Well, let me rephrase it: look at thermite, it'll go through an engine block with only a teaspoon
And it's in a completely unsuitable form. You couldn't liquify a human with the amount of thermite a few thousand nanobots could hold, even if you could use the energy
Now your argument that 20 thousand atoms of uranium won't do squat are right. But a single mol of them might. (go look up how many that actually corresponds to).
A SI mole of uranium is about 92 grams, if I'm reading this right. Tell me again how big these nanbots are.
Just keep in mind that the nanodevices don't need to be their own source of energy: a plane doesn't fly by burning up it's own fuselage... it carries something called 'fuel'.
Being pre-loaded with fuel means your nano-bots cannot replicate (where would they get more fuel to charge the new bots). A nano-bot is also not going to be able to carry much fuel on-board. The only suitable energy sources to be found inside a human body are the body's own energy storage chemicals (such as ATP). And as I said before, if it were possible to release enough energy from the body's own chemical energy to liquify a person, some bacterium probably would have found a way to do it.
Whee, raw thermal energy! A steam engine isn't going to work very well on the nano-scale. This also precludes self-replication, as (afaik,) there is no thermite to be found inside a human body.
nuclear?
You're kidding, right? 20 thousand atoms of uranium going through decay aren't going to produce much energy. And this makes thermite's replication problem look trivial.
chemical?
This is about the only energy source you're going to find on-site in a human body, and you're not going to be able to release it fast enough to "liquify a human in seconds". If it were possible, I don't doubt some enterprising bacterium would have already come up with a way of doing it.
Not that I think the application likely, but they could feed on the energy of the "host" that they are destroying...
The body may have enough available energy to destroy itself, but it's going to be extremely hard to release it fast enough to enable near-instant liquification.
We will be more interested on how clouds of nanomites can liquify a human in seconds than a hairline crack repairing coat of paint.
Do you have any idea of the power requirements to liquify a human in seconds? Where exactly are these machines going to get that much energy in that amount of time?
If you read my original post, you will see that I was talking about using turbines, etc at points where drag is already there, so adding something to take advantage of it probably won't add to it overly.
The only way this can work is if you first reduce the existing drag, then add the turbine for a net change of zero. TANSTAAFL. "Ye canna change the laws of physics!"
It'd be more efficient to just reduce the drag, and power whatever it is you want to power off the car's internal electrical system. Really, what is it on a car that needs such little power and is in a place where you can't run wiring?
Would that not cause drag on the cars movement? Wouldn't you car have to work harder just to move, burning more gas and thus negating any energy you might gain?
I'm sure there is a large, unpopulated area surrounding the launch site.
As someone who has driven through Fort Stockton, I can personally say that it is about as far from anywhere as you can get and still be on a US interstate highway.
like, is it 1 cd(i find it hard to believe, but not that hard) or 30? 1000?
Sources say there's about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. If we assume a reasonably efficient encoding scheme, we can get 4 base pairs into a normal 8-bit byte without compression. This gives us a total data size of a little over 700 megabytes, uncompressed. Run it through gzip, and you could probably fit it onto one cd, definitely 2.
The University is trying to sucker me into triple majoring in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Physics (only 176 hours!). Part of me wants to do this just so I can answer the question "What's your major?" with "mad science".
The other part of me keeps saying, "This is a bad idea. People will actually believe you."
But I'm not so sure that what I heard was Clarke's Law. I think Asimov was spoofing Clarke's Law with one of his own.
Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law: When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.
It can be found in The Illustrated Man, a collection of Bradbury's short stories. (Although a google search turns up at least one site that has violated the copyright and posted it)
So was Soran from ST:Generations. (Yes, I realize McDowell did Fantasy Island after Generations, but it's too strange a coincidence not to point out.)
I noticed IMDB now has a third series titled Fantasy Island in its listings. Any bets on how long it takes for the new Mr. Roarke to show up as a Star Trek villain?
The most convincing portrayal of the ultimate in virtual reality with the "holodeck". AFAIK, the holodeck was an original concept. In fact I'm surprised Paramount didn't patent the idea (or maybe they did).
Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "The Veldt" significantly predated TNG. Yes, Virginia, the malfunctioning holodeck story is at least 52 years old.
Q From e-mail:I just had to laugh at the part in the movie where someone called Dial-A-Joke. I remember calling that number to hear the joke of the day. Was it really you who did this?
WOZ:Yes. It was in the days before you could buy a phone or answering machine. I had to rent the same one as theaters rented, a very costly one. I was "The Crazy Pollok". This was the first Dial-A-Joke in the San Francisco Bay Area, back in 1973 or so. I used a heavy Russian accent and used the name "Stanley Zebrezuskinitski" when I took live calls. I met my first wife this way, she was a caller.
Of course a flywheel makes no sense in powering a laptop. It's absurd to think about that. Wrong scale entirely.
The post you replied to with "Gimbals" was about using flywheels in devices such as laptops, I assumed we were still talking about that.
I trust your numbers are right.
I'm trusting they're right as well, since I'm putting this together as I go. I half-expect somebody to say "Your number for foo is off by 27 orders of magnitude!"
I'm having a little bit of trouble with your comparison of this kind of tightly controlled use of energy to the uncontrolled energy release of failing flywheel.
If a flywheel fails, all of its kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and a fragmenting flywheel is going to be very efficient at converting its rotational kinetic energy into translational kinetic energy.(some of it will go into ripping the flywheel apart).
A hand grenade would have been a better example.
How about TNT? TNT's got an energy density of roughly 2 million joules/pound. Now, sticking some TNT into a laptop isn't going to be terribly efficient at converting chemical energy into kinetic energy, so let's say we're getting 20% conversion (which is probably optimistic). That leaves us with 400,000 joules of kinetic energy. Which means the hypothetical laptop flywheel failing is roughly equivalent to half a pound of TNT exploding.
Even if the gimbal mounting and safety containment trebled the volume and weight of the flywheel, we're still talking about a storage system that is an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than today's chemical batteries.
Gimbals aren't going to triple the volume, they're going to turn a disk into a sphere. Then you have to put armor around that.
An ordinary laptop battery has on the order of 50 watt-hours of power. That's 180,000 Joules, and we're storing it as kinetic energy. A 30-06 bullet only has ~3300 Joules of kinetic energy. Do you not see the hazard of failure?
I'd figure up the acceleration of the flywheel if there weren't so many unknowns, but the BS detector says trying to fit a fully gimbaled flywheel into a laptop is going to require the flywheel to be made out of inobtainium in order to keep from flying apart.
Slashdot Mirror
You could walk there faster, if you include the maintenance/rebuild time between flights.
And it's in a completely unsuitable form. You couldn't liquify a human with the amount of thermite a few thousand nanobots could hold, even if you could use the energy
A SI mole of uranium is about 92 grams, if I'm reading this right. Tell me again how big these nanbots are.
Being pre-loaded with fuel means your nano-bots cannot replicate (where would they get more fuel to charge the new bots). A nano-bot is also not going to be able to carry much fuel on-board. The only suitable energy sources to be found inside a human body are the body's own energy storage chemicals (such as ATP). And as I said before, if it were possible to release enough energy from the body's own chemical energy to liquify a person, some bacterium probably would have found a way to do it.
Morpheus vs Cowboy Curtis vs Mr. Clean
Whee, raw thermal energy! A steam engine isn't going to work very well on the nano-scale. This also precludes self-replication, as (afaik,) there is no thermite to be found inside a human body.
You're kidding, right? 20 thousand atoms of uranium going through decay aren't going to produce much energy. And this makes thermite's replication problem look trivial.
This is about the only energy source you're going to find on-site in a human body, and you're not going to be able to release it fast enough to "liquify a human in seconds". If it were possible, I don't doubt some enterprising bacterium would have already come up with a way of doing it.
The body may have enough available energy to destroy itself, but it's going to be extremely hard to release it fast enough to enable near-instant liquification.
FUSION!?
How exactly do you propose to achieve fusion in a machine that's on the same scale as a human cell?
Do you have any idea of the power requirements to liquify a human in seconds? Where exactly are these machines going to get that much energy in that amount of time?
1b) The first one gets Slashdotted again after a repeat story is posted. (3 hours - 2 years (variable))
The only way this can work is if you first reduce the existing drag, then add the turbine for a net change of zero. TANSTAAFL. "Ye canna change the laws of physics!"
It'd be more efficient to just reduce the drag, and power whatever it is you want to power off the car's internal electrical system. Really, what is it on a car that needs such little power and is in a place where you can't run wiring?
Yes, which is why it is funny.
Yes it does.
Because the power generated will be less than the power required to overcome the drag.
Second law of thermodynamics: you can't break even.
Because it's really hard to pick colors out of the middle of a solid RGB cube.
As someone who has driven through Fort Stockton, I can personally say that it is about as far from anywhere as you can get and still be on a US interstate highway.
Sources say there's about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. If we assume a reasonably efficient encoding scheme, we can get 4 base pairs into a normal 8-bit byte without compression. This gives us a total data size of a little over 700 megabytes, uncompressed. Run it through gzip, and you could probably fit it onto one cd, definitely 2.
The University is trying to sucker me into triple majoring in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Physics (only 176 hours!). Part of me wants to do this just so I can answer the question "What's your major?" with "mad science".
The other part of me keeps saying, "This is a bad idea. People will actually believe you."
"scientists"?
"practical use"!?
They're doomed.
Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law: When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.
It can be found in The Illustrated Man, a collection of Bradbury's short stories. (Although a google search turns up at least one site that has violated the copyright and posted it)
So was Soran from ST:Generations. (Yes, I realize McDowell did Fantasy Island after Generations, but it's too strange a coincidence not to point out.)
I noticed IMDB now has a third series titled Fantasy Island in its listings. Any bets on how long it takes for the new Mr. Roarke to show up as a Star Trek villain?
Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "The Veldt" significantly predated TNG. Yes, Virginia, the malfunctioning holodeck story is at least 52 years old.
The Police Academy series barely has one plot between them.
The post you replied to with "Gimbals" was about using flywheels in devices such as laptops, I assumed we were still talking about that.
I'm trusting they're right as well, since I'm putting this together as I go. I half-expect somebody to say "Your number for foo is off by 27 orders of magnitude!"
If a flywheel fails, all of its kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and a fragmenting flywheel is going to be very efficient at converting its rotational kinetic energy into translational kinetic energy.(some of it will go into ripping the flywheel apart).
How about TNT? TNT's got an energy density of roughly 2 million joules/pound. Now, sticking some TNT into a laptop isn't going to be terribly efficient at converting chemical energy into kinetic energy, so let's say we're getting 20% conversion (which is probably optimistic). That leaves us with 400,000 joules of kinetic energy. Which means the hypothetical laptop flywheel failing is roughly equivalent to half a pound of TNT exploding.
Gimbals aren't going to triple the volume, they're going to turn a disk into a sphere. Then you have to put armor around that.
An ordinary laptop battery has on the order of 50 watt-hours of power. That's 180,000 Joules, and we're storing it as kinetic energy. A 30-06 bullet only has ~3300 Joules of kinetic energy. Do you not see the hazard of failure?
I'd figure up the acceleration of the flywheel if there weren't so many unknowns, but the BS detector says trying to fit a fully gimbaled flywheel into a laptop is going to require the flywheel to be made out of inobtainium in order to keep from flying apart.
Which completely defeats the idea of a compact power source.