As a matter of fact, the military industrial complex spooks already have zero point energy devices derived from Tesla's principles and the reverse engineering of downed ETV craft..
I always wondered why the heat from radioactive decaying materials isnt used more often. The nuclear waste is going to decay no matter what. Why heat only the shaft of an old saltmine.
OMG, THURSDAY!! I had Monday off so I am all discombobulated this week!! I think the best part about this channel may be that this is the one place that's discussing pretty much ALL the subjects I have questions about!
USB plugs are one of the few things that can exist in three states, the first one you tried, the second one, and then the third one that works, which you thought was the same one you tried the first time, but demonstrably isn’t.
This has got to be in the top ten episodes of all time. No politics just facts coupled with real world science that in the near future MAY produce some results we can actually apply. I A ,your real talent is your vision for application There is no one on the net that has your vision. Can't applaud your videos enough Thank You
@@robinhyperlord9053 OR, no political opinion equals a respectable sense of restraint. injecting political opinions into a discussion takes attention away from said discussion (unless that discussion is about politics). no need to be so arrogant.
@@robinhyperlord9053 dude, you can't even reach k1 without leaving earth using only solar, wind, hydro, AND geothermal, much less just solar and wind. And we'll want to have reached k1 by 2200 if we want to have a decent population without over taxing the environment, as we'll need to be putting a lot of energy into increasing plant life, generating food, and recycling waste. Further, solar generates optimally at 27% efficiency, often less due to material wear, the panels last on average for 25 years, and requires more rare earth metals to be mined than a typical nuclear power plant per watt for the same time period, and produces long life toxic waste during creation, which can stay dangerous for millenia while the nuclear waste can be buried underground and spends most of its foreseeable future being barely radioactive enough to be picked up through a sheet of corrugated iron (half-life is inverse to radioactivity).
@@theapexsurvivor9538 at the same time solar panels can be build with meta materials like graphene or nanotubes (not just carbon), it reduces the amount of toxic emitions (that arent even that high to begin with and can be more easily deal with than carbón dioxide from fósil fuels) makes them tinier and lighter and can theoretically allow them to reach higher efficienties (some scientists theorize up to 90% efficiency) Also solar panels allow you to build a dyson swarm, who is the most efficient form of energy production on a solar system
Yippee... OK I had to Calculate Shipping on the Sigil Website at the first Cart Splash Screen not the Second Shipping Screen but I got it to work... One SFIA Mug and T-shirt inbound! Thank You Isaac! You Channel is well worth the Money!
Holy crap Isaac, I feel like I just took in a bit of EEVBlog, Thunderfoot, NurdRage, and PBS SpaceTime in a single half hour upload. Basically all of the channels I regularly watch that take scientific/engineering/chemistry subjects way past my pay grade. This is definitely a watch-it-twice (or more) kind of upload. There are so many things referenced that I want to read into further. I'm probably biased but this is one of your best uploads in my opinion. I imagine this subject overlaps your day job a bit. Thanks for sharing, and thanks to everyone else behind the scenes that helps to make this happen every Thursday ;) -Jake
Thank you for pointing hat out. Its lovelly that a guy whose main counter-argument against feminism is that "it is useless and ergo a waste of time" has 103 videos on it. Its nice to see him raging against pseudoscience. Thats what the 8th circle of hell was engineered for. But im gonna call it. That guy has some serious mommy problems to hate woman that much
@johnmburt1960 Huh. I didn't know any of that about him. I knew he had some personal hard-on against Elon Musk, but it looks like that woody's against a lot of folks.
As to getting fuel into black holes: "Like trying to jam a beach ball through hole in wall the size of a dime - while someone is spraying a pressure washer through the other side." Well said.
i misread the title as "portable tower" and thought the thumbnail was a picture of giant floating triangle building (like that one angel from evangelion)... i watched for 17mins before i realised this.
Me, too! Something so cool that is actually feasible in the (somewhat) near future excites me far more than colonizing distant star systems or anti-matter torpedoes! >8^)
I had a somewhat tough day with the 24 kids in my class today and I barely had a voice since I'm getting sick. Got home with a pounding headache and sore throat and collapsed in the sofa. Then I remembered it's Thursday, so I got up to watch my favourite Thursday video! Sometimes when life is shit you can still find a golden nugget.
Well, black holes are non normally portable, but if you get a lot of lasers pointing at a single point.... I fucking love how you dont discount anything as impossible as long as there us a single way of doing it.
Your videos are something I look forward to every week. I can not express enough how great these are. Each one is so much more than entertainment and education, each one (and I have watched them all) makes me think and furthermore makes me hopeful for the high reaches of the future of humanity, keep up this amazing work!!
We still use flywheels for more than most people realise. A data centre in Australia currently makes use of a truly massive one as a stand in for a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) capacitor when there are power blackouts. Spin it up when the grid works, then tapping its angular momentum for generation when the grid is down.
I might actually do that, I'd tended to think the interest wouldn't be there but then I was really shocked to see today's topic as runner up on a poll of 20 and more so that it seems to be doing very well so far. Just goes to show what I already knew, I never have a clue what topics folks will like :)
Isaac Arthur Antimatter production and antimatter reactor development is what I'm trying to hammer out right now for one of my stories. I'm trying to see how possible it would be to have a working, efficient antimatter reactor in around two decades, starting from technology using fast breeder reactors, with a funding capacity like that of the United States. How plausible is that to be able to happen in that time frame do you think? Because of the type of containment fields that would be necessary to safely store antimatter indefinitely and to guard against the heat generated in its reaction, I'd think they would have to develop a efficient fusion reactor first, since they need a similar containment field to keep it from meltdown during operation, and it would safer to have a fusion reactor meltdown during development rather than an antimatter reactor I would think.
Isaac Arthur Oh, I figure they could spare somewhere around between 4 to 10 trillion dollars to the project over 30 years. I'm still figuring out how much money they'd need for a civilization arc underground infrastructure to guard against extinction. And their total budget for everything they want to build for it is $27.7 trillion over 30 years, to basically have an underground microcosom of the whole society down to types of factories and everything.
Michael Jensen, The antimatter production capability is the advanced technology. Using anti-matter much less so. North America with fast breeder reactors can build underground infrastructure. No need to wait for fusion or anti-matter.
In a way I envy you. Discovering Isaac Arthur's work for the first time is truly a treat. Have fun with the megastructure material and the civilizations at the end of time (some of my personal favourites). Soon you will see why all the subscribers cannot wait for thursday to come.
Overjoyed at finding this channel after watching the episode on terraforming Venus. I love the in-depth approach to these episodes, the topics are always deeply interesting and are very well presented. I think this is my new favourite channel.
The cherubs in that picture are religious subtext of the harnessing of godly power but emphasising showing it in a positive light. Probably a result of the enlightenment being a time where the knowledge gained by science was finally being viewed as non confrontational to religious teachings in the west.
Krisztián Povázson that's a revisionist understanding considering the fact that most great western thinkers during the era ascribed to some form of Christianity. They sought to ratify their faith and the rational truths they discovered not defeat one with the other.
Deism is not "some form of Christianity", it is practically atheism with a distant and irrelevant godhead. The Aufklaerists were also rather militant advocates of the expulsion of living religion from society for "progress".
Krisztián Povázson Deism in the context of European society is Deism is basically as close as you can get to synonymous with 'some form of Christianity.'
I love the voice and the pronunciation of words here. It is unusual and unique. It is part of the icon of this channel. Please don't change it. Just as a channel like this should be. Keep up the great work.
Hi Isaac. I found your channel a few months ago and have been watching your episodes like crazy! Great stuff, and may I just say, you have really come a long way since the first episodes. You have a great voice and you've really improved with your speech impediment, I can't even hear it anymore!
He always seems apologetic for his unique speech. I love it. I switched from listening to thunder storms and rain audio to sleep, now I listen to the soothing sounds of Isaac, then replay it the next day to hear what I missed because it’s the most interesting content on the internet.
Would have been interesting to talk more about the dangers of extreme portable power. If something went wrong with an anti-matter battery (or it was intentionally sabotaged) for example even a fraction of a gram could wipe out a city which might be troubling in a future world where everyone has access to one. I guess you could restrict people to fractions of a nano-gram per "charge" but then it wouldn't offer that much advantage over regular batteries. It could be more useful in vehicles though, we already drive around with a giga-joule or so of explosive gas so the equivalent in anti-matter wouldn't be any more devastating if something went wrong but it would reduce their weight considerably and this could be really useful for space travel.
Jim Giant well when you talk about having technology that advanced where the average man will have the power to destroy a planet, you have to make some basic assumptions that in society coming to develop that technology it changed and grew based on this concept of post-scarcity and no longer requiring competition to get resources. So basically I'm saying it's just a spot where we have to bet that along the line we solve those problems and use a little handwavium/unobtainium to presume that such technology would either allow us to prevent such misuse or that the concept of misuse would no longer exist. The most likely scenario is that the inventors of these hypothetical technologies will have to Steward Humanity for a couple of generations until we are ready for such responsibilities.
Vys Erion yh that doesn't make sense. Was referring to the level of tech available. I'm sure by then we could force fields or enforced structures that prevent everyone in a city dying from an explosion.
There will be protections in place but will they be good enough? We have orders of magnitude more personal power than we had in the past. Modern firearms, cars, hell even a laptop battery catching fire is comparable to a grenade. All of these things can and do go wrong (or are misused) but it''s rare enough and they are useful enough that we accept those risks. I don't know if the same could ever be said when people have the potential to kill millions. The more powerful these technologies get the more regulations and restrictions are put in place. It could be that we are reaching the limits of what we find acceptable for personal power (though this power could still be used more efficiently and we could all benefit from increases in commercial/industrial power).
Love the merchandise. I also love the topic of O'Neill Cylinders. About "portable power", the molten salt Thorium reactor was first developed as a power source for a nuclear powered bomber. A very bad idea but actually possible because an MSR doesn't require pressurized water cooling system, containment vessel, etc. And when the Thorium breeding cycle is perfected, creating expensive radioactive isotopes will become much easier and cheaper. Of course having a source of very inexpensive electrical energy will create the "problem" of making the synthesis of carbon neutral chemical fuels much more attractive in the near term. I guess portable black holes will probably go the back burner, but on the brighter side almost all of the other technologies in Upward Bound become far more practical and politically feasible.
Your videos never fail to impress me. I like how you dive into depth on certain subjects while touching on a wide variety of subjects at the same time. (For Example instead of just talking about batteries you talked about portable storage!). I am thankful for you channel and love to continue to see more content from you in the future :).
I love each and every one of these episodes. I work in the healthcare industry on the ME side making ultrasound devices and there is always something you explain that triggers an idea to try or solution to a problem (sometimes I didn't even know I had) that will really change things. This channel is inspiring and delivered to just the right audience. It is bringing more people in to the fold of science and futurism which brings Tomorrow that much closer. Keep up the great work and get on Joe Rogan's podcast already! You would blow everyone's mind and that needs to happen.
I read a book in high school called “signal to ground” where they produced energy by siphoning the rotational energy off of celestial bodies. They then used said energy to teleport and all other manner of things. At the expense of the rotation of planets wreaking havoc and creating the plot. This made me think of that. Good work Isaac.
this has made stacking shelves worth it, thankyou isaac for helping to prevent mental decay in my mind as i go through life's transitions, truly i am grateful to you for this.
Once again you did not disappoint. My favorite video of yours is 'machine rebellion' and various alien series. Would really like to see more of that :)
Something I'd love to see is a video on the EM drive. It recently passed peer review and that means the laws of conservation of energy and momentum can be broken. I know that Isaac could do a really good job at going into that topic.
I was thinking about last weeks video on meta materials and your space warfare episode. You said that there is no stealth in space, but if you covered your ship in a meta material that could make it invisible to radar and any other wavelength of light, as well as place all of your ships radiators on one side facing away from the enemy, could you make a genuinely stealthy ship. Even better, make it a drone ship with no crew at all, and if you only have your computers running at the bare minimum, the amount of waste heat would probably be very small. Even if computers in the next few centuries or millennia won’t reach the landaur limit, they’ll still be far more efficient than those of today, and having no crew means the ship could be very cold making it even more efficient. So you probably could have stealthy ships unless there is some factor I’m overlooking.
Truth be told it's going to be very hard bordering on impossible to make something that can handle several wavelengths at once rather than a discrete or narrow band, I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to get the whole spectrum crammed in.If you did it might let you get away with passive drifting, turn your engine and and its definitely out the window.
You did an ep on teleportation. If you could teleport waste heat away... But now it's like saying if you had inertial dampers you could have super-fast elevators.
You cant just bend waves that causes a red shift, and you cant reproduce the image that changes timing. On earth we use signals that bounce back because we have things everywhere and are looking for a specific thing, in space we'd look for any disturbance. I think the biggest problem would be getting to people you can see before they are gone.
That fusion reactor animation from Oak Ridge never gets old! Good to see ORNL relevant again. Made my Thursday something to look forward to as usual, Thank you Isaac!
Excellent as usual. I didn’t know you were a fellow veteran, not that I would have a reason to. Although I went to grad school in a medical discipline (my undergrad studies were physical sciences) I took a class in the Department of Nuclear Science titled “Nuclear Reactor Theory and Design” just for the Hell of it (yeah, I’m one of “those people!”). There I was introduced to RTG’s and I’m still fascinated by them to this day. You do seem to dwell on shielding problems but those fueled by alpha emitters require little or no shielding. In regard to power transmission via lasers or microwaves/masers, there is a problem which limits transmission distance: the inverse square law. Resistance in metallic conductor cable can be overcome by cooling or otherwise using superconducting materials. But I know of no way to overcome the inverse square law limitations. If I ever have the opportunity to start my own country (or planet), I think I’ll use a power type not uncommon in industry but as far as I know not used anywhere on the globe (or in ships or aircraft...I once heard it was used on the International Space Station but I never attempted to verify the claim) for public power. I would used pulsed square wave DC. It’s easy to step voltage up or down using transformers. To improve efficiency my system would incorporate three or four phases. With the exception of the US and a few other countries, all of the world uses 220 VAC-240VAC for household power and I would continue this practice. To again further improve efficiency I would use a higher frequency than the 50 Hz-60 Hz worldwide standard. Large aircraft use 400 Hz power and one would be amazed in the difference in size between say a 62.5 kVA 400 Hz aircraft generator and a similar output 60 Hz generator. Picture a household vacuum cleaner or microwave oven with a power cord slightly larger than a pencil lead! To further save on copper usage (smaller wires) all vehicular power systems would use 24 VDC...42 VDC if an economical way could be found to construct a 21 cell battery (the 42 volt battery would be the same physical size as the 12 cell (24 volt) and 21 cell (41 volt). The higher the voltage, the less current is required for the same power and less current means smaller plates.
Great vid! I'd love to see your take on using the Sphaleron process for energy production. Max Tegmark mentions this possibility in his new book, Life 3.0. I'm working on a book (idea at the moment) and am researching all kinds of probable sci-fi tech and your videos have definitely helped. Thank you.
Another great video! One tiny correction: Beta radiation is not stopped by the top layer of dead skin cells. That is alpha radiation. Beta radiation can actually burn your skin. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_burn
Awesome. I love the fundamentals of portable energy. I also haven't heard of that those perfect mirrors for a particular wavelength. It is hard to believe but superconductors has virtually no loss.
Here's the merchandise link, at the moment it's just a small selection, folks have been asking for a while so I figured it was past-time, but I still wanted to start simple. SFIA Merchandise available: www.signil.com/?s=sfia As this is a new thing, please do let me know if you have any problems with it so they can be fixed or otherwise addressed quickly.
That reminds me, we're almost done with the first year of books of the month, I can probably get away with using Asimov again soon :) Figured no author should have it twice in one year, though he's the one I'd conside making an exception for.
was hoping this episode would cover some more near future examples ... like, how would you power a laser / rail "rifle"? Whole discussion to be had there, because any dense power source is incredibly dangerous. Also heat to deal with. What happens if it gets shot? etc. Certainly aren't going to be powering it with an RTG or chemical battery
There is also one more potential holding capacity for energy - spintronics. You can cram a lot of energy in atom nucleis themselves. Thats how NMR works. They would start to giving energy back instantly tho. If only we could "freeze" nuclear spins, we could hold huge amounts of energy.
There's one I like even better: it shows Ben Franklin ensconced in a throne in heaven, holding a lightning bolt in his hand, and surrounded by Roman gods. The caption in Latin is "He stole lightning from the heavens and the sceptre from tyrants." www.benfranklin300.org/frankliniana/result.php?id=654&sec=0
• Flywheels: You can still find them in data centers, among backup batteries and diesel generators. • Battery sizes: engineers started to use systematic names, such as 18650: 18mm diameter, 650mm length. Easier to remember than arbitrary labels such as C, D, AAAA…. • "Ambient temperature" (rather, particle movement) energy harvesters: Brownsche Zellen. And there's vibration energy harvester. Both give some pW to nW (size of an old transistor). Interestingly an ARM Cortex fabbed with modern tech sips just a few nW, too! Could run ages w/o any battery or visible light.
Love your channel, spent all day watching it while working! On your question about Benjamin Franklin, there's actually a lot of interesting Enlightenment-era art that depicts Benjamin Franklin and other contemporary American Founders in similar Classical settings, replete with Roman gods as a way of connecting the rational, republican ideals of the time to the Greek and Roman era. For similar themes, check out The Apotheosis of Washington. My favorite example, though, is a French print of Benjamin Franklin, entitled "Au Genie de Franklin" (To the Genius of Franklin). It shows him enthroned in heaven grasping a lightning bolt, surrounded by Roman gods, and with the caption, "Eripuit Coelo Fulmen Sceptrumque Tirannis"-- "He stole fire from the heavens and the sceptre from tyrants."
Transmission lines would be safer and suffer less line loss over distance if the wire were insulated(and I'd still have a left hand). But the line would be far heavier, which would require stronger equipment, and after paying for injured workers your still looking at line loss being cheaper than improving it with current technology. Right now capacitor banks are the best bet to combat induction. They're all over the place. Companies are starting to play around with new voltage converters. DC has less line loss over long distances with high voltage transmission lines. So generate in AC step up to 500kv convert to DC. Miles of transmission lines to get to the load. Transfer back to AC and step down to distribution voltage. 12470 or 14,000kv then to a 120/240 transformer then to the tv and wifi to watch SFIA!! Great episode!
In current time we start looking ( 8:40 ) about using DC for long distance transfer lines, because they have less lose, and because transistors we can easily (with low lost) transform to AC, with one is easy to change voltage. There are many things why they was not possible in past, as transistors not exist, so they use very lost method of conversion, but DC do not make change magnetic field around cable, and use full profile of cable (DC mostly use only surface )
Of course, it's reasonable to put tapping into other universes for power at the end of the episode: if we can do that, who needs anything else? (Seemingly) negating the laws of thermodynamics in the first place would, I imagine, be the ultimate example of a power providing technology which would siphon development away from all the rest! =D
I as well have been inspired to write about the distant future in what seems a more well thought out manner. I appreciate the discussion and thought process in these videos. Keep it up Isaac. :)
Your videos have inpired me too, to start worldbuilding a hard sifi setting. Now I was really exited, because i thought about the antimatter-kickstarted fusion as a way of having enough power for handheld railguns and lasers in my setting. Assuming the tec is advanced enough to sustain the strain of the reaktions, how fatal would a direct hit on such a cell be, assuming they would only use the minimal amount of antimatter to start the reaktion once. I know that it s likely going to be bad, but will it be roughly handgranate-bad, housekillingly-bad, neighborhoodkillingly-bad or citykillingly-bad?
42 kiltons of TNT per gram. trillions of atoms. It could probably do exactly as much damage as you'd like if you can control antimatter with such precision. Though it's possible a way will be developed to create some in situ, or at target. So however much you put in it. lol en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation
When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with energy sources and I had imagined bottling light. Made lots of research on the absorption rates, light reflection, etc., of various materials in the visible and infrared wavelenghts. My idea was to build a multi-layers box that wouldn't absorb, but rather reflect visible and infrared (even far infrared) light. Bouncing light generates photons of lower and lower energy, since no mirror is ever perfect. So being able to reflect far infrared considerably reduces the energy loss. Photons are hard to contain!
1:03 - ",,,critters squirreled food away". *(Shows video of squirrel storing food)* I love your subtle word-plays. lol
In german, you hamster food instead of squirreling it.
5:15 - some serious 4th wall breakage...
We could grow giant hamsters to spin flywheels at high speed. The problem would be feeding them...umm...not cost effective,I guess.
If asking for an episode on exoskeletons and power armor isn't working, you're not asking enough.
I just watched it ;)
I love the thumbnails of this channel. They always look great
Yeah Jakub always does an amazing job, I've been lucky to have a lot of talented folks volunteer on the channel but he was the first.
Jakub Grygier (the artist) has most of them uploaded on his Artstation page: www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier
Right! As soon as I see the thumbnail I instantly recognise the format and get excited to watch another vid from Isaac. Love it.
I have to admit it was the cover art that attracted me to this channel.
As a matter of fact, the military industrial complex spooks already have zero point energy devices derived from Tesla's principles and the reverse engineering of downed ETV craft..
I’m a simple man. I see a new Isaac Arthur video, I watch it.
He'll yeah Borther I see a 2yr old video that I don’t remember watching, so I click!!😂
Me too. It is time well spent.
Me too but I'm trying to binge watch all of them
"UNLIMITED POWER!"
Damn, someone's always seems to think of joke I can't believe I forgot to make in an episode.
Isaac Arthur Your failures are intolerable.
Isaac Arthur You have failed me for the last time, Commander Arthur.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one...
I always wondered why the heat from radioactive decaying materials isnt used more often. The nuclear waste is going to decay no matter what. Why heat only the shaft of an old saltmine.
We should get a shirt with all the different first rules of warfare
You should get a life.
@TD COE says the guy that comments to that guy lol sad.
Agreed
@@oilpond you're cool
An army marches on its stomach. The real first rule.
OMG, THURSDAY!! I had Monday off so I am all discombobulated this week!! I think the best part about this channel may be that this is the one place that's discussing pretty much ALL the subjects I have questions about!
"combobulating discombobulator ... "
I still have no idea what that means, but it sounds funny in Kerbal Space Program while loading the game.
Lol... I guess it just means confused :) I like the idea of combobulation
17:40 Quantum usb port uncertainty hahaha . So true
USB-C!!! No further explanation needed.
USB plugs are one of the few things that can exist in three states, the first one you tried, the second one, and then the third one that works, which you thought was the same one you tried the first time, but demonstrably isn’t.
I've always liked to think of them as 4 dimensional objects, so that three rotations has somehow only just managed to get them into the right position
I can usually get it right after turning it twice, so I don't think there's quantum uncertainty. Rather, they're just 4 dimensional.
This has got to be in the top ten episodes of all time. No politics just facts coupled with real world science that in the near future MAY produce some results we can actually apply.
I A ,your real talent is your vision for application There is no one on the net that has your vision.
Can't applaud your videos enough
Thank You
Remo 52, when's there ever politics? The references must have gone straight past me, or I'm not understanding what mean
I'm just so glad he spent the time to say that wind and solar technologies are debatable ecological friendly technologies. Thank you Isaac, thank you.
@@robinhyperlord9053 OR, no political opinion equals a respectable sense of restraint. injecting political opinions into a discussion takes attention away from said discussion (unless that discussion is about politics).
no need to be so arrogant.
@@robinhyperlord9053 dude, you can't even reach k1 without leaving earth using only solar, wind, hydro, AND geothermal, much less just solar and wind. And we'll want to have reached k1 by 2200 if we want to have a decent population without over taxing the environment, as we'll need to be putting a lot of energy into increasing plant life, generating food, and recycling waste.
Further, solar generates optimally at 27% efficiency, often less due to material wear, the panels last on average for 25 years, and requires more rare earth metals to be mined than a typical nuclear power plant per watt for the same time period, and produces long life toxic waste during creation, which can stay dangerous for millenia while the nuclear waste can be buried underground and spends most of its foreseeable future being barely radioactive enough to be picked up through a sheet of corrugated iron (half-life is inverse to radioactivity).
@@theapexsurvivor9538 at the same time solar panels can be build with meta materials like graphene or nanotubes (not just carbon), it reduces the amount of toxic emitions (that arent even that high to begin with and can be more easily deal with than carbón dioxide from fósil fuels) makes them tinier and lighter and can theoretically allow them to reach higher efficienties (some scientists theorize up to 90% efficiency)
Also solar panels allow you to build a dyson swarm, who is the most efficient form of energy production on a solar system
yet another great piece of work, Isaac, you never fail to impress!
he never fails to deliver! ... fixed it ;)
Yippee... OK I had to Calculate Shipping on the Sigil Website at the first Cart Splash Screen not the Second Shipping Screen but I got it to work... One SFIA Mug and T-shirt inbound! Thank You Isaac! You Channel is well worth the Money!
Holy crap Isaac,
I feel like I just took in a bit of EEVBlog, Thunderfoot, NurdRage, and PBS SpaceTime in a single half hour upload. Basically all of the channels I regularly watch that take scientific/engineering/chemistry subjects way past my pay grade. This is definitely a watch-it-twice (or more) kind of upload. There are so many things referenced that I want to read into further.
I'm probably biased but this is one of your best uploads in my opinion. I imagine this subject overlaps your day job a bit.
Thanks for sharing, and thanks to everyone else behind the scenes that helps to make this happen every Thursday ;)
-Jake
johnmburt1960 OY VEY! Respecc Wamen!!!
Thank you for pointing hat out. Its lovelly that a guy whose main counter-argument against feminism is that "it is useless and ergo a waste of time" has 103 videos on it.
Its nice to see him raging against pseudoscience. Thats what the 8th circle of hell was engineered for. But im gonna call it. That guy has some serious mommy problems to hate woman that much
@johnmburt1960
Huh. I didn't know any of that about him. I knew he had some personal hard-on against Elon Musk, but it looks like that woody's against a lot of folks.
I have watched all your videos and like all of them. But this one really hooked me. This is one problem I think many people tend to overlook.
Yes new video thank you so much for the hard work Issac
As to getting fuel into black holes:
"Like trying to jam a beach ball through hole in wall the size of a dime - while someone is spraying a pressure washer through the other side."
Well said.
T-Shirt: SFIA: No CC required!
i misread the title as "portable tower" and thought the thumbnail was a picture of giant floating triangle building (like that one angel from evangelion)... i watched for 17mins before i realised this.
The angel that have to be shot by eva-01 with a rifle rite?
What is this? A tower for ants!!?
Finally O'Neill cylinders I've been waiting for that video for a long time!👍
Me, too! Something so cool that is actually feasible in the (somewhat) near future excites me far more than colonizing distant star systems or anti-matter torpedoes! >8^)
antred11 need to it's actually more exciting than colonizing planets as well!
I had a somewhat tough day with the 24 kids in my class today and I barely had a voice since I'm getting sick. Got home with a pounding headache and sore throat and collapsed in the sofa. Then I remembered it's Thursday, so I got up to watch my favourite Thursday video! Sometimes when life is shit you can still find a golden nugget.
Sometimes when you find a golden nugget life can still be shit. :)
excellent episode, love the fact that your channel tackles all aspects from the huge to the absurd huge to the small and often overlooked. kudos!
Every home should have its own power source. The grid has had its day, and now it is night.
Well, black holes are non normally portable, but if you get a lot of lasers pointing at a single point....
I fucking love how you dont discount anything as impossible as long as there us a single way of doing it.
Perfect, just sat down to eat and the notification arrived, thankyou Isaac.
exactly the same for me
You've become adapted, and now prepare your snacks and drinks at the maximally efficient time.
same
Your videos are something I look forward to every week. I can not express enough how great these are. Each one is so much more than entertainment and education, each one (and I have watched them all) makes me think and furthermore makes me hopeful for the high reaches of the future of humanity, keep up this amazing work!!
We still use flywheels for more than most people realise. A data centre in Australia currently makes use of a truly massive one as a stand in for a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) capacitor when there are power blackouts.
Spin it up when the grid works, then tapping its angular momentum for generation when the grid is down.
Hey Isaac! Absolutely amazing episode as always! I'd like to see a full episode on antimatter production and challenges. What do you think?
I might actually do that, I'd tended to think the interest wouldn't be there but then I was really shocked to see today's topic as runner up on a poll of 20 and more so that it seems to be doing very well so far. Just goes to show what I already knew, I never have a clue what topics folks will like :)
Isaac Arthur Antimatter production and antimatter reactor development is what I'm trying to hammer out right now for one of my stories. I'm trying to see how possible it would be to have a working, efficient antimatter reactor in around two decades, starting from technology using fast breeder reactors, with a funding capacity like that of the United States. How plausible is that to be able to happen in that time frame do you think?
Because of the type of containment fields that would be necessary to safely store antimatter indefinitely and to guard against the heat generated in its reaction, I'd think they would have to develop a efficient fusion reactor first, since they need a similar containment field to keep it from meltdown during operation, and it would safer to have a fusion reactor meltdown during development rather than an antimatter reactor I would think.
Isaac Arthur Oh, I figure they could spare somewhere around between 4 to 10 trillion dollars to the project over 30 years. I'm still figuring out how much money they'd need for a civilization arc underground infrastructure to guard against extinction. And their total budget for everything they want to build for it is $27.7 trillion over 30 years, to basically have an underground microcosom of the whole society down to types of factories and everything.
Isaac Arthur The population of my country doing this is 500 million with resources similar to that available in all of North America.
Michael Jensen, The antimatter production capability is the advanced technology. Using anti-matter much less so.
North America with fast breeder reactors can build underground infrastructure. No need to wait for fusion or anti-matter.
Cheesecake is my favorite power storage substance
Reddit once again gives me another great channel to watch. Love your stuff.
In a way I envy you. Discovering Isaac Arthur's work for the first time is truly a treat. Have fun with the megastructure material and the civilizations at the end of time (some of my personal favourites).
Soon you will see why all the subscribers cannot wait for thursday to come.
Oh boy you are in for one hell of a binge
Baalur Upward Bound and Outward Bound were pretty good too.
Overjoyed at finding this channel after watching the episode on terraforming Venus. I love the in-depth approach to these episodes, the topics are always deeply interesting and are very well presented. I think this is my new favourite channel.
The cherubs in that picture are religious subtext of the harnessing of godly power but emphasising showing it in a positive light. Probably a result of the enlightenment being a time where the knowledge gained by science was finally being viewed as non confrontational to religious teachings in the west.
Sycopathy That's a dubious interpretation. Especially since the "enlightenment" explicitly pitted "science" against religion via materialist dogma.
Krisztián Povázson that's a revisionist understanding considering the fact that most great western thinkers during the era ascribed to some form of Christianity. They sought to ratify their faith and the rational truths they discovered not defeat one with the other.
Deism is not "some form of Christianity", it is practically atheism with a distant and irrelevant godhead. The Aufklaerists were also rather militant advocates of the expulsion of living religion from society for "progress".
Krisztián Povázson Deism in the context of European society is Deism is basically as close as you can get to synonymous with 'some form of Christianity.'
I love the voice and the pronunciation of words here. It is unusual and unique. It is part of the icon of this channel. Please don't change it. Just as a channel like this should be. Keep up the great work.
Yay! Can't wait for the 19th. I've been waiting for a video that went deeper into the Oneil Cylinder. Thanks Issac. Great video this week too
Mug idea.. "the first rule of combat is..." Blank.. leave it as a write in.
Not a bad idea, since there's no way we could get them all on a mug, or maybe even a whole shirt
Hi Isaac. I found your channel a few months ago and have been watching your episodes like crazy! Great stuff, and may I just say, you have really come a long way since the first episodes. You have a great voice and you've really improved with your speech impediment, I can't even hear it anymore!
He always seems apologetic for his unique speech. I love it. I switched from listening to thunder storms and rain audio to sleep, now I listen to the soothing sounds of Isaac, then replay it the next day to hear what I missed because it’s the most interesting content on the internet.
You do great work Sir, keep it up. Please Please do an episode about the subatomic. Thanks
Would have been interesting to talk more about the dangers of extreme portable power. If something went wrong with an anti-matter battery (or it was intentionally sabotaged) for example even a fraction of a gram could wipe out a city which might be troubling in a future world where everyone has access to one. I guess you could restrict people to fractions of a nano-gram per "charge" but then it wouldn't offer that much advantage over regular batteries.
It could be more useful in vehicles though, we already drive around with a giga-joule or so of explosive gas so the equivalent in anti-matter wouldn't be any more devastating if something went wrong but it would reduce their weight considerably and this could be really useful for space travel.
Jim Giant well when you talk about having technology that advanced where the average man will have the power to destroy a planet, you have to make some basic assumptions that in society coming to develop that technology it changed and grew based on this concept of post-scarcity and no longer requiring competition to get resources.
So basically I'm saying it's just a spot where we have to bet that along the line we solve those problems and use a little handwavium/unobtainium to presume that such technology would either allow us to prevent such misuse or that the concept of misuse would no longer exist. The most likely scenario is that the inventors of these hypothetical technologies will have to Steward Humanity for a couple of generations until we are ready for such responsibilities.
If a gram could take out a city then a kg could possibly protect it somehow.
abz998
That's not how it works. If a gallon of gasoline can explode, a barrel full of the stuff will not protect you...
Vys Erion yh that doesn't make sense. Was referring to the level of tech available.
I'm sure by then we could force fields or enforced structures that prevent everyone in a city dying from an explosion.
There will be protections in place but will they be good enough? We have orders of magnitude more personal power than we had in the past. Modern firearms, cars, hell even a laptop battery catching fire is comparable to a grenade. All of these things can and do go wrong (or are misused) but it''s rare enough and they are useful enough that we accept those risks. I don't know if the same could ever be said when people have the potential to kill millions.
The more powerful these technologies get the more regulations and restrictions are put in place. It could be that we are reaching the limits of what we find acceptable for personal power (though this power could still be used more efficiently and we could all benefit from increases in commercial/industrial power).
Love the merchandise. I also love the topic of O'Neill Cylinders.
About "portable power", the molten salt Thorium reactor was first developed as a power source for a nuclear powered bomber. A very bad idea but actually possible because an MSR doesn't require pressurized water cooling system, containment vessel, etc. And when the Thorium breeding cycle is perfected, creating expensive radioactive isotopes will become much easier and cheaper. Of course having a source of very inexpensive electrical energy will create the "problem" of making the synthesis of carbon neutral chemical fuels much more attractive in the near term.
I guess portable black holes will probably go the back burner, but on the brighter side almost all of the other technologies in Upward Bound become far more practical and politically feasible.
damn i am half way through interesting documentary and notification arrives, tough choice which to watch first
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Isaac Day
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
i know right?
Arthursday*
That should be a meme.
KappaW You it has begun before it began?
Yes, Thursday becomes ARTHursday!
Oh man i love this channel!
Your videos never fail to impress me. I like how you dive into depth on certain subjects while touching on a wide variety of subjects at the same time. (For Example instead of just talking about batteries you talked about portable storage!). I am thankful for you channel and love to continue to see more content from you in the future :).
Thanks for uploading, Isaac.
Very interesting!
Happy Isaac Arthur's Day everybody!
I forgot it was Thursday... a nice little surprise to make my day brighter!
These days it seems like the only day I can actually remember is Thursday :)
Happy Arthursday everyone!
This channel always opens my understanding, thanks Isaac Arthur.
This is truly the best TH-cam channel! Good luck! Be blessed! :)
I'm working on writing some stories, and this was precisely the episode I needed! Thank you!
I love each and every one of these episodes. I work in the healthcare industry on the ME side making ultrasound devices and there is always something you explain that triggers an idea to try or solution to a problem (sometimes I didn't even know I had) that will really change things. This channel is inspiring and delivered to just the right audience. It is bringing more people in to the fold of science and futurism which brings Tomorrow that much closer. Keep up the great work and get on Joe Rogan's podcast already! You would blow everyone's mind and that needs to happen.
Yaaaaas perfect subject matter, was hoping for this one. Much tks
didn't realize it was Arthursday already
such a nice thing to wake up to
I've never even thought about a vacuum energy source. Nice. Love the slogan as well. Thank you for these videos Isaac!
I read a book in high school called “signal to ground” where they produced energy by siphoning the rotational energy off of celestial bodies. They then used said energy to teleport and all other manner of things. At the expense of the rotation of planets wreaking havoc and creating the plot. This made me think of that. Good work Isaac.
I thought about the mirror idea a while back. Nice to see it's actually up there with the best of them.
I love this channel. Such a joy to listen to.
this has made stacking shelves worth it, thankyou isaac for helping to prevent mental decay in my mind as i go through life's transitions, truly i am grateful to you for this.
Once again you did not disappoint. My favorite video of yours is 'machine rebellion' and various alien series. Would really like to see more of that :)
Something I'd love to see is a video on the EM drive. It recently passed peer review and that means the laws of conservation of energy and momentum can be broken. I know that Isaac could do a really good job at going into that topic.
I love this channel, one of the very best I'll say, interesting information and some fiction too, I love to discuss about futurism.
As always awesome. Thanks Isaac.....
That USB quantum uncertainty totally got me lmfao
I was thinking about last weeks video on meta materials and your space warfare episode. You said that there is no stealth in space, but if you covered your ship in a meta material that could make it invisible to radar and any other wavelength of light, as well as place all of your ships radiators on one side facing away from the enemy, could you make a genuinely stealthy ship.
Even better, make it a drone ship with no crew at all, and if you only have your computers running at the bare minimum, the amount of waste heat would probably be very small. Even if computers in the next few centuries or millennia won’t reach the landaur limit, they’ll still be far more efficient than those of today, and having no crew means the ship could be very cold making it even more efficient.
So you probably could have stealthy ships unless there is some factor I’m overlooking.
Truth be told it's going to be very hard bordering on impossible to make something that can handle several wavelengths at once rather than a discrete or narrow band, I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to get the whole spectrum crammed in.If you did it might let you get away with passive drifting, turn your engine and and its definitely out the window.
Now adding metamaterials to the drone LACs in my sci-fi universe and adding stealth capabilities
You did an ep on teleportation. If you could teleport waste heat away...
But now it's like saying if you had inertial dampers you could have super-fast elevators.
You are kind of discribing the stealth ships from The Expanse. xD
Just that they only use anti radar materials.
You cant just bend waves that causes a red shift, and you cant reproduce the image that changes timing. On earth we use signals that bounce back because we have things everywhere and are looking for a specific thing, in space we'd look for any disturbance. I think the biggest problem would be getting to people you can see before they are gone.
Something to listen to on my drive home from the office
That fusion reactor animation from Oak Ridge never gets old! Good to see ORNL relevant again.
Made my Thursday something to look forward to as usual, Thank you Isaac!
Slow day at work, great time to watch this video!
The thumbnails for your videos are positively captivating.
Excellent as usual.
I didn’t know you were a fellow veteran, not that I would have a reason to.
Although I went to grad school in a medical discipline (my undergrad studies were physical sciences) I took a class in the Department of Nuclear Science titled “Nuclear Reactor Theory and Design” just for the Hell of it (yeah, I’m one of “those people!”). There I was introduced to RTG’s and I’m still fascinated by them to this day. You do seem to dwell on shielding problems but those fueled by alpha emitters require little or no shielding.
In regard to power transmission via lasers or microwaves/masers, there is a problem which limits transmission distance: the inverse square law. Resistance in metallic conductor cable can be overcome by cooling or otherwise using superconducting materials. But I know of no way to overcome the inverse square law limitations.
If I ever have the opportunity to start my own country (or planet), I think I’ll use a power type not uncommon in industry but as far as I know not used anywhere on the globe (or in ships or aircraft...I once heard it was used on the International Space Station but I never attempted to verify the claim) for public power. I would used pulsed square wave DC. It’s easy to step voltage up or down using transformers. To improve efficiency my system would incorporate three or four phases. With the exception of the US and a few other countries, all of the world uses 220 VAC-240VAC for household power and I would continue this practice. To again further improve efficiency I would use a higher frequency than the 50 Hz-60 Hz worldwide standard. Large aircraft use 400 Hz power and one would be amazed in the difference in size between say a 62.5 kVA 400 Hz aircraft generator and a similar output 60 Hz generator. Picture a household vacuum cleaner or microwave oven with a power cord slightly larger than a pencil lead!
To further save on copper usage (smaller wires) all vehicular power systems would use 24 VDC...42 VDC if an economical way could be found to construct a 21 cell battery (the 42 volt battery would be the same physical size as the 12 cell (24 volt) and 21 cell (41 volt). The higher the voltage, the less current is required for the same power and less current means smaller plates.
Great vid! I'd love to see your take on using the Sphaleron process for energy production. Max Tegmark mentions this possibility in his new book, Life 3.0. I'm working on a book (idea at the moment) and am researching all kinds of probable sci-fi tech and your videos have definitely helped. Thank you.
I had never heard of Quantum Plug Uncertainty before, but have experianced it everyday.
Another great video! One tiny correction: Beta radiation is not stopped by the top layer of dead skin cells. That is alpha radiation. Beta radiation can actually burn your skin. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_burn
Awesome. I love the fundamentals of portable energy. I also haven't heard of that those perfect mirrors for a particular wavelength. It is hard to believe but superconductors has virtually no loss.
Here's the merchandise link, at the moment it's just a small selection, folks have been asking for a while so I figured it was past-time, but I still wanted to start simple.
SFIA Merchandise available: www.signil.com/?s=sfia
As this is a new thing, please do let me know if you have any problems with it so they can be fixed or otherwise addressed quickly.
You should pin this so it sits at the top.
Thanks Jordan, I thought I had, insufficient caffeine this morning I suspect.
I'll buy what you got. You futurist, you.
Can I just call you Hari Sheldon?
That reminds me, we're almost done with the first year of books of the month, I can probably get away with using Asimov again soon :) Figured no author should have it twice in one year, though he's the one I'd conside making an exception for.
Your series is entertaining and thought provoking
Loved it. Please keep them coming.
Been waiting for this, thank you!
was hoping this episode would cover some more near future examples ... like, how would you power a laser / rail "rifle"? Whole discussion to be had there, because any dense power source is incredibly dangerous. Also heat to deal with. What happens if it gets shot? etc. Certainly aren't going to be powering it with an RTG or chemical battery
There is also one more potential holding capacity for energy - spintronics. You can cram a lot of energy in atom nucleis themselves. Thats how NMR works. They would start to giving energy back instantly tho. If only we could "freeze" nuclear spins, we could hold huge amounts of energy.
Amazing content and presentation. It truly is inspiring to watch.
17:45 no truer words have ever been spoken
That intro... dude.. dude
. Right on!
That portrait of Ben Franklin at 1:29 is DOOOOOPE.
There's one I like even better: it shows Ben Franklin ensconced in a throne in heaven, holding a lightning bolt in his hand, and surrounded by Roman gods. The caption in Latin is "He stole lightning from the heavens and the sceptre from tyrants."
www.benfranklin300.org/frankliniana/result.php?id=654&sec=0
Quantum Plug Uncertainty? I thought I was just hopelessly uncoordinated. But now I know it’s a universal principle!! Thanks, Isaac!!!
Simply Superb ! ......as always
I would call the internet a success if the only thing it did was bring this channel to me!
Thank you and Happy Arthursday!!!
• Flywheels: You can still find them in data centers, among backup batteries and diesel generators.
• Battery sizes: engineers started to use systematic names, such as 18650: 18mm diameter, 650mm length. Easier to remember than arbitrary labels such as C, D, AAAA….
• "Ambient temperature" (rather, particle movement) energy harvesters: Brownsche Zellen. And there's vibration energy harvester. Both give some pW to nW (size of an old transistor). Interestingly an ARM Cortex fabbed with modern tech sips just a few nW, too! Could run ages w/o any battery or visible light.
18*650mm battery? What's that used in? An electric car? Can't imagine something more than half a metre long would be used in anything human-portable.
Oy, it's 18mm and 65.0mm length, sorry. And indeed, accu packs in cars are comprised of those cells. Though Tesla is switching to a different format.
This was amazing. Thank you Isaac!
Wow, that pretty much covered everything related to portable power, great video
An iPhone with the latest SFIA episode is also a decent source of portable power. I always get a burst of energy when the latest episode goes live.
Love your channel, spent all day watching it while working! On your question about Benjamin Franklin, there's actually a lot of interesting Enlightenment-era art that depicts Benjamin Franklin and other contemporary American Founders in similar Classical settings, replete with Roman gods as a way of connecting the rational, republican ideals of the time to the Greek and Roman era. For similar themes, check out The Apotheosis of Washington. My favorite example, though, is a French print of Benjamin Franklin, entitled "Au Genie de Franklin" (To the Genius of Franklin). It shows him enthroned in heaven grasping a lightning bolt, surrounded by Roman gods, and with the caption, "Eripuit Coelo Fulmen Sceptrumque Tirannis"-- "He stole fire from the heavens and the sceptre from tyrants."
Transmission lines would be safer and suffer less line loss over distance if the wire were insulated(and I'd still have a left hand). But the line would be far heavier, which would require stronger equipment, and after paying for injured workers your still looking at line loss being cheaper than improving it with current technology. Right now capacitor banks are the best bet to combat induction. They're all over the place. Companies are starting to play around with new voltage converters. DC has less line loss over long distances with high voltage transmission lines. So generate in AC step up to 500kv convert to DC. Miles of transmission lines to get to the load. Transfer back to AC and step down to distribution voltage. 12470 or 14,000kv then to a 120/240 transformer then to the tv and wifi to watch SFIA!!
Great episode!
Yaaaaay new episode! Thank you !
In current time we start looking ( 8:40 ) about using DC for long distance transfer lines, because they have less lose, and because transistors we can easily (with low lost) transform to AC, with one is easy to change voltage. There are many things why they was not possible in past, as transistors not exist, so they use very lost method of conversion, but DC do not make change magnetic field around cable, and use full profile of cable (DC mostly use only surface )
Just bought your mug! Considering my money also bought me countless hours of awesome content, it was definitely worth every penny.
Of course, it's reasonable to put tapping into other universes for power at the end of the episode: if we can do that, who needs anything else? (Seemingly) negating the laws of thermodynamics in the first place would, I imagine, be the ultimate example of a power providing technology which would siphon development away from all the rest! =D
Thanks Isaac, love your videos! Im working on a hard-Sci-Fi, so this is extremely usefull!
I always love hearing that
Isaac Arthur Your channel is definitely invaluable for my own work. Optimistic futurism isn't the easiest thing to come by these days.
I as well have been inspired to write about the distant future in what seems a more well thought out manner. I appreciate the discussion and thought process in these videos. Keep it up Isaac. :)
Your videos have inpired me too, to start worldbuilding a hard sifi setting.
Now I was really exited, because i thought about the antimatter-kickstarted fusion as a way of having enough power for handheld railguns and lasers in my setting. Assuming the tec is advanced enough to sustain the strain of the reaktions, how fatal would a direct hit on such a cell be, assuming they would only use the minimal amount of antimatter to start the reaktion once.
I know that it s likely going to be bad, but will it be roughly handgranate-bad, housekillingly-bad, neighborhoodkillingly-bad or citykillingly-bad?
42 kiltons of TNT per gram. trillions of atoms. It could probably do exactly as much damage as you'd like if you can control antimatter with such precision. Though it's possible a way will be developed to create some in situ, or at target. So however much you put in it. lol
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation
"Catalyze fusion" Best phrase ever spoken. Cheers Isaac!
Ahh nothing like sitting down to have lunch and watch a new Isaac Arthur video. Great work as always.
When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with energy sources and I had imagined bottling light. Made lots of research on the absorption rates, light reflection, etc., of various materials in the visible and infrared wavelenghts. My idea was to build a multi-layers box that wouldn't absorb, but rather reflect visible and infrared (even far infrared) light. Bouncing light generates photons of lower and lower energy, since no mirror is ever perfect. So being able to reflect far infrared considerably reduces the energy loss. Photons are hard to contain!