I can deal with the robot uprising if it's a dance-off. We'll still end up enslaved, but it will at least be to a solid beat.
It has begun. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/24-amazon-workers-hospital-bear-repellent-accident/story?id=59625712
Yeah, it "accidentally" bearmaced everyone in the warehouse. But as long as we don't let them unionize, we should be safe from the machines. I think.
The robot uprising continues, and its getting worse. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/79542...mpales-worker-with-10-foot-long-steel-spikes/
Dear god how could we not have realized! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ionia-mains-federal-lawsuit-100-a7630591.html
phrasing please, here I'm looking for some guy skewered by 10' long steel spikes and I get a guy skewered by 10, foot long steel spikes...
I mean, i'm beginning to question if he was even really impaled, not sure 1' is long enough to go completely through *nod*
I would 100% prefer to be impaled by one 10' rod than 10 1' rods. And those clearly look like they're going through him. Also in that article: "Last year, a construction worker miraculously survived after he was electrocuted, thrown from his workstation and then impaled through the anus by a four-foot steel bar." Not only will they kill us, they're rape us as well. Not what I was expecting.
I'm also absolutely sure being able to make people's faces from scratch will totally not be used for evil.
Science has now proven that dolphins are even worse degenerates than we already knew: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...o-use-toxic-pufferfish-to-get-high-180948219/
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/us-navy-will-fire-150-kilowatt-laser-on.html Even the Arleigh-Burke's propulsion system is putting out 78 MW of energy and their electric powerplant is at 7,5 MW. The Oasis-class ships have a powerplant with 97 MW electric capacity. 2025 US Navy will have laser weapon systems in excess of 1 MW. I just read of a German weapon system of 50 kW that was able to cut 15mm steel girder from 1km range. I also read that typical atmospheric efficiency tends to be from 70% to 90% for the types of lasers used for military purposes. Lasers are coming. Also, as a general reminder: - Laser cannot be deflecter or mirrored away - All surfaces will rapidly absorb the energy and heat rapidly, even if the surface had reflective ability the reflection is based on absorption and then emission of the energy - As massive amount of energy is absorbed the surface, regardless of material, is vaporized, with sufficient energy it is immediately converted to plasma - Having a large ball of superheated plasma appear on your surface results in explosion - The explosion itself will send a shockwave through the material that was hit, with sufficiently energetic explosion the shockwave itself can damage the structure of the material it is passing through - The shockwave eventually reaches the end of the material at which point if it still carries enough energy it can cause a secondary explosion and spalling - Even if your laser doesnt' damage it's target it can make it glow fiercely, lighting it up on your sensors - Even if your laser doesn't damage the hull it can jam or even damage enemy sensors -------- With sufficiently powerful laser attack it is possible to trigger a fusion reaction, in a sense turning the target surface into fusion bomb - The fusion reaction triggered by laser will be incredibly clean - There would be no EMP
Slight edit, some of these things are... questionable XD Mirrors would redirect some of the energy but unless they were absolutely pristine (which is kinda difficult to maintain outside of a vacuum) any particulates on the surface are going to create imperfections which will create larger imperfections as they're burned away etc... until mirror becomes just glass/metal becomes molten soup. However if you had a mirrored surface that could withstand the heat of the sun beating down on it, you could totally Captain America that laser. One could also use a lens, or an array of lenses to disperse the energy of the beam over a wider area but again, efficiency is going to bleed some of that energy into your lens material. Water is the best option but difficult to produce in sufficient volume with pinpoint accuracy on demand. Plasma is a wildly misunderstood term not entirely at the fault of Hollywood but certainly they've got some of the blame. Primarily this is due to the fact that it is a very broad spectrum term that is used, sometimes inappropriately, for a lot of different circumstances. Plasma, even superheated is not by itself inherently explosive, being superheated does impart the substance with a significant amount of energy, but does not necessarily generate explosive force. Typically what causes plasma to explode are the elemental compounds of which it is comprised. Odds are as we develop laser weapons this will become a thing, but as we learn how elements react under these conditions armor will be adjusted to minimize or eliminate entirely this concern. Assuming it occurs at all with current armor types. Most of your laser generated explosions however will undoubtedly be from tertiary sources, propellants, fuels and existing explosive compounds. Unless there is a massive breakthrough in energy conversion I doubt we'll be seeing a petawatt laser with a significant range to create a nuclear event anywhere you'd want to generate one that wasn't a controlled event for energy harnessing purposes. Not to mention the necessity for two of them to create the 3 billlion degree temperature point to begin the cascade.
The problem with any mirror is not the efficiency, which can go to 99.99% or even greater values, but the material limitations which mean that the highest efficiency is only ever reached within a given specific wavelength and drastically drops from there - so being hit by 1 MW and having 99.99% means 10kW is still getting through on that optimal wavelength - but if the wavelength happens to be well outside the optimum you are suddenly getting easily 100kW, 300kW or more absorbed and then what you said - loss of reflectivity - occurs rapidly across all wavelengths. The only sure ways are either knowing exactly the wavelength available to enemy and indeed them not having multiple or using gravitic effects, which has no combat implications, unless you could somehow use a mechanism like Kugelblitz for defense, such as a very low diameter cylindrical craft having a wormhole for defense at the front? In space low density materials are a great defense against most types of attacks, laser included, you're essentially relying on the diffusion caused by the material being vaporized to obscure you further and reduce the effectiveness of the laser attacks, in a sense the more you get hit the less effective the attacks become temporarily. The point stands - you cannot simply find an easy way of shielding your things against electromagnetic radiation. Especially when it starts to go towards X-Ray and gammaray wavelength it becomes increasingly impossible to mirror it away at all. There are X-Ray mirrors but they are not that efficient. Ultimately there is no "I'm just going to coat myself with mirrors". They will not provide a good defense against lasers and they will likely make you incredibly easy to spot on radar. Heat is simply a measure of the amount of energy contained within a system. Pumping energy into a system increases the pressure if the volume stays the same. When a part of armor is turned into plasma it will have tremendous pressure that needs to be evened out explosively. With lower powered laser weapons the explosion can be either very small in size and effect or it can be so spread in time that it cannot be regarded as an explosion. The point was that if you hit something like a tank armor with sufficiently powerful laser the laser pulse will not penetrate the tank but it will still deliver the energy into the armor and the area in the immediate vicinity of the impacted spot. With sufficient power levels this can cause a very potent explosion that can be forceful enough to tear the rest of the armor and the tank along with it into shreds. This is all a result of the energy transfer; the primary effect here would be the immense amount of energy transferred - increase in heat - and not the chemical reactions themselves. There is nothing standing in the way of pumping a megaton nuclear bomb equivalent of energy to a pinprick dot on your enemy or their city - except that within atmosphere the devastation would be arguably much more massive if the energy release was spread over a larger area due to how atmosphere acts to dampen such explosions. Yea, they are testing out fusion ignition with Terawatt range lasers in massive facilities. Just, for what's plausible, someone like the US - if they really wanted - could hire reusable rockets and bring such a facility in space. The technology exists to create a Terawatt class laser system - and I bet if there was the funding they could scale it further up. It's more of a matter of the economic base and the burden on that economy that building and maintenance would put rather than whether it is possible.
With our current technology there's only one realistic way to protect against lasers and that would be electromagnetic shielding, but even that is quite outside our current point of technological capacity for anything more than a theory. With an electromagnetic field of sufficient strength you could redirect the laser without any material at all for the beam to pass through, simply electromagnetic fields. It would also be possible to diffuse or even reflect the beam (though at that point you're talking about an electromagnetic system that is using far more power than the laser itself, it's far easier to divert a string of energy than it is to turn it on itself entirely). At best barring an indestructible surface a mirror would only really give you a moment's protection (even if that moment is the barest fraction of a second.) and is hardly efficient. You'd be much better off armoring yourself up with RCC like the nose of the shuttle, I'm not sure what the maximum thermal protection it provides, but it's known to protect over 1260c. Also, there's a very easy way to shield from EMR, it's called lead XD It's simply not generally advisable to put lead in the way of intense heat as vaporized lead is quite poisonous. Point being that there's nothing actively maintaining the pressure or preventing the expanding material from evacuating outward, in order to generate an explosion from nothing more than heat expansion you would either need some kind of encapsulation or you'd need to evaporate enough material that the resulting cavity can act as a capsule faster than the material can expand. This particular effect is not actually an explosion but the result of rapid thermal conduction in metals, as the metal heats it changes the grain structure of the crystal matrix, if the metal heats fast enough that grain structure will expand faster than the surrounding metal can react causing it to break free of the covalent bonds, effectively creating rents and tears in the substance as impurities and slight differences in the metal heat, expand and contract at different speeds. To the witness, it would happen so fast that it would appear the material simply burst apart (with enough energy), but it is not quite the same thing as an explosion. The main difference is range, we can make obscenely powerful lasers that are only effective over a short distance (and generally most effective at a specific focal point), but to make something that is equally devastating over a long distance takes a lot more energy. Any energy source passing through the atmosphere is expending some of it's energy simply passing through the air. The equation isn't a huge amount when you're talking about a narrow beam of energy like a laser, but it is still present. This means that even at the event that we can focus a terawatt of energy on a single point, we still have quite a ways before we can make that same amount of energy into a viable weapon.
Electromagnetic radiation does not have a charge and is unaffected by magnetic fields. You're thinking of particle accelerators here - they fire charged particles that travel at relativistic velocities close to speed of light and will respond to magnetic fields. But for electromagnetic radiation - light - it is only affected by gravity and every surface first absorbs it before emitting it, there being a moment during which the energy is contained in the atoms before some mechanism causes the excess to be emitted as a new photon. For the dampening effect, that is where in space you can introduce the low density armor - just lots of low density fluff and the lack of density will mean that there's a lot of obscuring going on and not much in the way of shockwaves or explosions. I mean it still explodes away but if you can have 50 meters of armor instead of 50cm it can take longer to get through with just lasers. Which is where the combination of weapons kicks in, low density is easily damaged by low energy kinetic weapons and you can literally throw a plow shed at it and it can carve a huge hole in it, nevermind angular velocity stuff that can shred through a ton of low density stuff in a fraction of a second, dispersing it about. I also made some calculations on published best achieved rates of divergence and I found a beam of 4 meters diameter might only be around 4.2 meters at 1 light second distance with the best published practical existing systems. However when multiplying the distance it quickly became 60m. In atmosphere often the lack of line of sight can be a greater concern than the atmospheric effect.
