Using stasis very briefly to keep some critical patients from dying while a hospital marshals the resources to treat them could save many people right away. It would also make the lives of health care providers much better by allowing the patient to be put in stasis until the next day so the doctors and nurses who undertake these heroic saves don’t have to work all night long.
And it would certainly help with the hassles of having a pet!
Nuclear fusion for energy has been 10-20 years in the future for about 60 years now. One of the major problems is that the heat and pressure sufficient to crush atoms together so hard that they fuse requires more heat and a lot more pressure than any material in existence can withstand. Therefore, “magnetic bottles” that hold a super-hot plasma away from the material of the fusion plant are the mechanisms used in most attempts. There are also attempts to do it by crushing a pellet of hydrogen under the force of an incoming blast of laser beams from every direction. None of these methods have yet achieved “break-even” energy, though we’re hoping that in the next 10-20 years…
Heinrich Hora is a real Australian scientist who wants to use the ponderomotive force that accelerates atoms (not so much the heating) struck by very powerful lasers to achieve fusion.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/meet-the-father-of-the-hydrogen-boron-laser-fusion-reactor/ The instantaneous power of “chirped” lasers has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past decades and now is in the petawatt range (one laser can emit as much energy as mankind uses everywhere in the world, though only for a femtosecond). By Hora’s calculations, such a laser could accelerate a plasma block of hydrogen to over 1,000 km/sec, which is in the range of velocities occurring in an H-bomb.
Ideally, the accelerated hydrogen1 would collide with boron11 and fuse into carbon12. Carbon12 is extremely unstable and immediately fissions into three highly energetic alpha particles (alpha particles are the same as an ionized helium4 nuclei). This doesn’t release any radiation or neutrons (neutrons, when they strike other elements, often make them radioactive) except through a few reactions which go wrong and don’t fuse and then fission as described above. Even better, rather than having to harvest the energy through a “steam cycle” (wherein you use the heat generated by the reaction to transform water to steam, then use the steam to turn a generator) the positively charged alpha particles can be passed through an electrical field and will generate electricity directly.
Hora hopes to achieve this using one laser to accelerate the plasma block and another to generate a magnetic field that will briefly constrain the plasma so it fuses. Obviously, Stade would make this much easier, but until someone invents Stade, we’ll have to hope Hora’s scheme works.
It would be much better for our planet.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, J. Ralph Davis, Scott, McNay, Michael Scott, Eddie Still, Henrie Timmers, Stephen Wiley, and Jim Youmans, each of whom significantly improved this story.
Other Books and Series
by Laurence E Dahners
Series
The Ell Donsaii series
The Vaz series
The Bonesetter series
The Blindspot series
The Proton Field series
The Hyllis family series
Single books (not in series)
The Transmuter’s Daughter
Six Bits
Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too
For the most up to date information go to:
Laurence E Dahners website
Or the Amazon Author page
