Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers
edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue
The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the gameās Codex (āStarships: Heat Managementā in the Secondary section, if youāre looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which havenāt had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobodyās bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh donāt worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter theyāll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
I know youāre joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copperās great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:
The sun isnāt hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copperās gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core
Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copperās a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to ironās 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing
The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)
So, this ideaās fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but thatās a question for another day.
also unless youāre dissipating much more heat out at lower temperature, it wonāt even work as a heatsink because otherwise it goes pretty directly against second law of thermodynamics
if iām looking at this right, for copper alpha capture is actually still exothermic (by 3.7MeV and 4.4MeV for 63Cu and 65Cu respectively). itās different from alpha process, because in alpha process whatever comes after calcium is two or more beta plus decays away from stable, that is thereās already too many protons and next alpha capture only makes it worse, and it all happens too fast for these decays to happen. itās equilibrium process anyway at that point, but barriers are so large it probably doesnāt matter
donāt forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sunā¦
just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere
Indeed, people donāt seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple
The authorās previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.
Starcloudās fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.