5 ms·

>the only requirement was something that anti-gravitated: something like “negative energy” A bit more than that. Didn't it also require the energy equivalent t

>the only requirement was something that anti-gravitated: something like “negative energy” A bit more than that. Didn't it also require the energy equivalent to the output of a small star?

ben_w 3y ago
Depending on the model, anything from the mass-energy of a few tons to several times the universe. Apparently a few models work with positive mass, but I'm reading headlines for that, I can't follow field equations.
arethuza 3y ago
The Tsar Bomba (5.3YW) managed about 2% of the power output of the Sun (384YW) - admittedly not for very long though... So Teller's Sundial design was aimed at 10Gt so ~200 times more than the Tsar Bomba as tested. So Sundial's peak power output would perhaps have been roughly 1RW? Edit: Maybe you power the Warp drive with a sequence of Sundials.... in a sort of Orion like approach? :-) Edit2: So about a billion Sundials a second and you're good to go? Edit3: Usual upper limit of yield per mass is about 6Mt per t - so a Sundial would be about 1500t. So that would be burning about 1.5 Tt of bombs a second?
- api 3y ago
  > The Tsar Bomba (5.3YW) managed about 2% of the power output of the Sun (384YW) TIL You know what's even more amazing/frightening? There is no power limit for hydrogen bombs. You could take a bomb like the Tsar Bomba or Castle Bravo and use that as a blasting cap to trigger an even larger fusion stage. ... and on, and on, in a vast nested turducken of kaboom. One of the ideas to deflect a planet killer asteroid would, if we had time, be to land there and build a base and assemble such a mega-bomb deep underground.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    "There is no power limit for hydrogen bombs" Edward Teller (who else) got there first! https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi... A 1Gt primary (Gnomon) igniting Sundial to give 10Gt.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Can you only bump it an order of magnitude per stage though? Seems inefficient. Sounds like one of the defense contractor MBAs got ahold of the plan.
      - arethuza 3y ago
        I suspect that limit might be because a Sundial would be physically huge - 1500t or so.
  - lttlrck 3y ago
    "turducken" never heard of it and what a perfect word in this context LOL! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken
    - dboreham 3y ago
      The 3D version of turtles.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time: > John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created
    - arethuza 3y ago
      OK I think that wins the "largest H-bomb anyone has thought of" prize!
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Possibly the largest artificial one, but pair instability supernova turn several solar masses of hydrogen all the way up into nickel-56 in a few seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova Edit: Just remembered that Isaac Arthur has spoken about artificially inducing a Type Ia supernova to synthesise heavy elements, and why sufficiently developed civilisations may want to do this at this scale.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    One of the ideas to deflect a planet killer asteroid would, if we had time, be to land there and build a base and assemble such a mega-bomb deep underground. Problem: Giant-sized asteroid on collision course with Earth Solution: Build giant bomb and nuke it Problem: 843 medium-sized radioactive asteroids on collision course with Earth
    - api 3y ago
      From what I read the goal would be to pulverize it into pieces small enough that the majority would burn up or at least be significantly attenuated by the atmosphere, as well as impart enough delta-V to send some fraction of the mass on a new trajectory that would miss Earth.
pmarreck 3y ago
Honestly, this does sound like an intimidatingly high amount of energy, but look at the progress of computational power since, say, 1973, 50 years ago. If the same advances in physical control of energy had taken place, who knows where we'd be today
- WJW 3y ago
  The problem with that comparison is that we are not even close to the theoretical limits for computational density, while we are quite close to the limits for efficiency in things like turbines.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Anything involving a Carnot cycle is a rather primitive usage of energy, so I'm not surprised that turbines are close to their peak efficiency since humans have been using them for at least a century now. More modern forms of energy usage will skip the whole heat-cycle skip and just directly produce electricity from some other energy source. We're still in early stages of much of that; just look at how much PV (solar) efficiency has improved in the last few decades. And we've barely even looked at what we can do with nuclear power[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_reactor
    - WJW 3y ago
      PV has increased from a <10% percent efficiency in the 80s to 25-30% now for commercially available panels. They can grow another 3.3x in efficiency at most, hardly comparable to the doubling every few years that semiconductors have had. The wikipedia link you provided contains the following snippet: > and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40-45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors. A doubling of efficiency is extremely nice, don't get me wrong. But after you get to 90% there is simply not much further to go. On the other hand, semiconductor production has probably not even reached 1% of what is achievable. Non-flat structures are still seen as incredibly advanced, let alone true 3D chip manufacturing. Bulk energy production will never see improvements comparable to those found in semiconductor manufacturing, simply because the systems don't have nearly as much "efficiency space" left to grow into.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
That's just a scaling issue.

>the only requirement was something that anti-gravitated: something like “negative energy” A bit more than that. Didn't it also require the energy equivalent to the output of a small star?

ben_w 3y ago

Depending on the model, anything from the mass-energy of a few tons to several times the universe. Apparently a few models work with positive mass, but I'm reading headlines for that, I can't follow field equations.

arethuza 3y ago

The Tsar Bomba (5.3YW) managed about 2% of the power output of the Sun (384YW) - admittedly not for very long though... So Teller's Sundial design was aimed at 10Gt so ~200 times more than the Tsar Bomba as tested. So Sundial's peak power output would perhaps have been roughly 1RW? Edit: Maybe you power the Warp drive with a sequence of Sundials.... in a sort of Orion like approach? :-) Edit2: So about a billion Sundials a second and you're good to go? Edit3: Usual upper limit of yield per mass is about 6Mt per t - so a Sundial would be about 1500t. So that would be burning about 1.5 Tt of bombs a second?

api 3y ago
> The Tsar Bomba (5.3YW) managed about 2% of the power output of the Sun (384YW) TIL You know what's even more amazing/frightening? There is no power limit for hydrogen bombs. You could take a bomb like the Tsar Bomba or Castle Bravo and use that as a blasting cap to trigger an even larger fusion stage. ... and on, and on, in a vast nested turducken of kaboom. One of the ideas to deflect a planet killer asteroid would, if we had time, be to land there and build a base and assemble such a mega-bomb deep underground.
- arethuza 3y ago
  "There is no power limit for hydrogen bombs" Edward Teller (who else) got there first! https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi... A 1Gt primary (Gnomon) igniting Sundial to give 10Gt.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Can you only bump it an order of magnitude per stage though? Seems inefficient. Sounds like one of the defense contractor MBAs got ahold of the plan.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      I suspect that limit might be because a Sundial would be physically huge - 1500t or so.
- lttlrck 3y ago
  "turducken" never heard of it and what a perfect word in this context LOL! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken
  - dboreham 3y ago
    The 3D version of turtles.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time: > John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created
  - arethuza 3y ago
    OK I think that wins the "largest H-bomb anyone has thought of" prize!
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Possibly the largest artificial one, but pair instability supernova turn several solar masses of hydrogen all the way up into nickel-56 in a few seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova Edit: Just remembered that Isaac Arthur has spoken about artificially inducing a Type Ia supernova to synthesise heavy elements, and why sufficiently developed civilisations may want to do this at this scale.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  One of the ideas to deflect a planet killer asteroid would, if we had time, be to land there and build a base and assemble such a mega-bomb deep underground. Problem: Giant-sized asteroid on collision course with Earth Solution: Build giant bomb and nuke it Problem: 843 medium-sized radioactive asteroids on collision course with Earth
  - api 3y ago
    From what I read the goal would be to pulverize it into pieces small enough that the majority would burn up or at least be significantly attenuated by the atmosphere, as well as impart enough delta-V to send some fraction of the mass on a new trajectory that would miss Earth.

pmarreck 3y ago

Honestly, this does sound like an intimidatingly high amount of energy, but look at the progress of computational power since, say, 1973, 50 years ago. If the same advances in physical control of energy had taken place, who knows where we'd be today

WJW 3y ago
The problem with that comparison is that we are not even close to the theoretical limits for computational density, while we are quite close to the limits for efficiency in things like turbines.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Anything involving a Carnot cycle is a rather primitive usage of energy, so I'm not surprised that turbines are close to their peak efficiency since humans have been using them for at least a century now. More modern forms of energy usage will skip the whole heat-cycle skip and just directly produce electricity from some other energy source. We're still in early stages of much of that; just look at how much PV (solar) efficiency has improved in the last few decades. And we've barely even looked at what we can do with nuclear power[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_reactor
  - WJW 3y ago
    PV has increased from a <10% percent efficiency in the 80s to 25-30% now for commercially available panels. They can grow another 3.3x in efficiency at most, hardly comparable to the doubling every few years that semiconductors have had. The wikipedia link you provided contains the following snippet: > and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40-45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors. A doubling of efficiency is extremely nice, don't get me wrong. But after you get to 90% there is simply not much further to go. On the other hand, semiconductor production has probably not even reached 1% of what is achievable. Non-flat structures are still seen as incredibly advanced, let alone true 3D chip manufacturing. Bulk energy production will never see improvements comparable to those found in semiconductor manufacturing, simply because the systems don't have nearly as much "efficiency space" left to grow into.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

That's just a scaling issue.