Timeline for How are self-replicating mines supposed to work?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| Jun 16, 2020 at 9:31 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Jul 5, 2015 at 19:05 | comment | added | M. A. Golding | Damon - Don't say that runaway, dangerous fusion reactors are possible in Star Trek and other sci-fi shows merely because they are seen in various episodes and are canon. I say that dangerous runaway fusion reactors are not possible in Star Trek until someone creates a plausible theory making them 1) scientifically possible 2) technologically plausible and 3) reasonable to build, despite the difficulty in making atoms fuse at all and the obvious undesirability of fusion reactors which can runaway and explode. | |
| Jul 5, 2015 at 18:58 | comment | added | M. A. Golding | Damon - Theoretically you could start a fission reaction by dropping one rock on another rock, and would have to pick up and move the first rock to stop it. But fusion reactors always require complex machinery running and a lot of energy to make atoms fuse. One a fusion reactor produces more energy than it consumes, it can provide the energy to keep working by using some of the energy it produces, Even them a simple switch can switch the energy to continue fusing into the energy output and the reaction will instantly shut down. A runaway fusion reactor is impossible. | |
| Jul 5, 2015 at 17:06 | comment | added | Damon | Right, but the energy needed to create even a single 1 meter object "out of nothing" (that is, from energy) is... astronomic. At roughly 500 liters of volume, that would be anywhere from 750 to 1,000kg of mass for a mostly-metal thingie, that corresponds to energy somewhere in the 2-digit petajoule range. 15% of 2,500 mines lost is 375 such objects. That's... huge. So, if there should be any chance that this might work, it must be possible to gain huge amounts of zero point energy rather quickly (maybe not instantaneously, but still "pretty fast" anyway). | |
| Jul 5, 2015 at 15:43 | comment | added | Valorum | @Damon - The implication is that it's slow and not very efficient "The threshold was set deliberately high because of the long lead time required to produce small numbers of particle pairs.". It would be basically useless for a starship engine or really any other application other than a static installation. | |
| Jul 5, 2015 at 15:41 | comment | added | Damon | Zero point energy is a nice explanation. Although technology to extract such substantial amounts being readily available and so common that it can be rather easily rigged together by an engineer at some remote spacestation brings up the question why this is not the default source of energy for starbases and starships, being much less a risk than matter/antimatter or fusion reactors and needing no dilithium, nor containment field or emergency eject (though without an exploding reactor, an explicit self-destruct mechanism would have to be added...) :-) | |
| Jul 5, 2015 at 15:28 | vote | accept | Damon | ||
| Jul 5, 2015 at 0:19 | comment | added | user11521 | I wonder how zero-point energy corresponds to deeper subspace domains... | |
| Jul 4, 2015 at 22:37 | comment | added | user16696 | So they use ZedPMs? Cool | |
| Jul 4, 2015 at 22:27 | comment | added | Valorum | @cde - Theoretically, the vacuum of space contains a form of energy that is inexhaustible. In the trek universe, this energy can be extracted using [insert vague trek technobabble here]. | |
| Jul 4, 2015 at 22:22 | comment | added | user16696 | Any explication on the zero point vacuum domain? | |
| Jul 4, 2015 at 21:52 | history | answered | Valorum | CC BY-SA 3.0 |