It is not really trace amounts of other things. DNA needs phosphorus and quite a bit of nitrogen. In fact you need quite a bit of nitrogen and other elements. Carbon based life forms really under emphasizes just how many critical elements are needed and their proportions. Quite a few of them are needed in the percentile range rather than trace levels (ppt or ppm).
It is quite doable on human timescales. On the order of 1 million years. What we call human has been around for 3-4 Million years roughly IIRC. Or did you mean a generations time scale?
Personally I am in this for the long haul (aka the species). There is no reason to think that their won't be humans (or trans/post humans) still around in a few Million years.
Cold fusion violates a *huge* amount of experimental data, not to mention a ton of theory that also has a huge amount of experimental data. The original claims where never even verified or duplicated. It was always bogus.
We already have materials that do this water to hydrogen conversion, they just are not very efficient. Also guess how lasers, transistors, Solar cells etc are designed? By simulation. More or less. And they work pretty closely to the models.
Standard PV cells are single band gap. You can get over 20% efficiency with a single band-gap, with a optimal band gap I think you can get to almost 30% IIRC. Higher than that needs more bandgaps/junctions.
At 20% these would be very useful if they are cheap.
This is not entirely correct. A vast majority of people see nothing wrong with downloading a DVD copy program and making backups. Or even copying their buddy's DVD collection. They see nothing wrong with a bit of sharing.
Most probably never gave the legality of it a second thought. However something that so "clearly" public, and you tell them you can't copy this speech and then they will care just like if they get told they can't do the above things. Most folks just *assume* such common sense things are, well, common sense.
Getting more publicity to this story can only be a good thing.
Nukes are not that small--about 3-5kT is the smallest and its hard to make that small. Even the first ones where about 10-25kT. And fusion needs to be bigger to work.
yes. But good luck getting a 100 thousand tons of normal explosives down a hole without anyone noticing--just to fake a nuclear bomb. It would be easier to make a real one.
Nuclear fission can be good with reprocessing for thousands of years. I think we will have DD fusion by then, which it good for about 5-100millions years depending on how you slice it.
Folks may not want nuclear. That is fine. But it sure can work as far as the numbers are concerned.
A free higgs boson decays in something like 10^-20 seconds. So no cigar. Understanding particles that mediate forces and mass is not the same as understanding how to manipulate these forces and mass. Also the 30 mile particle accelerator is not very portable.
Just about all high power transmission is done with vacuum tubes (TWT, Klystron and their kin). Your HDTV broadcast for example is done with these devices as is a lot of sat coms. The LHC uses them for its high power RF generation etc. Every microwave has one (magnatron). The list goes on.
Obsolete does not mean what you think it means. These really are cutting edge applications where nothing else gets close.
I was in Kyoto last week at a conference. Almost all the tables i saw where Androids, not apples. Sure its not real data, but apple clearly thinks its a real threat.
The PLoS journals already have respectable impact factor. They are certainly respectable and respected in their fields. Its not like other journals don't have page charges. PLoS is on the high side, but not by much. If your biggest issues are that you can't afford page charges since you have so many good papers accepted, you really don't have much to complain about.
You have unfortunately totally underestimated the lack of effectiveness of a fusor. Sure you can detect neutrons from them, thats because the type of instruments used count single neutrons. While 14 grams of Nitrogen contains 6x10^23 atoms. The best fusors get about 10^10 neutrons per second (most get much much less), this will take 1.9 million years to produce enough neutrons to transmutate just 14grams of nitrogen. I don't recall the reaction, but I don't thing 14N does transmutate to 14C with the addition of a neutron. The numbers don't add up.
Lets see what it will take to get a strong enough neutron source. Lets say we want that 14g of 13C in 1 week. So we need 992x10^15 neutrons per second. At 2.45MeV (DD neutrons) per neutron that is 389kW of power in the neutrons alone. The total power burn of DD would be about twice that --In other words you need the order of 1MW of fusion power (DT would need less total power, but more would be in the neutrons).
If you want to transmute any significant quantity of something from a neutron source, its also a power source in its own right.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not really trace amounts of other things. DNA needs phosphorus and quite a bit of nitrogen. In fact you need quite a bit of nitrogen and other elements. Carbon based life forms really under emphasizes just how many critical elements are needed and their proportions. Quite a few of them are needed in the percentile range rather than trace levels (ppt or ppm).
It is quite doable on human timescales. On the order of 1 million years. What we call human has been around for 3-4 Million years roughly IIRC. Or did you mean a generations time scale?
Personally I am in this for the long haul (aka the species). There is no reason to think that their won't be humans (or trans/post humans) still around in a few Million years.
Cold fusion violates a *huge* amount of experimental data, not to mention a ton of theory that also has a huge amount of experimental data. The original claims where never even verified or duplicated. It was always bogus.
We already have materials that do this water to hydrogen conversion, they just are not very efficient. Also guess how lasers, transistors, Solar cells etc are designed? By simulation. More or less. And they work pretty closely to the models.
Let me introduce you to the decimal point.
Standard PV cells are single band gap. You can get over 20% efficiency with a single band-gap, with a optimal band gap I think you can get to almost 30% IIRC. Higher than that needs more bandgaps/junctions.
At 20% these would be very useful if they are cheap.
This is not entirely correct. A vast majority of people see nothing wrong with downloading a DVD copy program and making backups. Or even copying their buddy's DVD collection. They see nothing wrong with a bit of sharing.
Most probably never gave the legality of it a second thought. However something that so "clearly" public, and you tell them you can't copy this speech and then they will care just like if they get told they can't do the above things. Most folks just *assume* such common sense things are, well, common sense.
Getting more publicity to this story can only be a good thing.
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/07/25
Nukes are not that small--about 3-5kT is the smallest and its hard to make that small. Even the first ones where about 10-25kT. And fusion needs to be bigger to work.
yes. But good luck getting a 100 thousand tons of normal explosives down a hole without anyone noticing--just to fake a nuclear bomb. It would be easier to make a real one.
Not at this scale they don't. Diamond like everything else does compress. Significantly at these scales and pressures.
I wish i could use lisp for my day job. Unfortunately I can't.
So in other words you don't know. Feeling good is not being good.
And what is your energy/resource footprint. It is not always other people that need to change.
Nuclear fission can be good with reprocessing for thousands of years. I think we will have DD fusion by then, which it good for about 5-100millions years depending on how you slice it.
Folks may not want nuclear. That is fine. But it sure can work as far as the numbers are concerned.
Like learning drivers? Sorry but even if this is done poorly, its still gota be better than 30% of the other drivers out there.
A free higgs boson decays in something like 10^-20 seconds. So no cigar. Understanding particles that mediate forces and mass is not the same as understanding how to manipulate these forces and mass. Also the 30 mile particle accelerator is not very portable.
;)
Try that with a pilot.
Just about all high power transmission is done with vacuum tubes (TWT, Klystron and their kin). Your HDTV broadcast for example is done with these devices as is a lot of sat coms. The LHC uses them for its high power RF generation etc. Every microwave has one (magnatron). The list goes on.
Obsolete does not mean what you think it means. These really are cutting edge applications where nothing else gets close.
When is a tablet a PC and when is a PC a tablet? To me its all marketing speak to hide the fact that PC just got a lot more portable.
Your microwave. Ok it is a magnatron, but still its a vacuum device (electrons in a vacuum). But vacuum tubes are far from obsolete.
It was SMBE. A biology conference, which are typically heavily Mac biased.
I was in Kyoto last week at a conference. Almost all the tables i saw where Androids, not apples. Sure its not real data, but apple clearly thinks its a real threat.
Nature and Science absolutely charge for black and white pages. Color is a *lot* extra, but B&W is not free.
The PLoS journals already have respectable impact factor. They are certainly respectable and respected in their fields. Its not like other journals don't have page charges. PLoS is on the high side, but not by much. If your biggest issues are that you can't afford page charges since you have so many good papers accepted, you really don't have much to complain about.
You have unfortunately totally underestimated the lack of effectiveness of a fusor. Sure you can detect neutrons from them, thats because the type of instruments used count single neutrons. While 14 grams of Nitrogen contains 6x10^23 atoms. The best fusors get about 10^10 neutrons per second (most get much much less), this will take 1.9 million years to produce enough neutrons to transmutate just 14grams of nitrogen. I don't recall the reaction, but I don't thing 14N does transmutate to 14C with the addition of a neutron. The numbers don't add up.
Lets see what it will take to get a strong enough neutron source. Lets say we want that 14g of 13C in 1 week. So we need 992x10^15 neutrons per second. At 2.45MeV (DD neutrons) per neutron that is 389kW of power in the neutrons alone. The total power burn of DD would be about twice that --In other words you need the order of 1MW of fusion power (DT would need less total power, but more would be in the neutrons).
If you want to transmute any significant quantity of something from a neutron source, its also a power source in its own right.