In this case, the long twisty tunnel is necessary for operator safety. Even if you're not in the beam itself, anything within direct line-of-sight is getting irradiated by various secondary effects. Having a few right-angle turns in the entry and exit tunnels mitigates this to acceptable levels.
The process includes parts being moved around on some of the shortest conveyer belts I've ever seen, in some cases moving just a few feet before being picked up by another person.
Yep. Even in the linked video around 3:20 the assembly makes a short 3foot trip on a conveyer. There's a cut there but you could imagine instead of walking the part that distance and back now they have half the next item already done. Looks like some are used as a small queue for the next station as well to give some slack to timing variations.
Ah just like with the "PhD student" joke in another thread: the value is likely in the "workers compensation case" savings when you can show that you did everything humanly possible to mitigate risk of injury, should there be a claim
You can actually see that in many of those cases all of those short belts/rollers are actually funneling different major sub-assemblies together. Because you have lines coming together the conveyer/rollers provide a bunch of benefits:
a) It's a short term buffer. While the lines are going to balanced pretty well, it's still super useful to have a small buffer.
b) Lets you spread out the lines a bit, giving you more flexibility with the design and layout of your lines. This is probably one reason why they don't try to pack the lines closer so that you can just hand off.
c) Having people shuffling the parts around is just inefficient. You don't want to hire a person just to shuffle the parts over such a small distance. You don't want to interrupt the last guy on the line's job with such a task. You could try to minimize the cost of runners by batching up your work before moving them (and having your runner rotate through different things to haul), but now you introducing probably more buffer than you want, and also potential latency spikes into your process.
That's probably physically impossible for a charged-particle beam (like electrons). It would defocus itself from its own self-interaction, as well as from interaction with intervening magnetic fields.
On this theme: we know several types of natural, astrophysical accelerators of charged particles—but none of those are observed as a localizable source of charged particles, from the perspective of astronomy. We just see secondary photons.
A lot of effort is currently put into tracking missile launches and predicting ballistic trajectories. The goal is to give some warning if a nuclear strike is launched.
It would be obvious if a strike came from an extraterrestrial source, there would be no terrestrial launch detection.
In addition, such a attack is unlikely to succeed. It would take a long time to arrive on earth and by the time the result of the attack was known there could be angry Earthlings counterattacking.
> It would be obvious if a strike came from an extraterrestrial source, there would be no terrestrial launch detection.
There would be no launch detected, that is true. That doesn’t mean that it would be obvious that the attack was extraterestrial. The alternative hypothesis would be the that the known terrestrial enemies developed some technique to confuse your sensors, or cloak themselves, or bribe your watchdogs, or pre-position warheads in space, or any other similar deception. People would be sooner thinking that their enemies smuggled nukes in overland than to think that aliens attacked them.
> A lot of effort is currently put into tracking missile launches and predicting ballistic trajectories. The goal is to give some warning if a nuclear strike is launched.
Less advanced nations such as North Korea and Pakistan have nukes. Do you think that their monitoring systems are really that good?
No, but they won't destroy the earth with what they have - untold destruction of couple other nations, with millions dead and extreme humanitarian and economic catastrophe - sure, but not extinction of life on earth.
I don't see why or how the step 3 would happen. Even if NK nuked South Korea, and even if theoretically US responded with a nuclear strike(and that is already really stretching it), why would other superpowers respond with their own nuclear strikes? China would be super unhappy, sure, but would they attack US with nukes over destruction of North Korea? I don't see it.
I can see Pakistan and India exchanging nukes, but why would anyone join in that?
NK nukes SK, USA nukes NK, CCP needs to show that they are not weak and nukes something America-adjacent (ex: Guam). I think all bets are off at that point.
There is a contingent of generals in every nuclear capable country which is itching to use them. Historically, it has only been a rational civilian leader who has kept them in check.
There was recently a US President who was talking about nuking a hurricane.[0] Once nuclear weapons are in play, we just need one irrational reactionary leader, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and Fin.
Yeah that's true, I just worry that things could escalate quickly once there is any exchange of nuclear weapons. It would certainly be destabilizing to a great extent.
My concern is that it would possibly snowball and draw in other actors.
The aliens would have superior tech, so hacking into our systems would be trivial. They could just launch an actual nuke rather than lobbing one in from space.
People assume this and I never understand why. Even if we postulate highly complex realtime computing as a necessity for controlling a superluminal engine, why assume an entire technological history unrelated to ours would make it trivial, or for that matter possible, that even FTL-capable extraterrestrials can compromise earthly systems?
'The thing about aliens is they're alien.' - why assume this only works in one direction?
There's at least one science fiction writer who had similar thoughts and wrote a story [1] where the FTL is pretty much the only technology in which the FTL aliens who visit Earth are ahead of us.
There's a good deal of Turtledove in my perspective on this, yeah. His academic study of history lends a perspective few if any other authors in my experience share; my own study of the same subject, though entirely amateur, tends to make his counterfactuals seem more plausible rather than less, by which I infer both they and their consequences in his stories are drawn with scholarly care.
Of course it is not a guarantee. It is possible that the alien invasion fleet arrives, they land, unload their main battle tanks and a passing puppy laps up their whole fleet accidentally.
What we know that by virtue of them being here they are either very good at faster than light travel, or they are good at traveling slow.
If they are good at FTL what else are they good at? We currently think that is impossible. What other things we think as impossible are practiced by them?
If they traveled slow, they must be also good at maintaining their equipment on crazy long timeframes. It also shows that they are the patient sorts who plan and execute things on the order of timelines our empires crumble. How long have they been with us then? How much preparation did they do beforehand? Did Pham Nuwen code the intel management engine?
But sure, it is possible that the Aliens arrive. They broadcast a TV signal threatening us, but unfortunately the sync is a bit off so basicaly no-one understands it. Then they enter our atmosphere. The high oxygen concentration rusts their equipment and they all die.
Seeing something occur that we thought was impossible tells us our understanding of physics is incomplete, which we already know. Seeing how it is done would probably tell us more, but we haven't. Until we do, we're guessing, and to assume FTL mastery confers godlike powers is as much an assumption as any other. Turtledove addresses this in the story that a sibling commenter mentions; I can also recommend that story, which rewards the reader with considerable entertainment while making its point about what can reasonably be assumed in the total absence of information.
The same goes for the sublight option, only a lot more so. Unless they have FTL communications, which I believe we also consider effectively impossible, by the time they get here anything they think they know about us will be wildly outdated, in technological terms at the very least. Possibly also in terms of the dominant terrestrial species, but we can be generous here.
We can be generous about their information latency because that only matters if they want it to. Any species which wants us dead and doesn't care what state the planet's left in - a reasonable assumption, if we're talking about them popping our nukes at us - doesn't need to come close to landing, or even to orbit, to do it; a kinetic bombardment in passing will amply suffice to depopulate Earth to more or less any degree desired. For subluminal interstellar travel to be even remotely feasible, even for an individually long-lived species, implies access to the kind of delta-V budget where the only limiting factor in such a bombardment is the time it takes to accelerate impactors, which may be zero if those are released before or during deceleration to match velocity with our solar system.
In the former or FTL case, we don't know how FTL works or even could, and we therefore can assume anything we like - with all assumptions at equal risk of bankruptcy. In the latter or high-sublight case, they don't need to be more clever to kill us if that's all they're after, and it may be unreasonably charitable to assume we would even get a chance to see it coming.
That does not seem so far fetched to me. So many of the purported alien sightings are beings with bilateral symmetry, two eyes, two arms, humanoid face and so on. The only way I could see that happening is visitors from a distant future.
Or, more likely, the alien "creators" have created them more or less in our image.
Another possibility is that the Galactic Federation has a rule that when they need to visit a planet that is not yet aware of aliens the crew must entirely consist of beings that have the same general form as the people of that planet.
That makes it harder for someone who sees them to convince others that it was aliens and not just a trick of bad lighting or someone with deformities or injuries that give them an unusual appearance.
It also makes it less likely for them to be mistaken for some other species on the planet. Suppose the Federation sent an expedition to ancient Earth that included crew from a species that looked a lot like our cats, and accidentally let Earth people get too good a look at them and their technology.
Those Earth people might think those are Earth cats, and conclude that Earth cats are a lot more powerful and advanced then they thought, and that they had better stop treating cats like animals lest the cats decided to wipe them out and start treating them as superior beings. Next thing you know that entire civilization is treating cats as magical being of great value or even worshiping them as gods.
It's quite possible that the humanoid lifeform is optimal to have a technological species that can travel between stars. An aquatic species would have huge difficulties just building technology and civilization, because of the habitat. A species without arms and thumbs would have a hard time manipulating its environment (just look at all the 4-legged animals now). A species with more than 4 limbs would likely either be too small (insects) to accomplish much, or would need too much energy (and probably evolve to lose the extra limbs over time).
There's good reasons to think that alien species might not look all that different from animals on this planet, simply due to physics. Animals here didn't simply spring to life in their current form; they evolved from single-celled organisms to best suit their environments.
The word 'parochialism' positively vaults to mind. Not to mention your flagrantly unjustifiable opening assumption, given the number of bipedal technological species known to us to travel among the stars is currently zero.
Speaking of Golden Age twists! And not fully thought-through ones, at that. It requires two assumptions: first that there exists a yahweh-style creator deity, and second that Genesis 1:26 is accurate to fact. Even taking both as axiomatic, this approach still further assumes that this likeness, namely the one in which we as humans are made, must also be the only likeness in which a mortal could be made after its creator.
Given the assumptions of faith under which we here labor, it may also be wise to heed 1 Cor. 2:11, in which the convert Roman makes one of his few worthy statements in warning men against imagining they can know the mind of God. In that light, the proposition lacks soundness even under its own axioms.
You're kidding right? It's all SciFi. In case you're confused, the Fi is short for Fiction. Stuff that's not real. So of course we're making assumptions on the entire thing. Including The Book as the greatest selling book of fiction of all time.
You're also now assuming that we Earthlings are the original source. Some scifi tropes state we're more Martian fleeing their dying planet or with things like panspermia. I like the SciFi where everyone is searching for the nearly mythical planet that turns out to be Earth. Ice Pirates is a goofy one.
You may labor under a misapprehension here; if I met Yahweh on the road, I would do my level best to kill it. But I was raised with that book, and still remember enough to play with the toys in it when I want to; if we're talking 1950s sf twists like "the aliens were fellow children of God all along!" then those are the toys with which we're playing.
That aside, of course we're making assumptions. But if we don't choose to either be bound by the assumptions we've already made or re-evaluate them, then we're playing with dolls rather than worldbuilding. Your pastimes are of course your own business, but it's been a long time indeed since I graduated from the former to the latter.
(Not that I mind space opera, when it focuses on the character-driven stories it's best suited to tell - trying to figure out how a TARDIS works misses the point entirely, while "The Doctor's Wife" is beautiful. But you mentioned science fiction, and my current standard there is set by Children of Time and Blindsight.)
They probably can do that much cheaper: just come up with two opposing conspiracy theories, and people will naturally divide into 2 camps and will eagerly kill each other.
Depending on the voltage, you might die immediately from being electrocuted, or a few days later from radiation poisoning. The stories of the people who died from the Therac-25 machine are probably instructive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25#Radiation_overexposu...
There's a Russian Physicist that was in an accident where a proton beam went through his head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski He lived but with some brain injury. I'm not sure what the differences in effect electrons vs protons and a focused vs diffuse beam would be though.
"...the Therac-20, which could produce X-rays or electrons of up to 20 MeV.
"This dual accelerator concept was applied to the Therac-20 and Therac-25, with the latter being much more compact, versatile, and easy to use. It was also more economical for a hospital to have a dual machine that could apply treatments of electrons and X-rays, instead of two machines. "
I spent some time doing testing in a similar facility doing things with gamma irradiation and I'm amazed that they all look like they were constructed by crazy people in their garage. Like really janky mechanisms for moving samples and containing radiation, really ugly facilities, stuff laying around everywhere. They all look like the lab of a mad scientist.
I believe I was actually at this facility around the time this video was taken! I was there with a large group mixing scientists and others who were sending acrylic through it to make captured lightning/lightning sculptures/lichtenberg figures! It was a really cool experience!
One common use is cross-linking polymers. If you've ever used cable with XLPE insulation, it was initially extruded onto the wire as normal polyethylene, then spooled back and forth between drums passing under an e-beam system like this, to perform the cross-linking. It's phenomenally tough stuff after that; a lot of cars use XLPE (in its thinwall TXL spec) wiring.
In this video, it's for examining calcite according to the description; I believe I've also seen similar devices used for making lichtenburg figures in acrylic.
I believe they are used to irradiate cannabis too (to kill mould & yeast) - electron-bean irradiation retains much more terpenes than gamma irradiation does!
Yes, a lot of commercially grown cannabis is, unfortunately, irradiated. Different countries (abd different US states) have different laws about the amount of mould and yeast that are permitted on sold cannabis flowers (as well as other things, such as moisture content). The target is quite hard to meet got some markets, including the UK and EU.
To get to the required levels, irradiation isn't necessary... but it's cheap and easy. I get the sense that it's often used because of poor growing practises, more than anything else.
I can't speak for other countries, but in the UK most cannabis has until recently been gamma irradiated - which often led to practically terpless flower that smelt of damp hay. More recently, e-beam (electron-beam) irradiation has largely taken over - and it seems to be much, much kinder on terpenes! Honestly, most is now impossible to tell apart from non-irradiated flower.
I don't have actual data, I'm afraid. There's a single paper talking about cannabinoid and terpene content of cannabis after gamma irradiation, which was paid for by Bedrocan - but I haven't found anything about how it compares to e-beam.
> GoPro is enclosed in a 3/8" thick lead pig with a 1/2" thick, 50% lead glass window. Additionally there is a 1/4" thick lead plate above the camera box to provide shielding from direct irradiation from the beam.
Pleasing taste, some monsterism.