Strangely enough, his namesake also studied alchemy. Isaac Newton had notes auctioned off and to the surprise of the buyer it was his study into alchemy.
@@georgebulbakwa9017 and as noted in this video, transmutation of elements may be a path towards Clark Tech. Arthur C. Clark being the other half of Isaac Arthur's namesake!
@@Drew_McTygue Ah yes, use it on the peasants in the farm lands! They are getting rowdy. It is done your majesty, but, now we have no way to make food... OooOOooh NooOOOo!!
"But here on SFIA, we would say that lacks ambition. Why settle for tons of gold when you can make whole planets out of it." 😄😄 Ah man what an opening line to sum up SFIA. Another great episode Isaac, could use something to lift my spirits on the bleak week.
You mentioning RPGs reminded me of Star Ocean, where alchemy is a skill. It let's you turn one element to another, iron to mercury to silver to gold to platinum. Though judging by what you said early, it should probably go mercury to platinum to gold.
@GlobalDataConspirator yeah. Unfortunately we can't channel magical power into a symbol that breaks the laws of reality to make things happen like they can. But at least I don't have to deal with a lolli with a pet Cerberus IRL.
My favorite nuclear transmutation story is in Asimov's Foundation series when they make a transmuter(?) and use it to save a trader on Askone. Clever use in science fiction.
idk if you mentioned it, but transmuting matter into antimatter this way would probably be a lot more valuable (Or capture natural anti-matter that gets swept into the magneosphere of the earth with solar powered harvesters). Mass transmuting antimatter would make space exploration a lot easier, and be a handy alternative to fossil fuels on earth.
It might be worth mentioning that nuclei with too many protons (>~137ish) are expected to be unstable due to the Schwinger effect: spontaneous production of electron+positron pairs due to the strong electric field of the nucleus.
Thank you for your dedicated contribution in creating consistent, stellar content. You have paved the way for many more great minds to expand upon. I stumbled across you by accident in 2016 and you have never failed to exceed my imaginative capacity in a such captivating/problem-solving manner. Thank you for your service to us all, you will go down as one of the great minds of mankind👏🏻
I'm not religious, and i assumed you were not religious as well, but i love the Isaiah reference about beating plowshares into swords, and another where they beat their swords into plowshares. well spoken and received.
Honestly sums up all of the parts of chemistry that i find most interesting... Its just so perfectly balanced between entertaining and educational... Thanx isaac....never stop..
The hilarious part is, the most prosaic possible utilization of this technology played a pretty big part in the Fallout universe. In the New Vegas DLC, Dead Money They had tokens of heavy elements as currency at a resort, with universal vending machines that broke down the tokens as stock material in construction that transmuted into whatever you ordered, with items like weapons being restricted to security officers, basically a perfected version of a universal printer. And Fallout: Tactics had atomic forges that did the same thing at an industrial scale for robot production.
I think it would have been awesome if the Hello Games consulted folks like Isaac with the crafting in their game No Man's Sky. Imagine how cool it would be if the crafting in that game was extremely accurate to real life nuclear physics. Not only would it be highly entertaining, but it would also be very educational.
Economists will be long gone by the time we are able to transmute elements like gold using fusion. I doubt there would even be something akin to an economist at that point. As it is they are not particularly useful, with their predictive power being unreliable at best.
Why? Gold is valuable mostly for arbitrary reasons and because it doesn't corrode. Nobody even uses it as a currency base anymore. If anything this would help cure people of the premise that precious metals and gems are actually worth something on an objective standard, which would make them much more available and drop the costs when the alchemized matter is destigmatized for ornamental use.
@@AngryDuck79 Bit of both. Devaluation of gold at a point where we can make matter into whatever other matter we want is kind of a farcical concern. At that point if any materials are considered special for anything but aesthetic and cultural reasons I have serious questions about the basic assumptions underlying that economy and how exactly it calculates value. It certainly couldn't be based on material scarcity afterward at any rate. But really, gold isn't that valuable now for any reason but habit and supports relatively few industries, especially when considering how far into the future this would probably have to be. So if you have an answer for the collapse of gold in particular or just material scarcity in general being a solved problem being an economic problem past the collapse of various extraction businesses, I would be fascinated to hear them.
If we assume quantum decay to be a random process then iron having far more decay paths/processes leading to it than to Nickel-62 would end up with that event (with negligible quantities of nickel-62 hanging around)
One thing that wasn't brought up that should have been mentioned. Transmutation isn't as simple as just bombarding a nucleus with neutrons. You're dealing with cross sectional area of the nucleus and that cross sectional area fluctuates based on the incident neutron. If your incident neutron has too much kinetic energy, the effective cross sectional area of the nucleus may be so small that there's little chance that the neutron gets capture. Similarly, once you're in the fission regime where a high enough kinetic energy neutron may actually cause the nucleus to split instead of capture which gets away from your transmutation as well. So it's a delicate balancing act between effective cross sectional area of the nucleus and the kinetic energy of the incident neutron (or nucleus as some of the larger atoms are made, the 100 proton+ - Z number).
Was thinking if we use a cougleblitz black hole just for a moment to use it's event horizon to rip off a layer of electron from an atom, or do some other extream modification to other subatomic systems. Depending the precision of the engineering behind it we might go down to the point where we can put such event horizon in the path of an electron and when it gets yoinked we practicly confirm the position of the electron, might be even to go as far as to perfectly map out each layer's precise path with such interactions. Altho a light tweezer might be able to do that too.
In that particular fashion, basically none under known science, we looked at it and some more plausible alternatives in our "Santa Claus Machine" episode a few winter back.
Hi! Some trivia the instalation around black holes and/or stars is present peripherally in Star Wars to create components of repulsolifts, which weirdly enough sound like the warp bubbles created by DARPA. Also nit pick: Alchemist were looking for spiritual transmutation but were studying material first. Cheers!
Amused. Whenever I hear about Quarks, I instantly think of a specific episode of Voyager and Tuvok’s meditation session with Kess in which he tells her, “There is nothing beyond the subatomic,” and I can’t help but think of it ‘reality’ creating a major continuity-breaker in the series, probably one of the biggest continuity-breaker in the entire franchise alongside the 1997 launch of the S.S. Botany Bay, although in terms of scale I’d put the former before the latter as the latter could be explained away by government conspiracies and secrecy, etc. Additional. I’d even put it above the TOS “Zefram Cochrane was born in the Alpha Centauri star system and invented warp drive but nobody remembers who he was,” and the TNG+ era revering Cochrane as “a man who survived WWIII on Earth and built the first warp-capable vessel on an old ICBM and caught the attention of benevolent aliens” continuity problem. Fair. I could go on, and I’m probably just subjectively bias about it, but I also can’t get past the idea that an entire quadrant-spanning federation that uses anti-matter also has no knowledge of Quarks up until the 24th century. After all, literally all of their ships run on anti-matter, and Quarks are talked about far more than scarcely between 21st-Century Middle-School students. But I digress…
Is something like the Omnitrix from Ben 10 (and its failsafe's, capabilities) possible for some advanced civilization. (also what would the logistics be for getting all the DNA).
Shout out to Issac I’m a big watcher and I love the episodes. They are really fun to watch + it makes me think of all the possibilities the human brain can conquer if we put our minds to it. Do you think we could get an episode of electricity. How we can generate it on our own, how we can harvest it on a larger scale to power city’s n beyond without the help of electric companies. Anyway again I ❤️ the shows. Keep em coming!!!!
Maybe we could do some larger-scale transmutation on earth by piggy-backing it on the "quick and dirty" Fusion Power technique of detonating H-Bombs underground to generate steam. You could put some materials in the irradiation zone and then...somehow recover them later? Hmm...I think my plan is falling apart faster than the molecular cohesion of the irradiation samples.
I guess the real question here is not the cost, not even the cost in fusio-dollars, but how do we determine what element is rare (and valuable) for a true energy post-scarce civilization?
You should do a video about well known and often supported stories about humans who claim to have had contact with, or worked with aliens or alien technology. Such as Bob Lazar or the man who inspired the movie Fire in the Sky (can't recall his name at the moment). Bob Lazar is a tricky one especially. He clearly knows the science about which he speaks and gives little to no reason to doubt his story. He declines most interviews and appears to be on the defensive. I honestly can't seem to commit to one opinion or another. I know your show generally isn't about this type of thing but it would be interesting to hear you pick it apart.
Ngl, this is something that I feel a society that doesn't have to worry about energy would do and or innovate in in spades. I didn't even think about it being a big thing until a few years back, but looking at it now, if you have a way to more or less perform _actual_ alchemy (not just exchanging, removing, or adding chemical bonds, but making chemicals anew all together), just seems like you should do it. I even vaguely consider that being a use for Muon-catalyzed fusion if using it for energy doesn't pan out *or maybe even if it does. 🤷🏾♂️
If you are going to set off a fusion explosion to generate potassium with the neutron flux there's no reason not to do it in great big high pressure tank of water and generate electricity from the heat.
Nuclear alchemy? Now I’m reminded of the guy from the Shambala movie (set in the 2003 anime timeline) that discovered uranium and was trying to build a bomb or something I feel like he should have been the main villain of that movie and not a throwaway guy they beat in the first 10 minutes
If neutrons decay more than protons, how do so many elements have more neutrons than protons? Is it a case that there are less neutrons in the universe but they are hoarded by heavier elements?
Decay is based on what is more energetically favourable to the system. In free space neutrons have a very short half-life (few hundred seconds) because an electron and a proton is lower energy than a neutron. However, if the neutron is contained in a stable nucleus it will last for a long long time. In nuclei, if you add more protons the electrostatic repulsion means you need to add even more neutrons to "pack" to protons. As you go up through the nuclei the ratio between the neutrons and protons to remain stable increases until you start reaching nuclei so large the nuclear force is not longer strong enouh to hold them together.
Actually you don't need a nuclear bomb for transmutation, some kind of nuclear reactor can do the job, and it's more practical when you need to recovery the products of transmutation.
If I ever run into a time traveler, I'm going to knock him out, steal his time machine, go into the future to steal a schematic for an antimatter weapon, and go back in time to show the people working on the Manhattan project this schematic. To show them how small an atomic bomb is. A bomb that can destroy a city is like a party popper compared to a bomb that can destroy a whole planet.
I think that with the advent of reliable nanotechnology our material demands will change. We can nano-sift important elements from asteroids and most things will be assembled from synthetic molecules or carbon.
Hi Isaac , @ 13.58 you show the periodic table and what is needed to form certain elements , can you make an episode explaining in which part of the universe history, all those millions/trillions of merging neutron stars happend. it's the one part i do not understand
well it's not like neutron star mergers are all that common. Part of why over 99% of all matter is still hydrogen or helium. anywho, earlier in the cosmos' history there were far more supermassive stars than there are today. With lifetimes well under a billion years & masses more than high enough for neutron star formation. i would think that most of these mergers would have happened billions of years ago
I'd never think I would see the day that it's quite possible to transmute gold today, like right now, but the only reason we are not is that we'd have to transmute it from Platinum which is around the same cost....
Neutrons are composed particles not fundamental particle (fundamentals particle are matter or antimatter, or none of them, like photons) , are made of three quarks, antineutrons are made from three antiquarks, is more than electric charge that defines matter from antimatter, and obviously are composed particle made from quarks and antiquarks, but have a instability issue.
How about a petition to name the first stable (relatively) mass-produced trans-plutonic element either "naquadah" or "naquadria" depending on its state of matter at room temperature.
How do you utilize nukes and supernovae to transmutate elements without blowing away all the material? Also, if we had solar collectors in close proximity of the sun, could we use that to create large quantities of iron to build the cores of new planets?
generally no matter how big the explosion you can always just arrange the matter far enough away to not be destroyed. So the same way that you can make a power plant that runs on nukes you just gotta make sure the walls are far enough away to avoid the actual blast wave but close enough to soak up the energy. that is if you cant focus that energy down cuz a if you can make a GRB-scale neutron beam then you can probably just aim at a planet or line up some moons made of the starting material
the iron thing though would be nonsensical. Iron can be starlifted out of a star & is already basically the single most common metal. It's also the eventual byproduct of fusion anyways so you would never expend energy to make it. On top of this if you're in the planet building game you don't use iron cores. You use the iron to make orbital rings & fluid tanks to hold cheap abundant hydrogen or helium for gravity(shell worlds). having a solid iron core would be unconscionably wasteful, have exactly zero benefits, & have the detriment that, unlike hydrogen/helium, you can't use it as fuel. well unless you have synthetic black holes on hand but then you would just have that be the core of your planet.
"Why settle for tons of gold when you can make whole planets out of it?" Because it would devalue it too much, presumably. I suppose these days gold wiring is useful for electronics but before modern times gold's value was entirely "cuz it looks pretty" rather than any intrinsic properties. Making an entire planet of gold would drop the value too much.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
Isaac is an alchemist, he can turn my bad day into a good one!
Definitely! it helps that encourages snack consumption. What a great way to spend a Thursday
Strangely enough, his namesake also studied alchemy. Isaac Newton had notes auctioned off and to the surprise of the buyer it was his study into alchemy.
@@georgebulbakwa9017 and as noted in this video, transmutation of elements may be a path towards Clark Tech. Arthur C. Clark being the other half of Isaac Arthur's namesake!
Nice!
He is an 👾...alien
It's probably best that ancient alchemists didn't have nukes
Your majesty, I've discovered a way to convert a portion of your realm into radioactive riches!
@@Drew_McTygue Ah yes, use it on the peasants in the farm lands! They are getting rowdy.
It is done your majesty, but, now we have no way to make food...
OooOOooh NooOOOo!!
Look on the bright side: if they had nukes, global warming wouldn't be a problem. 😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅
Ooooh I now have a new villain for my d&d game!!
Lol, "probably" killed me
"But here on SFIA, we would say that lacks ambition. Why settle for tons of gold when you can make whole planets out of it." 😄😄
Ah man what an opening line to sum up SFIA. Another great episode Isaac, could use something to lift my spirits on the bleak week.
Definitely putting that one in a list of IA quotes.
Let's take it up a notch. "Why settle for worldbuilding if you can be a . . . _starcrafter_ ?" ;)
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 if you're not aiming to be at least a cluster manager, are you even serious about this?
You mentioning RPGs reminded me of Star Ocean, where alchemy is a skill. It let's you turn one element to another, iron to mercury to silver to gold to platinum. Though judging by what you said early, it should probably go mercury to platinum to gold.
@GlobalDataConspirator yeah. Unfortunately we can't channel magical power into a symbol that breaks the laws of reality to make things happen like they can.
But at least I don't have to deal with a lolli with a pet Cerberus IRL.
Why would a Rocket Propelled Grenade remind you of Star Ocean,
I'd like to recommend "The Ice Limit", a sci fi book in which the island of stability figures prominently. Great read!
I'll never look at a strawberry snowcone the same way again
My favorite nuclear transmutation story is in Asimov's Foundation series when they make a transmuter(?) and use it to save a trader on Askone. Clever use in science fiction.
Wasn't transmutation a central part of Asimov's story "Out Wit" too?
even though it looks wrong to me - it feels like it should be "transmutor" - i'm pretty sure it's spelled transmuter in the story lol
Asimov was certainly a clever writer
Yeah that's a greats tory that tends to get skipped a lot in between the Hardin and Mallow epoch discussion.
@@isaacarthurSFIA It is one of my favorite stories in the Foundation series.
idk if you mentioned it, but transmuting matter into antimatter this way would probably be a lot more valuable (Or capture natural anti-matter that gets swept into the magneosphere of the earth with solar powered harvesters). Mass transmuting antimatter would make space exploration a lot easier, and be a handy alternative to fossil fuels on earth.
This reminds me of my astronomy class. "The birth and death of stars" so interesting how star fusion works. I learned so much.
pepe pfp
Always a good morning when Isaac uploads. As always my favorite TH-camr does it again!
It might be worth mentioning that nuclei with too many protons (>~137ish) are expected to be unstable due to the Schwinger effect: spontaneous production of electron+positron pairs due to the strong electric field of the nucleus.
Interesting!
Thank you for your dedicated contribution in creating consistent, stellar content. You have paved the way for many more great minds to expand upon. I stumbled across you by accident in 2016 and you have never failed to exceed my imaginative capacity in a such captivating/problem-solving manner. Thank you for your service to us all, you will go down as one of the great minds of mankind👏🏻
I foresee the day when we'll have the ability to build things one atom at a time and optimize each ones isotope for optimized specific properties.
isoweave(tm) is our new patented technology for 6% stronger aluminium. not all atoms are the same!
@max fourth eagle of the apocalypse technology at the atomic level will not be limited to metals.
I'm not religious, and i assumed you were not religious as well, but i love the Isaiah reference about beating plowshares into swords, and another where they beat their swords into plowshares. well spoken and received.
I still can't believe this channel isn't up to 1m subs yet. Thanks for the video Arthur.
If someone doing pranks can get a million subscribers, I believe Arthur can one day.
Sadly intelligent discussion is not as popular as watching people get punked
@@Moriddin A sad sign of the times...he would have hit 1M ages ago eating tide pods.
Great episode. I'm curious how exotic it can get; i.e. matter that effectively has no or negative mass, etc.
Honestly sums up all of the parts of chemistry that i find most interesting... Its just so perfectly balanced between entertaining and educational... Thanx isaac....never stop..
The hilarious part is, the most prosaic possible utilization of this technology played a pretty big part in the Fallout universe. In the New Vegas DLC, Dead Money They had tokens of heavy elements as currency at a resort, with universal vending machines that broke down the tokens as stock material in construction that transmuted into whatever you ordered, with items like weapons being restricted to security officers, basically a perfected version of a universal printer. And Fallout: Tactics had atomic forges that did the same thing at an industrial scale for robot production.
This is an awesome example of what nuclear technology can be used to improve our future.
I think it would have been awesome if the Hello Games consulted folks like Isaac with the crafting in their game No Man's Sky. Imagine how cool it would be if the crafting in that game was extremely accurate to real life nuclear physics. Not only would it be highly entertaining, but it would also be very educational.
The physicist in me is excited to transmute lead into gold but the economist in me is horrified.
Use it for electronics.
Economists will be long gone by the time we are able to transmute elements like gold using fusion.
I doubt there would even be something akin to an economist at that point. As it is they are not particularly useful, with their predictive power being unreliable at best.
Why? Gold is valuable mostly for arbitrary reasons and because it doesn't corrode. Nobody even uses it as a currency base anymore. If anything this would help cure people of the premise that precious metals and gems are actually worth something on an objective standard, which would make them much more available and drop the costs when the alchemized matter is destigmatized for ornamental use.
@@morganrobinson8042 are you being snarky or do you want an honest answer?
@@AngryDuck79 Bit of both. Devaluation of gold at a point where we can make matter into whatever other matter we want is kind of a farcical concern. At that point if any materials are considered special for anything but aesthetic and cultural reasons I have serious questions about the basic assumptions underlying that economy and how exactly it calculates value. It certainly couldn't be based on material scarcity afterward at any rate.
But really, gold isn't that valuable now for any reason but habit and supports relatively few industries, especially when considering how far into the future this would probably have to be. So if you have an answer for the collapse of gold in particular or just material scarcity in general being a solved problem being an economic problem past the collapse of various extraction businesses, I would be fascinated to hear them.
If Nickel-62 is most stable, why would everything quantum decay into iron instead?
If we assume quantum decay to be a random process then iron having far more decay paths/processes leading to it than to Nickel-62 would end up with that event (with negligible quantities of nickel-62 hanging around)
It's ironic that there is a video about Nuclear considering what's happening somewhere in the world right now, This video by Issac is great through.
These videos are always the highlight of my thursdays. Thanks Isaac.
One thing that wasn't brought up that should have been mentioned.
Transmutation isn't as simple as just bombarding a nucleus with neutrons. You're dealing with cross sectional area of the nucleus and that cross sectional area fluctuates based on the incident neutron. If your incident neutron has too much kinetic energy, the effective cross sectional area of the nucleus may be so small that there's little chance that the neutron gets capture. Similarly, once you're in the fission regime where a high enough kinetic energy neutron may actually cause the nucleus to split instead of capture which gets away from your transmutation as well.
So it's a delicate balancing act between effective cross sectional area of the nucleus and the kinetic energy of the incident neutron (or nucleus as some of the larger atoms are made, the 100 proton+ - Z number).
Love the intro! Nukes are like firecrackers compared to large bolides, Yellowstone, relativistic projectiles, supernovae, etc.
Yeah! Got me some Isaac Arthur to wake up with!! Gonna be a good day!
Isn't neutron star just a GIANT atom?
add it to the list: th-cam.com/play/PLpcRnxC_05f70jg_u1Pna4zKJ74GioGkI.html
Nope. It is held together by gravity. Atoms are not. It is mostly neutrons while most atoms are not.
Was thinking if we use a cougleblitz black hole just for a moment to use it's event horizon to rip off a layer of electron from an atom, or do some other extream modification to other subatomic systems. Depending the precision of the engineering behind it we might go down to the point where we can put such event horizon in the path of an electron and when it gets yoinked we practicly confirm the position of the electron, might be even to go as far as to perfectly map out each layer's precise path with such interactions. Altho a light tweezer might be able to do that too.
I believe it's spelt "kugelblitz". That looks right from what I remember about German spelling.
Oooh! I’ve been waiting to hear about the programmable matter episode. And it comes out in time for my birthday:)
Isaac, what are the chances of replicators from Star Trek/Energy to matter conversion?
In that particular fashion, basically none under known science, we looked at it and some more plausible alternatives in our "Santa Claus Machine" episode a few winter back.
I have a chemistry test in a hour; I should be studying, but it’s Arthursday.
synthesize the particles, from the quarks, also, you get a distribution of different from a super high temp collision, particle accelerators
just slam a huge pack of atoms together to get some pack of different atoms
quarks are fields
Hi!
Some trivia the instalation around black holes and/or stars is present peripherally in Star Wars to create components of repulsolifts, which weirdly enough sound like the warp bubbles created by DARPA.
Also nit pick: Alchemist were looking for spiritual transmutation but were studying material first.
Cheers!
this is one of my top 3 favorite videos on your channel issac! thank you!!! :-).
This week is kinda ass for me, watching your upload reminded me weekend is coming and make it a little easier.
Amused. Whenever I hear about Quarks, I instantly think of a specific episode of Voyager and Tuvok’s meditation session with Kess in which he tells her, “There is nothing beyond the subatomic,” and I can’t help but think of it ‘reality’ creating a major continuity-breaker in the series, probably one of the biggest continuity-breaker in the entire franchise alongside the 1997 launch of the S.S. Botany Bay, although in terms of scale I’d put the former before the latter as the latter could be explained away by government conspiracies and secrecy, etc.
Additional. I’d even put it above the TOS “Zefram Cochrane was born in the Alpha Centauri star system and invented warp drive but nobody remembers who he was,” and the TNG+ era revering Cochrane as “a man who survived WWIII on Earth and built the first warp-capable vessel on an old ICBM and caught the attention of benevolent aliens” continuity problem.
Fair. I could go on, and I’m probably just subjectively bias about it, but I also can’t get past the idea that an entire quadrant-spanning federation that uses anti-matter also has no knowledge of Quarks up until the 24th century. After all, literally all of their ships run on anti-matter, and Quarks are talked about far more than scarcely between 21st-Century Middle-School students. But I digress…
Question: if we learn to manipulate strong force, would new stable elements be possible and could they have some useful properties?
Arthursday! Excellent as always. Love from Brazil my friend. Keep up the good work.
There is just something about the drink and a snack line that makes me feel so happy
type 3 wedding gift, solid gold planet
Swords into ploughshares should not even be a thing, it's exhausting to know that much waste is all our own fault.
Is something like the Omnitrix from Ben 10 (and its failsafe's, capabilities) possible for some advanced civilization. (also what would the logistics be for getting all the DNA).
While this channel is known for the science fiction aspect, I do love me some "SIA", Science with Isaac Arthur episodes.
Isaac! This is my favorite episode of late. Great job, I love this topic.
Yay! A new video from Issac Arthur. Yes,today shall be a good day. :D
You rule Isaac, these videos are absolutely peerless
The whole ecology of _Code of the Lifemaker_ is dependent on nuclear transmuters as primary producers (otherwise, the world has no heavy elements).
Shout out to Issac I’m a big watcher and I love the episodes. They are really fun to watch + it makes me think of all the possibilities the human brain can conquer if we put our minds to it. Do you think we could get an episode of electricity. How we can generate it on our own, how we can harvest it on a larger scale to power city’s n beyond without the help of electric companies. Anyway again I ❤️ the shows. Keep em coming!!!!
Maybe we could do some larger-scale transmutation on earth by piggy-backing it on the "quick and dirty" Fusion Power technique of detonating H-Bombs underground to generate steam. You could put some materials in the irradiation zone and then...somehow recover them later?
Hmm...I think my plan is falling apart faster than the molecular cohesion of the irradiation samples.
I guess the real question here is not the cost, not even the cost in fusio-dollars, but how do we determine what element is rare (and valuable) for a true energy post-scarce civilization?
This was a treat and what a great great cap it's good to see your progress. Long time listener 1st time cometer
Not gonna edit that last typo
I love it how Google has completely created a universe where SFIA is covering a subject I searched for just 2 days ago.
Have you heard of/ played Eclipse Phase? Amazing tabletop RPG with themes very complimentary to your channels content.
You should do a video about well known and often supported stories about humans who claim to have had contact with, or worked with aliens or alien technology. Such as Bob Lazar or the man who inspired the movie Fire in the Sky (can't recall his name at the moment). Bob Lazar is a tricky one especially. He clearly knows the science about which he speaks and gives little to no reason to doubt his story. He declines most interviews and appears to be on the defensive. I honestly can't seem to commit to one opinion or another.
I know your show generally isn't about this type of thing but it would be interesting to hear you pick it apart.
Wow! I did not understand a tad of all that. A we lot of numbers and words❤️
the only way i realized it was thursday - Arthursday!
genuinely thought it was tuesday fml.
If transmutation of gold is successful, the biggest problem would be keeping it a total secret, so not to crash the gold speculation market.
Congratulations on the award! And great work keep up the great videos
Hydrogen to Iron releases enough energy to make pretty much anything via fusion, we just need the technology to initiate and control the process.
Planet of gold 😂😂😂 is for the unambiguous & unimaginative ❤️❤️❤️
What about nuclear transmutation in the halo universe?
Ngl, this is something that I feel a society that doesn't have to worry about energy would do and or innovate in in spades. I didn't even think about it being a big thing until a few years back, but looking at it now, if you have a way to more or less perform _actual_ alchemy (not just exchanging, removing, or adding chemical bonds, but making chemicals anew all together), just seems like you should do it. I even vaguely consider that being a use for Muon-catalyzed fusion if using it for energy doesn't pan out *or maybe even if it does. 🤷🏾♂️
33:03 Does that extend to people? An egg goes through a device that replaces bad isotopes with good ones and then every other step is normal?
Learning the magic of the stars!
If you are going to set off a fusion explosion to generate potassium with the neutron flux there's no reason not to do it in great big high pressure tank of water and generate electricity from the heat.
If only Edward Elric had this type of alchemy.
Nuclear alchemy?
Now I’m reminded of the guy from the Shambala movie (set in the 2003 anime timeline) that discovered uranium and was trying to build a bomb or something
I feel like he should have been the main villain of that movie and not a throwaway guy they beat in the first 10 minutes
If neutrons decay more than protons, how do so many elements have more neutrons than protons? Is it a case that there are less neutrons in the universe but they are hoarded by heavier elements?
Decay is based on what is more energetically favourable to the system. In free space neutrons have a very short half-life (few hundred seconds) because an electron and a proton is lower energy than a neutron. However, if the neutron is contained in a stable nucleus it will last for a long long time.
In nuclei, if you add more protons the electrostatic repulsion means you need to add even more neutrons to "pack" to protons. As you go up through the nuclei the ratio between the neutrons and protons to remain stable increases until you start reaching nuclei so large the nuclear force is not longer strong enouh to hold them together.
Actually you don't need a nuclear bomb for transmutation, some kind of nuclear reactor can do the job, and it's more practical when you need to recovery the products of transmutation.
If I ever run into a time traveler, I'm going to knock him out, steal his time machine, go into the future to steal a schematic for an antimatter weapon, and go back in time to show the people working on the Manhattan project this schematic. To show them how small an atomic bomb is. A bomb that can destroy a city is like a party popper compared to a bomb that can destroy a whole planet.
My brain feels fatter after this video. Great video!
I think that with the advent of reliable nanotechnology our material demands will change. We can nano-sift important elements from asteroids and most things will be assembled from synthetic molecules or carbon.
I feel like you might have been a little emotional about the Pluto demotion lol
As well he should be. Pluto got a raw deal.
Pluto has at least a solid surface, and that's more than be said for the gas giants.
@@Chad_Thundercock I know but it’s so cute!
Hi Isaac , @ 13.58 you show the periodic table and what is needed to form certain elements , can you make an episode explaining in which part of the universe history, all those millions/trillions of merging neutron stars happend. it's the one part i do not understand
well it's not like neutron star mergers are all that common. Part of why over 99% of all matter is still hydrogen or helium.
anywho, earlier in the cosmos' history there were far more supermassive stars than there are today. With lifetimes well under a billion years & masses more than high enough for neutron star formation. i would think that most of these mergers would have happened billions of years ago
There is no natural element that starts with the letter J
So, to rectify this I propose this name for a fictional element: Jasonium
is it useful against camp counselers?
@@dualityomk9854 Depends, How big is the camp?
I'd never think I would see the day that it's quite possible to transmute gold today, like right now, but the only reason we are not is that we'd have to transmute it from Platinum which is around the same cost....
Remember the SF story where the transmuting goose laid gold shelled eggs? A tour de farce.
"Post-cold war notion is to dismantle nukes..." - LOL that didn't age well.
I love every single one of your intros.
How Iron 56 stars would undergo quantum randomness and fission to create new isotopes?
The Full Arthursday Alchemist
I was looking for this comment
Element 114 flerovium is can exist for a minute, more so than it's fellow transactinides, those barely existing for milliseconds
Why settle for planets of gold when you can have planets of rhodium?
Happy Thursday everyone!
37:55 How will this affect the Moon slowly moving away from the Earth?
How can there be anti neutrons when they're neutral? I thought they were the same in both atoms and anti atoms.
Neutrons are composed particles not fundamental particle (fundamentals particle are matter or antimatter, or none of them, like photons) , are made of three quarks, antineutrons are made from three antiquarks, is more than electric charge that defines matter from antimatter, and obviously are composed particle made from quarks and antiquarks, but have a instability issue.
Explosions And Fire has led me to the theory that alchemy is just yellow chemistry
This is the kind of content i come here for.
How about a petition to name the first stable (relatively) mass-produced trans-plutonic element either "naquadah" or "naquadria" depending on its state of matter at room temperature.
OH man, you had me at lasers making gold!.
Does anyone have any theories regarding the Magic Numbers of nuclear stability?
I really like this episode! Less sci-fi and more Sci!
Just when I think he can't outdo himself he proves me wrong.
Isaac Arthur Plushies!! We Demand Issac Arthur Plushies!! NOW!!
*It could be like that little wacky alien graphic you folks use
So, a realistic Fullmetal Alchemist anime would have Amestris be a post-nuclear wasteland?
Neat.
How do you utilize nukes and supernovae to transmutate elements without blowing away all the material?
Also, if we had solar collectors in close proximity of the sun, could we use that to create large quantities of iron to build the cores of new planets?
generally no matter how big the explosion you can always just arrange the matter far enough away to not be destroyed. So the same way that you can make a power plant that runs on nukes you just gotta make sure the walls are far enough away to avoid the actual blast wave but close enough to soak up the energy.
that is if you cant focus that energy down cuz a if you can make a GRB-scale neutron beam then you can probably just aim at a planet or line up some moons made of the starting material
the iron thing though would be nonsensical. Iron can be starlifted out of a star & is already basically the single most common metal. It's also the eventual byproduct of fusion anyways so you would never expend energy to make it.
On top of this if you're in the planet building game you don't use iron cores. You use the iron to make orbital rings & fluid tanks to hold cheap abundant hydrogen or helium for gravity(shell worlds). having a solid iron core would be unconscionably wasteful, have exactly zero benefits, & have the detriment that, unlike hydrogen/helium, you can't use it as fuel.
well unless you have synthetic black holes on hand but then you would just have that be the core of your planet.
"Why settle for tons of gold when you can make whole planets out of it?" Because it would devalue it too much, presumably. I suppose these days gold wiring is useful for electronics but before modern times gold's value was entirely "cuz it looks pretty" rather than any intrinsic properties. Making an entire planet of gold would drop the value too much.
Nuclear Alchemy. Why didn't Nuclear Punk take off?
This channel is genious.
Awesome content as always 💖💕♥️💯🌍
Neutron star collisions are called a kilonova.