Cosmic Catastrophe

[Piotrsko]

AFAIK, it is possible to get decent fission from a medium quantity of mined unprocessed uranium shoved into a mass.

Would definitely be hard on the un-initiated operators

[freebeard]

The big bada-boom requires considerable refinement.

[redneck]

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Well, 17 yr. old David Hahn was trying...




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[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by freebeard

The big bada-boom requires considerable refinement.

Only for precise control [say 8000 ft msl and @ this certain longitude and latitude] and to get beyond 20 or so kiloton yield. A sloppy mini bada-boom (bada-bing-bang?) that could occur under very primitive conditions would clear a couple of square miles of pretty much anything not hiding behind big earthen berms. The shock wave and heat still occur, but are weaker.

Case in point is MOAB which is a kiloton class explosion that mimics a low yeild nuke. AKA daisy cutter for those aforementioned characteristics.

[freebeard]

David Hahn and the African natural reactor as fission piles, not assploding devices.

You have to turn the Uranium into Plutonium. That's non-trivial, the Hanford Site for proof.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

The scale of "nova" starts at about Carrington event level and goes up to Carrington event times a number with about eighteen zeros in it.

One must wonder why people 3000 years ago are describing stuff that sounds exactly like modern technology and weapons systems.
Oppenheimer seemed to think the Mahabharata has some basis in fact.

Wikipedia mentions that all nova have to do with white dwarfs in a binary system.
That would exclude the Sun.
I read an entire book on Oppenheimer and don't recall any mention in belief of ancient weapons of mass destruction of the scale of modern thermonuclear devices.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

He relentlesslyattacks their dark matter honey pot. Of course he is unpopular.

I watched a Great Courses, 24- hour lecture series on 'Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime', by PhD Theoretical Physics, Benjamin Schumacher, Kenyon College, which gets into dark matter and dark energy, among many things.
It appears that it's very real.
It can be 'viewed' only by gravity lensing, and how it's gravity distorts things. Maps have been made of it.

[freebeard]

Wikipedia mentions that all nova have to do with white dwarfs in a binary system.

Well, that's Wikipedia for you.

It appears that it's very real

Inadequate sensors.

[aerohead]

I went over to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory website.
Their latest reporting involves a nova which occurred February 12, 2006, RS Oph, in Ophiuchus, involving a white dwarf and a red giant.

[freebeard]

You Don't Know Nova

Try looking for 'Cataclysmic Variables'.