike one morning.
~Philly
And how long would it take to push debris into an enemy satellite? Or form a large enough mass to plunk down on an unsuspecting enemy?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I was using one of these radio wave generators to construct my own personal spacecraft last week.
My friend and I were sitting there in the station, and were getting real tired of the annoying noise being picked up by our stereo. We were getting really bored bored, and as you know these things take hours, so we decided to see what would happen when we broadcast some hard rock via the device.
And it worked... mostly. All was going well until the end. All of a sudden, about 3/4 of the way through Jimmy Hendrix playing "All along the Watchtowner", the craft started spinning around wildly, and smashed itself to the moon where it shattered into a million pieces, and then it set itself on fire.
I can't figure it out...
And then my sister put in some Michael Jackson, but I don't even want to talk about that...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
He has harnessed the power of his stereo system and can actually *make my walls shake*. I just sit there on my couch marvelling at his ingenuity. I've never met him, but I picture a singular genius toiling away at his workbench, wiping sweat from his haggard brow as Mother Inspiration taps him on the shoulder yet again. What will he think of next?
Newton's 3rd law (equal and opposite reaction...), according to their nifty little diagram, this would require satelites surrounding the object, and pushing them from all directions, so:
1) how do you keep the satelites around after they start generating their waves?
2) how do you keep them symmetrical? (the requirement is that they set up a resonator, I think, in which case, spacing is VERY important).
hmmmm?
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You think that's a long time to rearange matter? Get it to clean my room!
I've never heard of this concept. Why can't we use super-concentrated radio waves as force fields to guard against space debris?
How can it be that just flashing a light wave at something will cause it to move?
The article just assumes that we all knew about radio waves having force, whereas I was laboring under the impression that they had none.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Sorry to break the news to Georgia....
No matter how much they shout at the roaches on the table, they won't combine to form another blunt.
Sadly.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
Could this technique be used to take building blocks that have been tuned to be neutrally boyant, and then assemble them into structures using sound in the water, then slowly lower the water and weld each layer as it comes out of the water?
Of course neutrally boyant requires no gasses in the objects that can be compressed, though I could imagine you might have metal building blocks with a gas bladder inside that can be filled by computer controlled pump to make it neutrally boyant to some degree.
Imagine building the frame of a house in a big
tank.
Anybody done this?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
And in other news: I shaped my mash potatos into a fort using only a spoon. One scientist was quoted as saying, "It took him 4 hours, but with enough practice and a bigger spoon, it could be done in an hour."
Yes I do realize that they are attempting to create a more useful structure with the debris, but this just reminds of the innate human drive (of which I fully admit guilt) of breaking things in order to put them back together- only better!
Maybe there is a use for that satellite radio service now...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
how can you use sound waves in space? I thought that in space there is no sound. With no atmosphere, how would sound travel at all?
Maybe there is sound in space on tv but it's not so in the real world.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Dude: Dude, nice techno.
Technician: Actually I'm sending out the construction sequence for the storage module for the ISS.
Dude: Woaw.... Rock on.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I would have to imagine that quality control on something like this would be a nightmare. I didn't see anything in the article that talked about refining the pulverized asteroid. One would think that if you had a non uniform mix of materials it would affect the structural integrity of whatever you're building. Still the idea is really intriguing:
1. Break Rocks
2. Compress with radio wave "force field" (now how cool is that?)
3. ???
4. Profit
I know it's an overused joke but, in this case, it seems to me to be exactly what they're talking about.
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
Wouldn't building, using only radio waves and debris, require an absolutely monstrous amount of energy? How is this helpful compared to some other approach?
When Earth is threatened by a large asteroid, everyone should turn their radios on and play loud, annoying music until the rock explodes.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
The only way I can imagine gathering this much energy would be with a massive solar array, one of incredibly large porportions...
...so massive that it would be best built using directed radio energy.
PS - I leave issues of inertia of the transmitting station and also the subtantial risks of a misfire/hijack of one of these transmitters into an inhabited settlement as exercises for the astute reader...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Funniest comment ever.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I am the Pusher Robot: I use radio waves to shove around the blind people.
-m
Isn't that what his supercomputer Deep Thought did to forge the space ship on the planet Kricket, thus causing the eventual near destruction of Life, the Univers and Everything?
Sigh. No new ideas.
-FC
No no, here is how you do obligatoria:
1. Patent garbage
2. Put garbage in space
3. Use radio waves to melt garbage into a beowulf cluster
4. ???
5. Profit!!!
Table-ized A.I.
Pardon our dust?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I like the sound of that.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Oh, this is fantastic! Instead of launching building materials into space, you could simply supergun material into orbit or, safer, Lagrange points for longer-term parking, and then coagulate and shape them as needed. Of course space material could be used but if that was impractical for the need -- such as not providing the type of radiation shielding needed, for example -- this would be a cheap alternative.
This is the best news I've heard all day.
My
Limekiller
The power of sound
Fusing debris into more
Truly, such is truth.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.
From the link above: The oldest debris still on orbit is the second US satellite, the Vanguard I, launched on 1958, March, the 17th, which worked only for 6 years.
NASA should take it down with one of the shuttles and sell it on Ebay... I bet some billionaire would buy it.
maybe we could use this technique in teraforming mars, from my understanding really all we need to do melt part of the surface of mars to start a chain reaction that will eventually recreate the martian atmosphere, when you melt part of the surface obviously this forms water, but it also releases gases into the atmosphere, which in turn hold in more heat, which melts more surface, which releases more gases, which holds in more heat, etc. Well with this we could form a large dome on the pole of mars, dump a few nukes under the dome, and thus intensify the explosion when we set the nukes off and hopefully give that teraforming a kickstart, the radiation should be negliable since by the time mars is ready for people to live on it will be gone or if not, right now we have none of mars to live on, so if we lose part of mars to gain the rest, sounds like a good deal to me. Double bonus, if we miscalculate and blow mars up, we can use the debris to create our homes everywhere else in space.
I _do_ know about the physical processes involved, and while I'm a physicist rather than an engineer (and hence less quick at estimating these things), this idea sounds completetly loony. You'd need to transmit an enormous amount of power to move a big chunk of rock even a small distance, because the power radiated by your transmitter will fall off rapidly with distance, and the rock will only absorb a small part of the radio wave anyway (for the same reason the walls of your house don't block radio reception).
And don't forget - NASA is funding research into an anti-gravity machine too, so the fact that they may be taking this seriously is no sign that it makes any sense....
Instead of using such technology to build something, how about cleaning up the space junk mess first. If a radio wave can be used to apply a force against an object, then instead of precision manipulating it, just push it into a decaying orbit. That'll be a good start in learning to manipulate objects in such a fashion, and will help clean up the space junk mess.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
That's pretty neat, considering it took Hactar millions of years to do this kind of thing.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Is find out what royalties RIAA will charge us...
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
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it has no department!! hemos, what were you thinking about? should we call mulder and scully right now? :-)
--
Backup not found: (A)bort, (R)etry, (S)uicide
You can send energy using any form of electromagnetic radiation, except you'd want to keep the frequency extremely high to keep the signal from diffusing to much.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
How about this: we capture a small asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could nudge it into different orbits. Then we could steer it into the path of an incoming killer asteroid -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging the bad boy off course to miss the Earth.
/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could even build our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces rather than going out and getting one.
Remembering an earlier
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs
to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in:
WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.
Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered
small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random
words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
-- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
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