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Thanks, I was not aware that the surface of the Sun is very bright. If we're going to analyze the performance of our "reactor", then we need to include the fus

Thanks, I was not aware that the surface of the Sun is very bright. If we're going to analyze the performance of our "reactor", then we need to include the fusing fuel, the "confinement", which prevents us from being very quickly destroyed by rather nasty fusion products, and the photosphere, which is very beneficial to us. I continue to claim that if you ask laymen about the mass of their "personal portion" of this reactor, you will get answers that are about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than in reality. I actually tried this just now, with expected results ("some kind of a tiny pinhead thing"). There is no point to this exercise, other than to show that people have no intuitive vision of these scales; it doesn't make them stupid, the scales are just unintuitive and outside of their experience. I don't claim to have discovered anything about astrophysics.

scythe 15y ago
>Thanks, I was not aware that the surface of the Sun is very bright. Well, you also clearly weren't aware of the point I was making: if you ask a misleading question, you get a misleading answer. >I continue to claim that if you ask laymen about the mass of their "personal portion" of this reactor, you will get answers that are about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than in reality. I actually tried this just now, with expected results ("some kind of a tiny pinhead thing"). There is no point to this exercise, other than to show that people have no intuitive vision of these scales; it doesn't make them stupid, the scales are just unintuitive and outside of their experience. I don't claim to have discovered anything about astrophysics. The 'laypeople' are basically right, though: if you actually extract the energy from a bit of thermal plasma it only takes a "pinhead" to supply energy for an entire human life. Obviously the energy being actually emitted is much smaller, just as there is no light emitted from a box with a bright light in it, but that doesn't mean that the light in the box couldn't easily light up a room. Like, the amount of 15000000 degree plasma at the core of the Sun that could destroy a small city if it were released is probably no larger than my fist. >rather nasty fusion products There really aren't any seriously nasty fusion products -- tritium and positrons, the latter being instantly destroyed and the former already present in the atmosphere.
- yaakov34 15y ago
  I don't agree that "the energy is not being emitted"; the Sun is roughly in thermal equilibrium, and the energy emitted equals the energy produced by fusion. The same would happen to a "bright light inside a box" - the box would emit the same amount of power once it's in thermal equilibrium, only it would presumably emit in infrared. The power produced by nuclear fusion inside the Sun turns out to be very small compared to the mass of the Sun. I don't claim that this is some kind of a discovery, and I am sure that this is obvious and intuitive to astrophysicists, but it's not intuitive to laymen, who think that the Sun emits a lot of power relative to its mass. That's not misleading, it's only unintuitive. In their immediate experience, anything this bright is indeed producing tens of thousands of watts per kilogram at least. And I never doubted that you would get a whole lot of power if the energy contained in the Sun was released on a human time scale; this is something where intuition serves us well.

scythe 15y ago

>Thanks, I was not aware that the surface of the Sun is very bright. Well, you also clearly weren't aware of the point I was making: if you ask a misleading question, you get a misleading answer. >I continue to claim that if you ask laymen about the mass of their "personal portion" of this reactor, you will get answers that are about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than in reality. I actually tried this just now, with expected results ("some kind of a tiny pinhead thing"). There is no point to this exercise, other than to show that people have no intuitive vision of these scales; it doesn't make them stupid, the scales are just unintuitive and outside of their experience. I don't claim to have discovered anything about astrophysics. The 'laypeople' are basically right, though: if you actually extract the energy from a bit of thermal plasma it only takes a "pinhead" to supply energy for an entire human life. Obviously the energy being actually emitted is much smaller, just as there is no light emitted from a box with a bright light in it, but that doesn't mean that the light in the box couldn't easily light up a room. Like, the amount of 15000000 degree plasma at the core of the Sun that could destroy a small city if it were released is probably no larger than my fist. >rather nasty fusion products There really aren't any seriously nasty fusion products -- tritium and positrons, the latter being instantly destroyed and the former already present in the atmosphere.

yaakov34 15y ago
I don't agree that "the energy is not being emitted"; the Sun is roughly in thermal equilibrium, and the energy emitted equals the energy produced by fusion. The same would happen to a "bright light inside a box" - the box would emit the same amount of power once it's in thermal equilibrium, only it would presumably emit in infrared. The power produced by nuclear fusion inside the Sun turns out to be very small compared to the mass of the Sun. I don't claim that this is some kind of a discovery, and I am sure that this is obvious and intuitive to astrophysicists, but it's not intuitive to laymen, who think that the Sun emits a lot of power relative to its mass. That's not misleading, it's only unintuitive. In their immediate experience, anything this bright is indeed producing tens of thousands of watts per kilogram at least. And I never doubted that you would get a whole lot of power if the energy contained in the Sun was released on a human time scale; this is something where intuition serves us well.