Strudel asks
So after the recent White House response about Death Stars (well only one) we were talking in the office about how powerful it would need to be to destroy Jupiter (obviously just the power of one Death Star to destroy Earth, right?) and also, if a puny laser won’t work against Jupiter, what effect would deflecting our moon into Jupiter have?
Ah, an easy one.
Most publicity photo sets of the really big telescopes and observatories will invariably include one like the above, featuring one of the telescopes shooting a bloody great laser beam into the sky. It makes for a very pretty and very striking image, but it’s also something that I know confuses a lot of people as they can’t really see why a telescope would need a laser attached to it unless astronomers are harbouring some hitherto undisclosed universal megalomaniac quality that makes them want to turn their observatory into the Death Star. Lasers are not something that fit into the popular conception of an observatory, and the reason for this is that they’re a fairly recent innovation: sticking lasers onto your telescope only really became a thing back in the mid-nineties with the advent of something called adaptive optics.
Joshwah asks
All fields of science have their mavericks: people who are prepared to run against the grain of consensus to deliver a startling insight that changes the paradigms about how we think about stuff. To what extent have mavericks shaped astrophysics, and to what extent to you think that astrophysics has benefited from anti-orthodoxy when compared to other disciplines?
(Don’t worry, I’m not asking that in the quasi-philosophical manner that sends anyone familiar with relativistic physics screaming for cover.)
On the surface of the planet Earth, there is Something. Lots of somethings, actually; rock and water and dirt and metal and air and loads more besides. By contrast if you were to go out into interplanetary space you would find Nothing. Or at least, almost Nothing; even the hard vacuum of intergalactic space has trace elements of Something in it – a few particles of hydrogen/helium per cubic metre, electromagnetic radiation, possibly even dark matter/dark energy if no better culprit can be found for their effects on the universe – but in general you’d have to work very hard to find somewhere with less Something than outer space. If you get into a rocket and blast off into the heavens, you will at some point transition from the Something-rich environment of Earth to the large quantity of Nothing that makes up outer space.
Darren asks
I recently played Killzone 2, and the only thing that particularly stood out to me was the gun that shoots lightning. Besides being the only unusual weapon in the KZ2 arsenal, it was extremely well-realized, and actually looked like it would be functional. Would a gun that shoots lightning actually be possible? And would lightning in general make an effective weapon?
Maxx asks
Mars One – this seems rather ambitious for the timeframe they are proposing. Do you think they will get there? Is our technology at the state that this is actually possible?
Oh god, where to even start with this one.
I don’t know, you go two months without a single question and then three come along at once. Anyway, Glory Be To Smurf, For He Is Awesome asks
So I was watching a program that said we’d dammed so many rivers that it had altered the spin of the earth by a fraction of a second. That got me thinking, firstly on how the hell that made a difference and secondly if there was anything humanity could do to really alter the spin of the earth?