mistermack

The pellets are a deuterium/tritium mix I believe. Lasers are a very inefficient way of injecting heat, there wouldn't be any point of using them in a Torus. Their advantage in inertial systems is that the heat is supplied so fast to the pellet by the lazers, that there is for an instant a very high pressure in the pellet, it's the inertia of the target that momentarily gives the high pressure. So the combination of high temperature and pressure enables the fusion in the deuterium/tritium mix. In the inertial laser system, the temperatures are much lower than in a torus, but the pressure, for an instant, is much higher. I believe the production of Tritium is to be achieved using isotopes of Lithium in a blanket. There are various configurations that are going to be explored, but it's Lithium that will be producing the Tritium.

Yes. Power comes in degrees. If I had absolute power, they wouldn't just get a fine. I was following three school kids down the footpath last year, and one of them was a great big fat tub of lard, the other two normal build. The fattie was eating an ice-cream on a stick, and he just threw the wrapper straight down on the pavement. I felt like kicking his fat arse. Even one of the other two called him a name. Of course I didn't say or do anything, because I know it would be me who ended up in the shit if I did. If I was in real power, he would be in the stocks, and anyone who wanted to could kick his fat ass. Share the power.

The problem is, if you keep cleaning up after habitual litterers, they will drop more and more litter. I would favour much bigger fines, because 1) They bloody well deserve it and 2) Because the kind of people who litter will only change if it costs them, and 3) It works. Have big fines, and enforce it. But give the all of the fine money to a list of carefully chosen charities, like free school meals for all kids, and end of life care. That's what I'd do tomorrow, given the power.

Good point. It was originally probably wildfires that caught their attention for the bounty of food left behind. They could probably see fires from a long way off, and would move towards it like vultures to clean up the goodies left behind. It would progress from that to using smouldering embers to reignite fires on unburned areas to produce more leftover food. Eventually they would learn how to preserve fire for long periods, and how to carry smouldering embers from one place to another so that they could take fire from place to place, and no longer rely on lightning strikes to start fires. But that progression would probably take a lot of time, probably millions of years. And right at the end of that process came the invention of fire-lighting techniques.

!00% agreed. Public spirited people are already converted, but the people who litter generally don't give a toss about public spirit, and no amount of "education" will change them. On my first trip to Canada and the USA, back in 1970, I couldn't believe how litter free the place was, but then I saw the anti-littering signs, and the huge fines that applied to littering. It was immediately obvious why there was so little litter. And the cops were hot on enforcing it. In the uk, fines are paltry, and the cops don't really care. Hence, lots of litter.

Most of the claims about fire use more than a million years ago are not supported by firm evidence. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but the evidence is very weak. The thing with fire though, is that it's development is likely to have taken a very long time. We're used to things happening very quickly, but go back more than a few hundred years, and development happened at a snails pace. The way stone tools evolved was slower than the way the species evolved. Fire would have first been 'controlled' by people throwing sticks onto a natural fire, to keep it going. The most likely reason would be to keep predators and insects away, and to keep warm at night. Finding traces of fire from a million years ago does NOT mean that people were cooking. They might have been, but there's no evidence for it. It's very unlikely that they were cooking to such an extent that it influence the evolution of the species, that would surely leave far more evidence behind. wiki : Archaeological evidence from 300,000 years ago,[10] in the form of ancient hearths, earth ovens, burnt animal bones, and flint, are found across Europe and the Middle East. Anthropologists think that widespread cooking fires began about 250,000 years ago when hearths first appeared.[11] Lately that's been pushed back to 300,000 years in a cave in Israel. But the use of a hearth doesn't necessarily mean cooking. And certainly doesn't mean cooking to an extent that the species changed as a result.

Humans became fully upright millions of years before the use of fire. They also started evolving big brains millions of years before. The jaws were also shrinking long before they cooked anything. Fire is a comparatively recent tool for humans, dating back only about a million years, and the ability to light a fire much more recent than that. Richard Wrangham has pushed the hypothesis that "cooking made us human" but the evidence so far is wafer thin. If you restrict the definition of "human" to the last couple of million years years then cooking played a part. But human history obviously goes back six million years or more. It's just that looking back, we call earlier ancestors pre-human. But they were the humans of their day. So the idea that cooking made us human is a bit contrived. Most of what made us human happened long before.

The fact that you can't conceptualise something, doesn't have any effect on the reality. If you are thinking of space as absolutely nothing, then there is obviously an infinity of that. But in my understanding, "space" is not nothing. It has properties that define three or four dimensions, and can allow transfer energy and matter across those dimensions. From what I've read, space is expanding now, and expanded rapidly in the early stages of the big bang. So projecting backwards, it seems to have come from nothing.

I wondered about that. The key is the combination of plasma density and temperature. If you create temperatures high enough, you can do with less density. In the favoured tritium/deuterium fuelled reaction, a lot of the heat produced is lost very quickly via high energy neutrons, which can't be kept in the plasma using magnetic fields. Maybe mirrors could be used, to reflect them back towards the centre and maintain higher temperatures? I don't know anything about reflecting neutrons, so that's just speculation.

I don't think you would have to go down the dna route. Just because all the planets and moons of the solar system became uninhabitable, that doesn't mean that you couldn't send humans in spacecraft away from the Solar System. Given the likely time between now and the obliteration of the Solar System, it's odds-on that humans will have the capability to make a self-sustaining craft capable of travelling to another star. Or more likely, they will have done it long before things got that hot. They could carry frozen sperm and eggs with them, if that was desired, and by that time, it's highly likely that we will have perfected artificial wombs, capable of carrying a fertilised egg all the way from fertilisation to birth. So you wouldn't need to breed a new population from a small dna pool. It's even feasible that unmanned probes could be despatched carrying frozen sperm and eggs, with a totally automated system that could produce babies and bring them up and educate them, all by robotic machines. That way, journeys that would take thousands of years could be undertaken, without the need for a human crew. Sounds fantastic, but given how willing kids are to watch tv, it might not be all that far-fetched.

I'm not sure that the projectile is a runner at all. If you add energy to a star, you're surely delaying the day that it goes supernova, or swells up like our Sun will. You may be just turning back the clock, making the star effectively younger. I know we can't possibly forecast what might be possible in a million years time. (or not possible) Your guess is as good as mine, probably better. But both are just shots in the dark. Maybe if astronomers were to witness an exploding star, that should not have exploded, that might be grounds for suspicion. I personally don't think that there's much of a motive for destroying aliens, or them destroying us. I think that there must be billions of uninhabited Earthlike planets out there to exploit, if that's what they want. And the way that technology accelerates, if they are ahead of us now, they will always be ahead of us, so there's no real need to fear that a less advanced culture might overtake us. Unless they live and function at a much higher tempo, I guess.

I think you would need figures on how much harmful radiation gets through clothing to give a meaningful opinion. I know that if you hold up a white shirt against the sun, more light gets through than for a black one of similar thickness. But that's visible light, you need figures for the harmful UV wavelengths. It doesn't appear to be critical. Other factors come into the picture. White clothes quickly get grubby. Not a problem for affluent people who live in areas with plenty of water. But not so good for Bedouins in the Sahara. Also, it may be that some cultures value a paler skin so they don't want to get tanned.

Ideas that have no prospect of being put into practice in the real world are hardly sound. A sound idea in game terms is meaningless in real life, unless the game adheres to a real life standards. So I would say it's a sound idea for a meaningless game. But not a sound idea for reality. Just because you can imagine something happening, that doesn't move it into the 'sound' category.

I think doable, conceiveable and imaginable are getting a bit blurred now. 😊 But even blasting the star would give no guarantee of full destruction of the aliens. Say they are a mere 10,000 years ahead of us, they will surely be able to fuse hydrogen in space. So the necessity to hang around a star for the cheap solar energy will be gone by then. You will be able to create a colony anywhere you like, in deep space. All you need is some hydrogen, and that's not exactly scarce or inaccessible. Plenty of it on our moon as water ice, also on comets and other moons and small planets. The gas giants are made of it, but it's probably inaccessible there. But with fusion, you don't need a lot of hydrogen, so interstellar space is wide open to anyone who can fuse hydrogen on a space station. Give it 10,000 years and I'm sure that we humans will be doing that with ease, so aliens, if they exist and have a lead on us, will surely be able to spread well away from their original star. They won't need to find another suitable star or planet, a station will do fine.

My earliest recollection of poetry. From the English West Country : ----------------------------------- Apple tart, makes I fart. Custard powder makes it louder. Apple crumble makes it rumble. ---------------------------------- It's a strange thing, that animals that eat weight-losing food tend to have big bellies. Like Gorillas and cows and elephants. The Cheetah is the skinniest animal I can think of. So a diet of all meat seems to be the way to go. Maybe that's where Atkins got the idea.

That's where the fundamental difference between magnetic and laser systems comes in. The NIF are celebrating a Q figure of 1.5 (although it's arrived at by stretching the definition a bit). Q is power produced over power in. With an array of lasers running constantly, the power-in number will always be significant, limiting the raising of Q. But with magnetic confinement, there is the prospect of reducing the power-in, as the power out is made to grow. So the smaller the input power gets, the higher the value of Q, and as power-in approaches zero, the Q number is accelerating towards infinity. (in the ideal scenario) So it's hoped that the highly prized and critical Q number will take off, once magnetic systems get past a certain point. One big hurdle appears to be making the heat from fusion stick around in the plasma for long enough to enable turning down of the input electrical heating. A lot of that output energy is in high energy neutrons, that can't be held in by magnetic confinement as they have no charge. Another hurdle is collecting the energy from the neutrons and turning it into steam. And another big one is finding a good method for producing and handling tritium. The theory is there for this to be done, but doing it in practice is another thing. It's those kinds of problems that the ITER project will hopefully solve.

And yet I've seen fantastic quality pictures and video of Amur Leopards and Tigers. In stark contrast to Bigfoot and Yetis and Spacecraft and ghosts.

That whole story is pretty suspect. Nobody knows who took the picture, and it's been under wraps for thirty years. It doesn't fill you with confidence, and the picture doesn't look great quality anyway. If that't the best ever, it's not saying much. On the subject of pre-emptive strikes against hopefully all the aliens, the problem of multiple targets might be bigger than we can imagine. The targets might be in their millions, or even billions. I just looked up what animal produces the most eggs on Earth, and it's the Ocean Sunfish, that produces a whopping 300 million in a season ! So if the aliens were anything like that, or had advanced cloning technology, they might be able to bounce back from disaster in just a few short years, so long as a few survived. They could archive all current knowledge in a few small space stations, just as we could today, so they wouldn't need to learn everything again from scratch.

That doesn't sound very promising. You are compounding the inefficiency of energy delivery to the pellet by laser with having to run the lasers more or less continuously, which must surely incur maintenance problems, with such high-energy machines. I don't know much about lasers, but what I have come across is generally short-term use. It's so much more efficient a concept, to create a fusion burn that is self-sustaining once ignited, that just needs control input, rather than constant power input. No, this American version is Lazer. It stands for 'Let's all zap every Russian' .

That's interesting. How do they maintain the copyright privileges if books are available in a pdf? I haven't read a book for years, my eyes are pretty crap so all my reading is done on a big screen. I did find a source for free books a few years ago, and started reading one or two but my attention span snapped.

That must be the goal, but I wouldn't be confident that it will ever be achievable. Fusion only takes place for a tiny fraction of time, while the inertia of the ingredients and casing keep the whole thing intact, but as it's an explosive event, it's hard to see how that tiny fraction of time can be lengthened enough. Whereas magnetic confinement can be run for minutes, in a continuous process, inertial confinement can't. So I can't see how you can use the energy of one pellet to cause fusion in the next one. It needs the lazer in order to inject the energy almost instantaneously, in order to work. With magnetic confinement, you work with much lower pressures, but much higher temperatures. So there is the prospect of the heat of fusion taking over, and becoming self-sustaining at some point, without the input of external energy. I can't see how you can get to that with lazers and pellets. But like I said, there must be a way, they don't throw money away lightly. Edit : Maybe the fusion experiment is just a front, for the military research into bigger and stronger lazers ?

That's what I do, at the moment. I archive onto a large capacity magnetic disk, which I then remove and store. The theory being that the disk will last longer, if it's not constantly powered up and spinning. But I have had hard disks lose their formatting, if not used for a long period. Maybe by coincidence, the were Hitachi disks. Maybe they have a weakness. You can get your data back (or most of it) by formatting the disk again, and running Recuva, or some other data retrieval software, but it's long winded, and you don't always get everything. What would be great, would be a formatting utility that doesn't wipe the existing file system, but just restores the boot system files, so that you can access what was on the disk straight away. Maybe there is something like that out there. I haven't come across it though.

That's what I understand, although my knowledge is pretty basic. If I want to store stuff long-term for reference purposes, I put it on a spinning hard disk. What I'm not sure of though, is how long a hard disk will keep it's boot info safe. I have had hard disks lose it and need reformatting, if left unused for a long period. Maybe there is flash memory used at start-up that can leak away. Fortunately, you can usually recover data after formatting, if it's precious. But backing up is a better bet. If I want info to be constantly available, and continually updated, then an SSD is ideal. And of course, for laptops and phones, that get bumped and dropped, SSD is miles better.

You can't have a need without a purpose. I don't claim to speak for others as you do. In the US, people vote for others to overshadow them. And worship the thoughts of others, who are dead but wrote a constitution. And millions crave to be overshadowed by a sky being and it's son who might or might not have existed 2,000 years ago. So your 'need not to be overshadowed' hypothesis doesn't stand up to examination. For many humans, that's exactly what they want.

Me too. They've moved the goalposts so much, it's like they want to give a false impression. I'm very keen on fusion research, but I've never seen the problem of Lazer inefficiency adressed head-on. How can there be any future for Lazer systems, without an entirely new form of Lazer? I feel I must be missing something, because the money keeps going in to it.