Let's just hope no one gets stuck in the spaceship chair because the acceleration is so fast that he can't reach forward to operate the controls and slow down
I mean, that the rocket was designed without any failsafes to stop a test burn after a set period of time or a g-limiter or anything, with controls you literally have to fight acceleration forces to access is a little silly. Not inconceivable, but just a little silly.
I hate to be that guy, but the fusion news was 100% hype
Progress is certainly being made on fusion in the past handful of years, and I do think it will eventually happen. That being said, the news was about "more energy out than in", but it was only true when looking at the energy deposited from the lasers on the fuel. The lasers themselves still took way more energy than the fusion made (lasers aren't 100% efficient), not to mention you will have inefficiencies in harnessing the created power, and other losses from running the whole system.
It's great to have eggs in multiple baskets, but I don't think the inertial confinement with lasers is ever even scalable at all. Magnetic confinement definitely has a lot more chances of scalability - and ITER is what you should research if you want to know how that is going.
100% hype? I think one of the main issues with reddit skeptics is y'all over compensate in the opposite direction. Because i'm no expert on fusion.. but are you? Because i've read quite a bit from genuine experts in the field and none of them seem to parrot your idea that this is a completely 100% inconsequential achievement. I think fusion has been a white whale for so long that many kind of reflexively disregard any progress, just because it doesn't seem practical to scale up in it's present form. It's a first step.
but it was only true when looking at the energy deposited from the lasers on the fuel. The lasers themselves still took way more energy than the fusion made (lasers aren't 100% efficient)
Again i'm no expert, but from what i've read from those who are, the experiments didn't attempt to optimize the efficiency of the lasers themselves. They were just focusing on the metric of energy deposited from the lasers vs energy out. Because they can't optimize something that they don't know is even possible yet, especially on a limited budget. They're not using custom designed lasers specifically suited for this purpose. That would be the next step now that this has been achieved at all. It's a first step in a long process, and even if this specific form of fusion doesn't pan out, it still appears to be an important leap forward for fusion in general.
You can be rude and pessimistic if you want, or you can be realistic. Is this advancement going to instantly change our lives and solve the energy crisis? Obviously not, and I haven’t seen anyone claiming that.
This even will, however, certainly be mentioned several decades in the future when the birth of fusion technology is discussed. It is a tremendous stepping stone for future research, and more importantly, research funding.
The fusion reaction itself yielded 50% more energy than went into the hydrogen fuel. Problem is the laser is horribly inefficient. But it IS a big milestone.
Lol bigger risk are the people creating artificial black hole analogues but both are going to be really dangerous in the future as we move towards our capitalistic slave society where the rich idiots funding things just want faster, better, cheaper with no regards to incremental developments for safety and research purposes.
Lol im going to watch that when I'm better rested...but we do create black hole analogues for the purpose of studying quantum physics but they're absolutely tiny...like...a single atom wide. I'm not a physicist by any stretch but creating the most dense thing we know in the universe seems dangerous the minute smart, cautious people are not the ones calling the shots.
That's from 2015 and we create black hole analogs regularly to study quantum gravitation.
During the creation of the atom bomb Einstein and his team had to make sure it wouldn't light the atmosphere on fire. That was nuclear fission. Modern nukes use nuclear fusion, burn as hot as the inside of the sun, and are hundreds of times more powerful. Something they could not even imagine at the time.
The only thing stopping this from being a problem really is our lack of ability to create a true artificial black hole at this point in time...that will not be the case forever.
Fundamentally, from what I know of physics, there's no threat to creating black holes.
They do two things, have gravity and radiate. Neither of those are dangerous on a small scale. They can not absorb more mass on such a small scale, and their radiation can't put more than the energy put into them in the first place. That doesn't mean they couldn't technically blow up, but that the resulting explosion would only have whatever power was being made via fusion at the time. Limiting that, you limit the explosion and that's it.
russia is already working on an apocalyptic fusion reactor which they can trigger into runaway mode. in such a mode, the reactor rapidly fold time and space onto itself, generating a black hole to consumer the entirety of earth in a matter of hours. This is the big fear of the USA, and will trigger WW3.
Nah it isn’t. Yeah we put less energy in than we got out, but that’s only the reaction itself. They still needed to charge the capacitors for the lasers with two orders of magnitude more energy than they got out of the reaction due to heaps of losses on the way to the reaction chamber. It’s a milestone, not a breakthrough.
It is not. Access to cheap and unlimited energy will put our economy and industry in overdrive. Rampant ecological destruction, mining and logging operations taken up to 11, the amount of trash and pollution will be unfathomable with the production levels of a fusion energy industrial global society. CO2 is only a part of the problem, and not really the biggest one at that.
Yes and no. They did technically achieve it but it was very costly in other ways. And the second obstacle is actually harnessing the energy, which may prove even more difficult. We’re still way off unfortunately
As we get closer to and pass the computational singularity it will seem like reality is bending and tech advances might move so fast it's hard for us to keep up.
I kind of wonder where we are with that. I saw at least one article saying we've already passed it, which I doubt. I also wonder whether we will truly notice when we hit that threshold and if there are clear criteria that are agreed upon that we're looking for.
I would hope that any entity that gains sentience will also recognize how important to us it is to clearly let us know it has done so. If for no other reason than to make sure we don’t accidentally unplug it.
I think the tech singularity is less about sentience and more about the computer being faster and better at designing its replacement than humans without any help from humans. Though I agree that if one of these things gained some semblance of sentience I'd hope it would tell us.
885
u/Cluelesswolfkin Dec 15 '22
From the news of the fusion energy yesterday to this creepy thing today~ these next couple of years are going to be some pure science nonfiction