500 Trillion Watt Laser Breaks Records
- Thread starter Hevva
- Start date
Wonder if this is the weapon we could use to protect the planet from asteroids. Also anyone know if a video of the laser firing exists?
EDIT: Lead scientist: I"M CHARGIN MY LAZER
EDIT: Lead scientist: I"M CHARGIN MY LAZER
If the "scientist" saying this was not wearing a dark cloak while saying "fully operational" I will be very disappointed...crepesack said:
You know that bit from Prince of Space where the bad guy's ray gun destroys people, leaving only their hats behind?draythefingerless said:
OT: This is very cool. Now, if I might just borrow that for a little while... I just need to attach it to the LHC to finish my Dimension Gun. A-Class Criminal Kain got loose again and he's not easy to handle alone.
Kaplooey?CardinalPiggles said:
I'm gonna go with Kaplooey.
Also, I would be very disappointed if the first guy who fired the laser didn't say "DOCTOR OCTAGONAPUS BLAAAAAAARG!"
Since my friend works on the Higgs Boson and has a non-insignificant chance of tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time, I find giant death lasers a lot less scary than I used to.
Nothing.CardinalPiggles said:
Shine a laser pointer at the moon, and it will have spread out over that range to a spot size of about 500 square kilometers. And besides, this many photons is nothing to the sun. Sun wouldn't notice one iota. What is of note here is that they got all the lasers focused to a single target at nearly the same instant in time, and all that energy has to go somewhere- into fusion reactions.
Well, if the beams lasted a second, it would release 500 TJ of energy, or about the equivalent energy of 120,000 tons of TNT (roughly). That would have taken a nice big chunk out of California. Instead, the beams last a small fraction of a second. At a millionth of a second, it's about 240 lbs TNT equivalent energy. At a nanosecond, about 1/4 lb TNT equivalent. The nanosecond beams would kill a human being, and the microsecond beams would Jackson Pollack everything for several dozen meters. If the beams lasted a picosecond, on the other hand, it might be survivable by a human being (probably blinding, but survivable).
The power alone isn't enough to tell, you also need the duration. I'd bet on something like a nanosecond.
The power alone isn't enough to tell, you also need the duration. I'd bet on something like a nanosecond.
Yes.crepesack said:
Where do you get these figures from?Hevva said:
- The second sentence in the article says 60 times more than any previous laser system. Not 100.
- Nowhere in the article do they mention 500 terawatts. Or 500 of anything. Not even the word "watts" appears anywhere in the article.
Are you making this stuff up as you go?
edit: I see that you took these from the article at the Huffington Post... so maybe they are making stuff up as they go.
Hmm yeah as awesome as a giant laser is in concept, the thought of a real one kind of frightens me. No, scratch that, the thought of the military having access to a real giant laser frightens me. Mostly because I don't live in the US.
