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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Most people believed the Earth was flat too up until a few hundred years back...
So when asking the average four'n'twenty wielding joe to cope with algebra, the speed of light and a brain-bending concept like relativity, its no wonder they dump them all into the same "that complicated science stuff" basket in their head.. About all that most of them can remember is that Einstein had funny hair..
The 1Kg of Uranium thing would probably depend on whether you managed to achieve complete energy conversion or not. Conventional fission bombs ony convert something like .04% of their mass into energy (and thats still enough to make a darn big boom !). That C^2 multiplier in there means a very small amount of M turns into a very large amount of E.
[Edit: OK, Jake was posting while I was, and he got there with the numbers first.. They look realistic, except that isnt it difficult to fission an entire mass of U238 (as opposed to U235) ? I seem to remember something about U238 only fissioning when struck by neutrons of a certain energy level (slow ?) requiring a moderator to be mixed in with the reaction mass to slow down the fast neutrons emitted by the fissioning nuclei).
Nice Calculations though.. everyone follow that class ? Good, tomorrow we will allow exemptions for nuclear-powered bots once we replace the polycarb with lead shielding.
And to anyone who thinks we already know about all of the available energy sources out there, heres a favourite quotation of mine..
Take 3 bricks of about 1Kg mass each.
1 is made of Glowing Red-Hot Iron
2 is made of Room-Temperature Uranium 235
3 is made of Frozen Hydrogen-2 (Deuterium)
Ask a scientiest to rate them in terms of the energy that could potentially be extracted from each brick. Rewind 50 years and repeat. Then 100 years and repeat.
Without listing the answer (Which is probably obvious to anyone reading this thread), - If our concepts of where energy can be obtained from can do a total back-flip in the last 100 years, what are the chances that we now know it all and there arent any new sources waiting to be yet discovered ?
Food for thought in my opinion.. Never assume science knows it all.. When amateurs are building Nuclear-Fusion reactors in their basement, you can bet something new is going to pop up soon.. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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Thu May 26, 2005 10:35 am |
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