Fusion (again)

@moonbus said
Oh, I see what you mean. Certainly the parties which sustain themselves on burning fossil fuels, both nations and corporations, would fight tooth and nail to prevent the widespread implementation of fusion power. I doubt it would come to war though, as that would be in no one’s interest. If the USA were to offer the technology to the world’s worst fossil fuel polluters, it wo ...[text shortened]... at they a right to catch up with capitalism, so offering China the tech would obviate that argument.

The petrodollar is important for keeping the US dollar as the world reserve currency so if oil mostly became a thing of the past the US dollar would be toast. That still doesn't explain why North Korea is not seeking fusion though. They have no incentive to suppress fusion technology so I have dismissed this conspiracy theory as nonsense. Something that important cannot be suppressed for long.

@sonhouse said
@moonbus
It turns out fusion is easier to do on a spacecraft for propulsion than here on Earth because you can basically make it a mile long accelerator and smash stuff together with no fear of radiation because you would be at the other end a mile away.
The only thing more powerful than that Kg for Kg is anti matter conversion which is also on the drawing boards for space ...[text shortened]... pace shuttle and the boosters into orbit so on a small craft it would get to Jupiter in a day or so.

How do you use antimatter without blowing yourself up?

@sonhouse said
@moonbus
It turns out fusion is easier to do on a spacecraft for propulsion than here on Earth because you can basically make it a mile long accelerator and smash stuff together with no fear of radiation because you would be at the other end a mile away.
The only thing more powerful than that Kg for Kg is anti matter conversion which is also on the drawing boards for space ...[text shortened]... pace shuttle and the boosters into orbit so on a small craft it would get to Jupiter in a day or so.

This suggests that the way forward may be to generate fusion-based power off-world. Now we just need a transmission mechanism to utilize the power down on Earth …

@moonbus
There is an ongoing present day experiment to beam solar power from space to Earth.
So if that works, some kind of a space based fusion reactor could do just that.
The only thing I see is the ones talked about are less than a gigawatt and that is not enough power to light a decent sized city much less power a civilization.
I think they will have to do ground based fusion if they want terawatt level, we may need PETAwatts in the future.

@moonbus said
This suggests that the way forward may be to generate fusion-based power off-world. Now we just need a transmission mechanism to utilize the power down on Earth …

Microwaves have been suggested, the receiver station could be on the pole (either) to facilitate the aim 😉 (you don't want a microwave beam of considerable power to go through living creatures.)

@Metal-Brain
Antimatter can be trapped in a magnetic bottle and one end reduces the field strength and the antimatter shoots out, enabled by an opposite charge electric charge.
That stream would meet a regular matter stream and THAT is when all hell breaks loose but on a small scale.

@Ponderable
The actual power level would be very high but spread out over acres of land so you use a lot of antennas on the ground to convert the RF to electricity so the density per square meter would be low enough to not injure birds flying the beam.
That's the theory anyway🙂

@sonhouse said
@Metal-Brain
Antimatter can be trapped in a magnetic bottle and one end reduces the field strength and the antimatter shoots out, enabled by an opposite charge electric charge.
That stream would meet a regular matter stream and THAT is when all hell breaks loose but on a small scale.

Easier said than done. Isn't that like trying to control a nuclear explosion?

@sonhouse
Too expensive.

http://eskify.com/the-antimatter-bomb-the-only-weapon-more-powerful-than-a-nuke/

@sonhouse said
@Metal-Brain
Antimatter can be trapped in a magnetic bottle and one end reduces the field strength and the antimatter shoots out, enabled by an opposite charge electric charge.
That stream would meet a regular matter stream and THAT is when all hell breaks loose but on a small scale.

How are you going to keep that stream of antimatter from being blown back into your space ship? Once again, how are you going to avoid getting blown up?

Don't get me wrong, I like to watch Star Trek as much as the next guy, but don't take that crap too seriously. Faster than light travel? Beam me up? Come on dude.

@sonhouse said
@Ponderable
The actual power level would be very high but spread out over acres of land so you use a lot of antennas on the ground to convert the RF to electricity so the density per square meter would be low enough to not injure birds flying the beam.
That's the theory anyway🙂

Good idea. Some countries still have large uninhabited spaces. Canada, Australia, Russia, the Sahara, USA. Now, if we can just convince the tin-foil-hat loonies that this does not cause cancer, sterility, autism, or genital warts …

@ponderable said
Microwaves have been suggested, the receiver station could be on the pole (either) to facilitate the aim 😉 (you don't want a microwave beam of considerable power to go through living creatures.)

5G is in the microwave frequency. So are routers.

YouTube

Microwave ovens contain the microwaves in a tiny space. That is why they heat food so well.

@Metal-Brain
In a rocket, there would be antimatter stored in a magnetic trap and and then a plasma generator of ordinary matter, the two types of matter would have a controlled stream of each one on separate paths and coming together in a rocket chamber, and THERE is where the reaction would take place, and the heat from that reaction would accelerate a third stream of ions, maybe hydrogen ions, basically a stream of protons, which would be heated to a tremendous degree, much higher temperature than ANY other kind of rocket and therefore a much higher ISP rate with much higher propellant velocity which obeys kinetic energy laws and therefore you get much better thrust for the weight of the propellant that any other craft would have kg for kg of propellant mass.

There is no danger of an explosion because the anti matter has its own stream and it has just enough energy to zap the hell out of a propellant, maybe it would be Argon but there is much higher exhaust velocity for lighter ions so they would probably use hydrogen.

They could use water after the H and O are separated
probably by electrolysis and ionized, (neutral ions would not react to the magnetic field) the H would have one path in a magnetic field and because Oxygen is much heavier than Hydrogen, they could be run together in a mixed stream and meeting the curved magnetic field the Hydrogen would bend at a much sharper angle than oxygen so they would be on separate paths exiting the steering magnet.

That is exactly how one of the clean room machines works, ion implanters which I was field maintenance for near 20 years so I know exactly what I am talking about in the case of the steering magnet, which means the O2 can be sent to its own chamber and the H to meet up with the antimatter stream but where they meet there is not enough actual mass to make any kind of explosion, just a controlled release of a LOT of energy, some ten times that of the next competitor, fission and thousands of times the energy involved in ANY chemical rocket.

Of course a craft like that would be built in space and supplied kind of like the ISS during construction and then loaded with fuel, supplies and then people after non human tests are run and confirmed ok then human test flights would proceed.

If the engineering is done right that vehicle could get to over half the speed of light, maybe 90% so a trip to Alpha Centauri could be completed one way in maybe 8 to 6 years and of course the closer to c you get, the less time the crew thinks it took so they will age less than say a twin on Earth, if they went far enough, they might age 20 years but the twin could be long dead by the time they get back to Earth and probably nobody would have even known about your existence after 200 years but that is another story.

I hope you actually read this, it should give you an idea of how safe such a vehicle would be, much safer than a fission rocket because there would be no onboard fission material with those attendant problems, radiation direct to the crew and such and the weight of the fission fuel and the weight of the propellant would ALL be much higher to get to say Alpha Centauri.

I like Alpha Centauri as a first place to travel when you can get 90+% of c because it is a triple star system so you get to visit three stars for the price of one major journey, the three stars are less than a tenth of a LY apart so that would be a snap for our intrepid explorers and astronomers have already detected one planet in the goldilocks zone around one of the dwarf stars in that triple system so that is where I would place my bets as to first trip into interstellar space.

@moonbus
Or picked up by conspiracy theoriests that the beam could be used as a steerable weapon to burn up a whole city because they want to sow fear in the public which is what they thrive on.

@Metal-Brain
Where did you get the idea that ANY rocket could ever go faster than light?
I never mentioned that idea which so far is not going to happen and the best bet we would have for a long time to come would be the anti matter rocket which would not be able to get anywhere near say 99% of c.
Don't know why you even threw that one in. You should know with any vehicle getting acceleration by ANY means would NEVER get to even the SPEED of light much less go faster than light.
If you could have a thought experiment of a way to teleport fuel onto a space craft so the propellent and fuel, whatever that is, is ALWAYS full being filled up by the teleport link and all that would get you is to follow the rules of the road and the craft would slowly TRY to get to c but would always be less than c. Maybe such a system could get to 0.999999% of c but NEVER 1.0c or 1.00000001 c for that matter.

Why did you not learn this stuff in school? You claim to have a college degree and it would be part and parcel of a STEM education. I guess you missed those physics classes which I got into as a FRESHMAN in college, Palomar College to be exact.