They do lol
They do lol
A Dyson swarm is basically just a huge number solar collectors orbiting the sun. Humanity could put some individual collectors in space if we wanted to, but we don’t have anywhere near enough resources to make a full swarm.
Near-relativistic spacecraft are conceivably possible and are not too far beyond what’s possible with current technology (though would still require significant advancements). The catch is that they would be very tiny and we would have to send a stream of them to their destination.
Retinal projectors are currently under development, and advanced ones could in principle be higher quality than current VR headsets while having a very small form-factor. Optical metamaterials such as metalenses would be very useful for this, particularly if they could be designed to work at all three RGB wavelengths simultaneously (not easy).
Putting aside the issue that it requires a negative energy density, there’s still the issue that it will necessarily violate causality, which is the reason FTL travel is considered problematic in the first place. Maybe it’s ultimately okay, but it may also mean that warp drives are fundamentally impossible.
Depends on what you consider reasonable. If you’re a researcher, Thorlabs has a couple for <$30k. You could also build your own, but you probably wouldn’t be asking if you had the experience necessary to do this.
If you’re a hobbyist, building your own would be an impressive project that would teach you a lot (look up spontaneous parametric down-conversion, a common way to create entangled pairs). It would also be pricey, as you would need an appropriate laser source (probably a nanosecond pulsed laser), a non-linear crystal like BBO, and a lot of miscellaneous optical components, etc. You can get this stuff second hand online for a lot cheaper than new, but it would still cost a lot for an individual. You would also need to characterize your output to ensure you’re actually getting correlated pairs, which is outside of my expertise.
fountainpens@kbin.social or fountainpens@wayfarershaven.eu?
I never posted my pens on r/fountainpens before, but I maybe I should here.
In principle, you could have a system designed to image your surroundings (using cameras, LIDAR, etc) and perhaps some kind of machine learning algorithm to predict what kind of sound would be expected if the events around you were occurring in atmosphere. I imagine this could work well for simple things like a tool hitting a piece of metal, but would be probably run into issues when the events are affected by the lack of atmosphere or give little or no visual indication that they are occurring. And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to “hear” anything outside of the view of your imaging system.
Heat can transfer through conduction (basically thermal diffusion through physical contact), convection (bulk motion of matter, like gas or water flow), and radiation. For a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, the pressure is considered ultra-high vacuum, so you basically only have radiation to dissipate heat. Near room temperature, this would be mid-infrared light. The energy in everyday sound waves is very small, so body heat, on-board instruments, sunlight, and perhaps even IR emission from the Earth would be much more important contributors to heat build-up. However, regardless of the heat sources involved, there will always be some equilibrium temperature where the energy going into the system equals the energy radiating away.
To keep things comfortable for the crew on the ISS, there are passive and active systems to regulate the temperature [1]. For dissipating excess heat, large radiators are used. These are basically panels with a large surface area in order to maximize emission of thermal radiation. A closed-loop system is used to circulate fluid, which collects and transfers heat to these radiators. Water is used for some parts, but others have pipes on the outside that use ammonia to prevent freezing. The radiators themselves can be retracted or deployed as needed.
[1] Memi, E. G. “Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview.” (2006): 19.
Any composite particle can have an antiparticle counterpart if you replace all of its constituent particles with antiparticles (e.g. anti- up and down quarks in the case of protons and neutrons).
Yes, sound is the collective motion of particles in the form of a compression wave. As these waves propagate through a material and scatter off boundaries and inhomogeneities in general, they become less ordered and eventually indistinguishable from random atomic motion (i.e. thermal energy). However, in addition to this, sound waves can radiate away when in atmosphere. In the case of spacecraft, they can only dissipate into thermal energy and can therefore persist much longer. This is actually a problem engineers have to deal with, as unwanted vibrations can cause issues. There’s research looking into addressing this by using materials specifically designed to be highly absorbent to sound waves at particular frequencies (i.e. the collective motion of atoms at particular frequencies rapidly decays into random thermal motion).
No, they don’t annihilate. The electron will scatter off the other particle, though any differences in charge will of course affect the scattering. For example, an electron and a proton could become bound to make a hydrogen atom, but this couldn’t happen with an anti-proton. Any nuclear reactions (specifically electron capture) would be affected too.
In the case of free anti-neutrons, there’s a chance the anti-neutron could decay into an anti-proton and a positron. If this were to happen during the collision with an electron, the electron could potentially annihilate with the positron.
Depending on what you use on your TV, SmartTube may be an option. It even blocks sponsored segments within YouTube videos.