So I am reading in my new favorite book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and I come to this very interesting fact: Mass can be converted into Energy, just like that!
*The scientifically overconfident reader dies.
Okkay Okkay I am stating the obvious right? I mean for years we had nuclear plants that are producing vast amounts of energy from small amounts of material So I am not THAT stupid, the thing is, someone screwed up somewhere in my education and kind of convinced me that this principle applies ONLY to like those very rare radioactive elements (e.g. Plutonium , Uranium ..etc). So I went ahead to cruise through life unaware that we are actually swimming in a sea of energy! I mean you know Einstein’s famous E=mc2 and c is HUGE! so if you square that number and just multiply it by just one gram it would be huge! So the revelation I got is the fact that no matter if the element is very rare (like Plutonium) or very abundant .. say Copper or Iron .. the same principle holds! This automatically means that basically we are sitting ontop of a huge amount of energy beyond our wildest dreams!
*The scientifically-challenged reader is dazzeled by my revelation.
*The scientifically overconfident reader lost hope in anything interesting in this post.
.... but there's a catch, obviously it's way much easier for us to release energy from those heavy/unstable elements than it is to do that from more common/stable elements. But then again, I was surprised to learn that we are about 1% efficient in releasing Nuclear energy now from those heavy elements! So by a simple (and I am almost sure inaccurate) deduction I got my second revelation: What if in the future we find a way to release energy from more stable elements (again assume Iron) in a little bit more efficient way? So the drop in the total amount of energy that can be released is evened out by the more efficiency. And voila you’ve got yourself:
.... but there's a catch, obviously it's way much easier for us to release energy from those heavy/unstable elements than it is to do that from more common/stable elements. But then again, I was surprised to learn that we are about 1% efficient in releasing Nuclear energy now from those heavy elements! So by a simple (and I am almost sure inaccurate) deduction I got my second revelation: What if in the future we find a way to release energy from more stable elements (again assume Iron) in a little bit more efficient way? So the drop in the total amount of energy that can be released is evened out by the more efficiency. And voila you’ve got yourself:
The MtoEtor
Note: Do you know that an average human being has around 7x10(18) joules of energy? So if I were to feed you to my MtoEtor you will generate an energy equivalent to 30 Uranium bombs in an instant... and you thought those suicide bombers with a belt of TNT explosives wrapped around them were dangerous? Think again!
1 comment:
*Munqy shakes his head in dismay.
And that's why I've always thought reading science fiction was important. Ignorant bloody philistine...
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