The Mega Laser

lasers than they used to be. I think that's that's a true fact. When it's something that can be put on a key chain on your keys, I agree, like when it becomes that commonplace. I get the sense that back in the gold Finger era, lasers were this fresh, scary, really original and fascinating sci fi trope, and now they're boring to us. They're what we used to make the cat run into the wall. I will say that I was not aware that this was a thing, although it

makes perfect sense. I saw a video on YouTube recently in which a group of people went to a laser maze where you go into a dark room where there are lasers criss crossing all the room, and your job is to navigate from one part of the room to the other side without breaking any of the lasers. Yeah. Yeah, like in that bad Sean Connery movie. Yes, what are you talk the one that has Jones but going beneath the necessarily arching Yeah, yeah, that is unnecessary. You know

my Mike point to one of those. It's great, is it? Yeah, I gotta try it. My point of comparison, there is actually, I believe the Duck Tails movie in which there's a scene where Scrooge McDuck must infiltrate his own compound and it has a moving laser beam area. Yeah, like a grid of lasers that you have to maneuver through. So they're still I would argue, there's still some life left in the old laser still at this point, but yeah, some of the luster has has worn off. Well, we're

gonna polish off lasers for you. We are because because we're going to talk about the upper end of lasers, the ones that are truly astounding and still kind of terrifying. Yeah, and if you don't agree, you're just wrong. Yeah, that's easy. That's that's that's a factual statement. Okay. But so lasers,

where did they come from? Well, this all goes back to, uh, the early days of radio actually, because you've got to think about the time where you have people who first discover that there is such a thing as electromagnetic radiation, and then they start to figure out how to generate

electromagnetic radiation and to receive it using radio waves. And then there was this effort to study this, uh, this part of physics and to try and figure out, well, if we can do this, you know, this range of frequencies, this range of wavelengths really of radio waves, what if we could aim at trying to harness shorter wavelengths? Yeah, yeah, quick basic physics lesson if if you're not familiar radio waves, visible light, these are all the same stuff. It's just

different wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. So the way that manifests is very different to us. That's the way we perceive them or cannot perceive them is dependent upon the wavelengths and or frequency. Those two are related. Uh So radio wavelengths are long, we can measure those in terms of like meters. Uh. Then we started to learn how to deal with radar, which deals with frequencies that are

measured closer to centimeters to millimeters. And then we started having some really smart people ask some really interesting questions about what else can we do with electro magnetic frequencies and wavelengths? Uh. And one of those businicists was named Charles H. Towns, who passed away in January two um. Actually I remember specifically when he passed because a lot of people started saying he is the in essence, he's

the father of the laser. Although the about that well also we should we should mention and this this is good to say. Whenever we talk about who invented what, it's never as simple as one person coming up with an idea of fully formed It's usually the culmination of years, if not decades, of work from dozens or hundreds of people that lead up to a point where this invention is possible. So we do not wish to suggest that Charles H. Towns by himself came up with all this,

but he pushed it forward. This science doesn't happen in a vacuum except sometimes experiments too. Yeah, and occasionally you get some crazy Einstein who comes up with a fully formed fleshed out theory. Well, I've even seen some debate about that, like people talking about to what extent Einstein's discoveries were inevitable. Would somebody have discovered the same thing around the same time if he hadn't interesting, So the point being that that, you know, we we don't wish

to say that other people don't deserve credit. But Towns is often pointed at as sort of the father of lasers. He was looking at creating precise beams of short wave radiation, um, microwave radiation specifically, Yeah, microwave amplification by stimulating the mission of radiation is what he called it, or or mazers. Yeah,

and uh and it's an acronym, folks. We've brought this up on the podcast before, but you always got to remember, laser is a word now that you spell in lower case letters because we use the words so often in science fiction that that people got sick of capitalizing it. But originally it was an acronym, same same principle as maser as an acronym. Yeah, all of masers also now just a noun, it's just spelled with lower case letters

as well. But uh so, so he came up with this idea for masers, and he built the first working maser in nineteen fifty three. He had some help James P. Gordon and H. J. Zeiger worked with him at the columb at Columbia University, and this was a great jump forward in science and technology. But maser's had limited practical applications.

What do you do with the focused beam of microwaves? Well, you can do lots of different things that that have been useful in science and technology, but not to the same extent that you would be able to create an effect using I don't know, even shorter wavelengths. Yeah. Yeah, So that leads us to Towns thinking about these shorter wavelengths. Now, for a while people have been trying to create a device that could use the far infrared spectrum, but we're

running into lots of problems. It was really difficult to control, to create, to manipulate these infrared wave lengths. And Towns hit upon an idea. He said, you know, it looks to me that these shorter wave lengths would actually be easier than infrared, Like we could skip this part of the spectrum. But once you get shorter than infrared, you get into the visible spectrum, which is the light we

see every day. Yeah, yeah, until you keep going and get to a point where it's even shorter than what we can see, but exactly that it was in the visible spectrum. So he had essentially theorized that we could probably build a device that would use visible light, uh and just skip the infrared part for now, at any rate, And he began to work with another physicist named Arthur Shallow. Shallow was his brother in law, and Shallow ended up

actually cracking the code for creating a working laser. So he created a very long, thin chamber, and he put

mirrors on either end of the chamber. One of the mirrors was not perfectly silvered, meaning that some light could escape through this mirror, and then he would start to pass a ray of light back and forth into this chamber, which also had atoms of some substance depended upon what he was experimenting with, and found that because he was using these mirrors and the light the rays were passing back and forth over and over again, it increased the

chances of them interacting and thus stimulating these atoms, which would emit radiation, and some of that radiation would escape through the partially silvered mirror on one end, and that would create this coherent light, this this focused beam of light,

and thus the laser was born. However, there was another physicist, another colleague of Towns, who had also spoken with Charles Towns about this idea, named Gordon Gould, who was working on the problem himself, and he came up with a name for a device that would do this, and he called it Easier and instead microwave, it's light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. So you had Gould working on this,

and you had a Shallow working on this. Many other physicists around the world we're also working on this problem and making various contributions that would eventually lead to better devices being made down the line. Yeah, yeah, making it practical. Yes. So uh, here's where we get into the contention about who invented the lasers. So already we've got lots of different parties involved. The three big ones that we're talking about, of course, are Towns, Shallow, and Gould, but others as well.

You get to a point where Towns and Shallow were working. Shallow was actually employed by Bell Labs, and Towns was working as a consultant for Bell Labs. Meanwhile, Gould was working for a company called t rg uh it's sort of like a a research and development company. And Gould maintained that he had filed for a patent for the laser idea before shallow And and Towns had um but Bell Labs had been awarded the patent. So there was this big argument about who came up with the actual idea,

and it it waged for decades. I would love to hear the courtroom proceedings that. I mean, if it actually didn't make it to the court or was it legal documentation. Well, the settlements didn't start coming into so we're talking like decades of of legal battles and multiple ones, not just like a single court case. So it was one of those things where it got really ugly. I mean, if you ever want to read about patent wars, this would

be a pretty good one to dive into. At any rate, we tend to look at the this trio in particular as being the physicists who brought lasers into being, although keep in mind, like we said, lots of other people made contributions, some of them very much significant to the successively. Now the main real laser we're going to talk about in this episode is going to be a research laser.

But if you say laser future in the same sentence to somebody dr evil, of course you are, because that that's the way it has largely been imagined in science fiction. Any any future projection of the use of lasers probably has something to do with weaponry. So I was wondering what we should actually talk about this before we get into the most amazing laser on Earth today? What is up with the sci fi depiction of the laser gun or you know, the sort of future laser weapon. Is

there any reality to that? Especially is there any reality to the way it's imagined as a kind of handheld device. Well, it's kind of the most simplistic application of a laser because it's obvious that these things get warm. So so I suppose it's just the easiest thing to to imagine, is like, well, a big one gets really really warm, and then al Durand goes put um. But you know, I want to offer my own qualification of the future lasers.

I have a problem with the fact that every time there is a futuristic movie with laser guns in it, standing to the side, you can see the laser blast, see it traversing like you see like a distinct, distinct dash of light. And really, unless you're looking at it head on, it should be invisible to you. Right. The future is entirely filled with us fog machines. See. It really depends. It depends on it doesn't show up on camera,

but it depends on the wattage of laser. It depends upon the frequency it because that will determine the color and if it's within the visible spectrum whether or not you can see it. And it depends on how long the laser is turned on. Like if you were to turn it on on, like the laser on a laser pointer, and it was a dark enough environment with some particulate matter in the area, it's certainly you could see a beam. Uh.

If it's not, however, you probably wouldn't. Alternately, I would say that everyone in the future is wearing augmented reality contacts and that do kind of the same thing that that television networks do when they're broadcasting football or hockey or something like that over a line to show you where things are happening. Laser battle with the drawings on

your eyes. Yeah, at least at least uh, you know, the laser blaster type stuff in Star Wars as supposed to be uh a blaster in the sense that it's actually projecting something besides pure light, because although obviously otherwise you would never see the blast move from the gun to the target. It would be far too fast. But think about how creepy it would be if you made that sci fi movie a weapon with the invisible kill. Like you pointed, you see nothing, it's actually much scarier. Yeah,

it doesn't quite happen that quickly. Yeah, it's yeah, right, it's it's it would not be an immediate blast effect the way that we see in movies, or at least not anything like that from the technology that we have today. Where is the technology to some of it's in the military. Okay, so when you come down to the handheld laser gun, that's pretty much that's pretty much a non starter right now. And I'll get into y in a second. But there

are multiple reasons why it's not very practical. Um. The big one is that, well, we've got some lasers that are used for military purposes, like actual semi weaponized type lasers. In two thousand and thirteen, the United States Navy announced it would equip the USS punts with a laser weapons system also known as laws L little a WS, and the system had been tested on drones have been proven to reduce a drone to no longer a drone or garbage or whatever. It just made it no longer work.

And uh, it's interesting. So so who found the six commercial cutting lasers? That's yes, that's really cool. I didn't see that. It basically just yeah, stacks six commercial cutting lasers um and in the process finds up using really quite a lot of energy. Yes, yes, in fact, that is one of the big issues. Now, on one hand, they're way cheaper on a purse shot basis than using alternate methods like missiles. Yeah, because the Navy said, hey, it costs US about a buck to shoot this laser

off once. It costs US hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch a single missile that we would launch at a drone typically. Sure, because it's filled with a computer bits and all kinds of other stuff and expensive metals, and light is relatively inexpensive to create. Yeah, it's not that not that bad, but it does take a lot of energy and there are other things you've got to consider, right, if you're going to be using lies the weapon, there are other things that can end up being a problem.

Oh sure, the like the density of the atmosphere, because as we have said many times on the show, air is not thin. It's a soup. And so even the world's most powerful laser, which we will I promise get talking to in a few minutes here um, couldn't shoot down anything so far away as a satellite, certainly due

to atmospheric interference. The very best that I've heard of a laser doing in terms of distance through the atmosphere is a German company called m b d A Deutschland, claiming that it can knock out a drone from three kilometers away, which is a little bit less than two miles. Now, like I said, you've got to use a lot of power. Lauren mentioned this to you gotta use a lot of

power for this laser to work. So lasers are not always terribly efficient, and in fact usually only a fraction of the amount of electricity you pour into a laser gets represented in the power output of the laser itself. So I imagine there's a lot lost just to heat. Oh yeah, that's that's one of the biggest problems. And also just focusing the laser, like using the energy so that the laser is truly focused. That that requires a

lot of energy as well. So you might hear about something like a twenty kill a watt laser, which is incredibly powerful. It pales in comparison to the one we're gonna talk about in a minute, but way stronger than anything you or I could get. Yeah, that's that's like a high end military laser, right, Yeah, so twenty what laser actually needs way more than a wats of electricity for it to run. So wats is referring to the laser,

not the laser output. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about wattage with lasers and a little bit to explain exactly what power output means. But yes, some systems are working on making that power output more efficient, um by creatively amplifying and combining multiple laser beams. For example, Lockheed Martin is working on this spectral beam combining system for the Army that merges hundreds of little optical fiber lasers into one coherent beam, which allows pretty sharp focus

at longer distances. One of the project's leaders describes it as sort of like the the reverse of how a prism splits a beam of light. It instead the system is combining um so that that does let you cut down on the energy wasted in in in heat sink by letting you cool each individual fiber rather than trying to cool one giant system. Yeah, I do look forward to the hit song by Kermit the Frog the laser connection.

They will be based on this principle. Uh So, laser systems also have to use like like the ones the one on the USS ponds has to use multiple laser beams just to be able to to track and fire correctly. Because an energy weapon is going to be substantially different than shooting a missile. I mean, the advantage of a missile might be that if it has if it's very advanced, it might have its own target seeking capabilities some kind like once you've launched it, it can still seek after

the target. With a laser, you need to aim right the first time, but you're projectile moves at the speed of light so well, and you're probably aiming at a moving target, which means and like we said, a laser hitting a target is it's not instantaneous destruction. You may have to have that laser concentrated on the target for a matter of a couple of seconds to follow it. Yeah, and and it sounds like it requires some good guidance

and tracking. And that's exactly right. So one issue Lauren already mentioned the fact about the atmosphere being a just having a distorting effect. Uh. The version that is on the U S S PONTS has three beams. The first beam is just meant to measure that atmospheric distortion so that a computer system can then account for that. For the actual fire beam, the one that's going to dismantle or disable the target, Uh, there's a second laser that

is used specifically for targeting purposes. And then the third laser is the one that actually does the pew pew part that makes the drone no longer a drone. And uh uh these systems are big, Like the one the US SPOTS is quite large and far larger than what any human being could ever carry. Even if you had, you know, like a right, Yeah, you would need essentially a tank behind you that was carrying the whole thing.

And even then, I don't think you would be holding any kind of a mirror, It wouldn't make any sense. You would make more sense for you to have this be a automated system that could track and move with precise moments, because the further way you are from your target, then the smaller degree will matter, like or the more a degree will matter, Like if I change my orientation by a single degree if you're really far away, that could mean the difference between whether I hit you or

I missed by a long shot. Right. Let's say I suddenly had lots of money and I wanted to melt my neighbor's mailbox because that would be funny. Could I buy a kill at laser? No, but you could buy You could buy a pretty decent powerful laser that is far greater than what you would find in a like a keychain laser pointer. Yeah, yeah, something you know in between melting a mailbox and I'm using your cat maybe maybe like putting a pretty good singe mark on your wall. Yeah,

you can. You can get something like a two thousand milliwatt laser, which is more than enough to be able to do things like pop balloons or light matches or even light other material if you focus on it long enough. Uh, These are legal, they're available, you can actually purchase one of them. I don't recommend playing with one because they are dangerous. You would need to wear eye protection and be aware that the beam you are playing with can in fact cause real damage both to living and non

living things. Um, if you want to melt your your neighbor's mailbox, I suggest don't do it. But if you're everman to do it, charcoal would probably suffice. You really need to go out and get a laser. Um, but don't do it is the main message. Uh. Yeah, So there are some commercial lasers out there that we we regular consumers can get our hands on that are definitely you know, they're definitely to a level powerful enough that

they are dangerous you don't handle them properly. But there are really a lot of applications for lasers that aren't just setting stuff on fire. Ruff well, I mean they're yeah,

like like like secret agents, no, Mr bond Um. There are lasers that are used for industrial purposes, whether to drill holes or to cut or to weld lots of different UM means practical means to put lasers to work in that sense, but they're also lasers that are meant to do things that don't involve cutting or burning or drilling and are really it's just the the use of light as a a useful tool, for example, to figure out the distance between two very far apart objects. Yeah,

how about surveyors lasers. Yeah, that's a great example. We use those here where typically what you're doing is you take a a tripod that has a laser mounted to it, You aim it at a reflective surface that is, uh, you know, off in the distance, and when you fire the laser, you have sensors that detect when some of that laser light returns when it's been reflected off of that reflective surface, and by taking the time it took for the laser to go out and bounce back, you

know how far away you are from that distant object. What about something way more distant like the moon, Yeah, you could do that too. So yeah, when Apollo eleven form of surveying, yeah, surveying how far away the moon is? Kind so, you know, we we've known for a while, like in general, how far away the moon was. But when Apollo eleven landed on the Moon, one of the things the astronauts left behind was this funky mirror that

they left on the surface and people on Earth. What they could do is aim a nice powerful laser up toward that that mirror, and same sort of principle, you know, using the survey or tool essentially to measure the amount of time it took for a laser to go from the laser itself, bounce off the mirror and returned back to Earth. You can then find out how far away

the moon was from Earth with much greater accuracy. In fact, it was described as being just a couple of inches or about the length of your finger, Like that's about the level of accuracy. Not that the moon was the length of your finger away, I'd hope not. That would have been a very bad day for us, for for many people, not just the three the three of us know we we probably also would not have had a day because this is we're talking about. That's that's true too.

But yeah, lasers can also be used in medical procedures, of course, and we have talked implicated in the beginning of surgical fires indeed, and uh and on this very show we have talked about how lasers can be used to manipulate microscopic materials like like cells or something like that, to to study them or sort them up, or do other science that starts with S. Yeah. Yeah, there's lots

of science stuff that has falls in the S category. Now, of course, we know the most important future technological application of lasers will be in the continued use of the laser disc. Oh yeah, you know, guys, I did find my capacitance electronic discs that I had as a kid that Yeah. No, I was going somewhere real with this kidding. So no, I don't think laser discs are coming back,

as much as it pains me to say that. But I don't know if you'all ever saw the system that was put together for mosquito hunting, the targeted mosquito hunting system. Oh yeah, yeah, we talked about it in our episode about mosquitoes and the idea there was using lasers for insect patrol. See. I like that idea, but only if you train ants to fire laser turrets and mosquitoes like just having this kind of insect on insect warfare type thing.

I think it's kind of cool that possibly in the backyards of the future or whatever kind of outdoor environments we want to protect from from mosquito infestation, you could just have a perimeter system set up that blasts each mosquito with about the type of laser light you'd used

to read a CD. So essentially, this would be kind of a high tech version of those bug zappers that we used to have, except it would know not to harm other insects insects, and it would also it's not using light to attract anything, it's just zapping stuff that happens to be within that perimeter. Interesting. Yeah, well, we're gonna now talk about the super powerful, crazy laser that we've been alluding to this whole episode and talk about what kind of super crazy powerful science that can do.

And that laser itself is located in Japan, right so, at Osaka University in Japan, researchers have They didn't build a new laser. They upgraded an existing laser, got a patch downloaded that you know you need to before you shut down. Do you want to install updates to this laser. It is a minor upgrade this laser. It's called the LFECTS, which stands for Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments. That's kind of ominous, so it can produce now a new record

breaking amount of energy. But this is also not a laser that you could carry around in your hand or put in a holster. Uh No, it's about a hundred meters long, that's something like three thirty feet and it contains these four beam amplifiers, which I have seen described as something like a very fancy light bulb. Um. I did not read into the technology of how it works, so I can't say for sure. Um, but yeah, it oper it's in a vacuum, which allows it to skirt

around certain issues like like air being pretty dense. Huh. Yeah, so you don't have to worry about the atmospheric distortion. That's a good idea. Yeah. So the laser produces not a continuous beam as you might be thinking about in the lasers you've seen in the past, but it's pulses. It produces a split second pulse of light at incredibly high energy output two thousand trillion watts for one trillionth of a second. So an unimaginably powerful laser beam for

an unimaginably short amount of time. Right, But that two thousand trillion watts, and now that's a number that's hard to grapple with. Yes, but it's going to the thing that's going to be important and interpreting that is the length of the pulse because a what isn't just energy, it's energy with relationship to time. What hour is energy and relationship to time? What When we talk about what's with electronic what we're really talking about is the load

that they require in order to operate. Uh In this case, we're not talking about the load that the laser requires. We're talking about its power output. UM. But yeah, there's there's this relationship with time that is an important part of it. Uh So in lasers, what's are how we describe that optical power output? Um? And we determine that by multiplying the pulse energy of a laser times the repetition rate of the laser, that gives you essentially the

average optical power output. Yeah. Similarly, that that concentration and amplia and amplification and that very short burst are all that the keys to LFEX is super huge output. According to its creators, the device only consumes a couple of hundred jewels of energy to create that burst, which is like what it takes to run a microwave for a couple of seconds or a light bulb. Yeah. Now keep in mind that's so that you can operate this this laser for one trillion of us set. Yes, So it's

it's that's telling you about the rate. Yeah, it's it's telling you exactly saying like, oh, it only takes this much. Yeah, but when you factor in the times, you're like, well, that's like an eternity. If you were to measure the energy that the microwave takes every trillion of a second, it would suddenly see where this disparity comes. Yeah, so what I wonder what would happen if this laser were

left on continuously for two seconds? It would well, it would require two thousand trillion watts per probably require more energy than we could give it, right yeah, probably. Yeah. So like if we look at your your appliance at home, like if you have a five hundred uh you know, kill a lot uh laundry machine, and you leave it

on for an hour, that's five hours. So if we left this on for an hour, would be two thousand trillion killer are two thousand trillion what hours or way more electricity than the entire world consumes in that same amount of time. We're talking like one thousand times the world's demand for electricity Uh, that's only if you were again to add up everything else the world uses for electricity in a in a general like time period. Yeah. They offered a couple of other comparisons about what two

thousand trillion watts is. Yeah, all of which are still kind of difficult to understand. Like a stadium floodlight. Alright, look at a look at the amount of light and imagine the the energy output of a stadium floodlight. Then multiply that by a billion times Again, doesn't really help. Or how about take all the solar energy that falls on London. Now, is that the actual London city or London metro area. I'm thinking that has to be the London metro area because one square mile area doesn't sound

like it's the same as two thousand trillion watts. But what do I know? Uh? And what do you know? Indeed? Yeah, So if you're looking at if you're looking at something like your your little key chain laser, and you're wondering,

how does this measure up? Well, those are measured in milliwatts, and usually just a few milliwatt's, even those super powerful ones I was talking about, the consumer ones that we can get our hands on, Those top outed around like two thousand milliwatts, So orders of magnitude are separating these two things. Okay, so what on earth do you use a two thousand trillion watt laser for. All Right, let's say that you are working really hard to get your

galaxy in order. But they are these troublesome rebels who just cause issues wherever you go. They're on done jan Well that's too far away for an effective demonstration. I think we'll use Aldaron is our example. But they're so peace loving that means it's just gonna be way easier to blow them all. So if you heard a million souls crowd in English and then were suddenly silenced, I apologize. Now we're talking actually about using it for science, not

for destruction. So it's not that's what they always say. Well, it's not currently being installed in a death star or being pointed at enemies over here. Is trying to get him grant. I don't know, man, I don't think that Palpatine like ran on a platform of science. I don't think that's what he was saying. No, he was pretty much. I mean he was orchestrating the whole Clone warst thing.

Remember the movies that never happened. I don't the So what's what's actually going on here is that when when a laser this powerful hits matter in plasma, fizes it, it essentially vaporizes it into an ionized gas that would be plasma. This is the stuff that out of everything that's not dark matter. It represents the matter that we have seen out in the galaxy, that's the stuff of stars.

This this ionized high energy gas. And uh so while while you wouldn't like fire this at a person and then see that person puff away into vapor, uh it would plasma ify the surface where the laser hit. In fact, this is the idea behind certain pain weapons that the military has developed, where the ideas that you direct high energy at a person, it plasma fies their clothing, which creates an incredible sense of pressure and heat and thus is an overwhelming sensation of pain. And it thus, uh

you know, renders them unable to be violent against you. Sure. But but back in the lab, that also is a terrific tool for letting a study plasma. Yes, it means that we can actually create in the lab conditions that otherwise we would have to go, say into the Sun's atmosphere to discover. So like we have a manned mission to the Sun planned anytime soon, nighttime soon? Uh science fiction science fiction films. Aside, we do not have any current plans to visit the Sun up close and personal

with a manned mission. What if we went in the wintertime when the sun is cold? Well, that's an excellent idea. I think we should just do it at night, that's when it's coolest. But uh, now we we This means that we can actually create a a kind of plasma in the lab that we can study that and we and depending upon what material we used to you know, in vaporizing, we can study lots of different stuff and

see how it behaves, what are its various attributes. This will tell us a lot more about how stars work. It will tell us about more about their lifespans, like how stars evolve over time, giving us a greater understanding of stuff that we we know bits and pieces about. We know a lot about stars, but this will give us even more observable data that will let us build stronger ideas of stars and how they operate, and even how the whole universe operates. We we can use this

for for Big Bang related studies, right. Yeah. In fact, there have been a lot of people who have suggested that these sort of lasers could potentially stand in for other massive facilities like particle accelerators, and that you could use a laser to vaporize material and create a plasma that would be similar to the conditions that you would see shortly after the Big Bang, So you could actually observe this this these conditions and get a better idea of what the Big Bang was, you know, what the

the events following the Big Bang were like? Um, and how are our universe kind of formed over time? Okay, but I, like Emperor Palpatine, do not really believe in science. Let me give me something practical that could come out of this, right right, because you know, obviously, if we're politicians and we're going to fund something, then we're going to demand that there will be some practical application, not just we learned stuff we need to make a weapon.

Come on, well, now we're not necessarily weapon, but we could potentially use the two. And in fact, this is the one of the big things that alf X is looking at, is using lasers in our pursuit of creating nuclear fusion. Here on Earth as an energy source. Yeah, as a means of producing electricity. You can get electricity from fusion. Uh. And it's not even it doesn't even involve turning turbines like every other method that we talked about practically with the with a couple of exceptions, I mean,

obviously solar is different. But anyway, Uh, with nuclear fusion, you can generate electricity. The problem we've run into a nuclear fusion is that while we know it works because that's what stars do, that's how the Sun generates the energy that we enjoy here on Earth, it is very difficult to create that same scenario here on our planet because we have to create incredible pressure, we have to create create an incredible amount of heat in order to

start the fusion reaction. And it's difficult to get more energy out of that than it required us to put into it, right, which means that it's scientifically interesting but not practical exactly, Because if you're spending more energy to make this thing happen then you're getting out of it, Then it's a net loss. Obviously, it's a it's a

crappy motor. Yeah, it's you don't want to do that if you can avoid that avoid it, because obviously you could have just used that that starting energy to do something else rather than pour it into a losing system. But there are a lot of different research labs across the world. They're looking at lasers as a way of initiating fusion reactions and seeing if they can create a fusion reaction that does in fact generate more energy than

it required to start it up. And uh leave. It was actually two thousand and fourteen when I heard of the first time that a lab managed to get a reaction that produced more energy than it required to start. But it didn't use up very much of the actual fuel, so it wasn't efficient. In other words, it wasn't a sustained thing. It was one. But it showed that there is at least some prom us that we could get

this to work. And if we can get it to work, that would be a boon for humankind because we would have a clean source of electricity, more than enough electricity to meet all of our needs right now. Although obviously every time we come up with a new way to generate more than what we need, we find new ways

of needing it. But but, but most theories say that this would if we were to crack fusion and really get to work, just based upon the the the basic fuels we would have access to right now, that would last us for like five thousand years without us having to figure out anything else. So that's it's one of the things that could potentially end uh scarcity. Yeah, it certainly could end our dependence upon fossil fuels, and it could end up really helping us fight things like climate change.

Although I mean, obviously there are certain things in motion now that that's happening. Whether we quit fossil fuels today or not, we could decrease the severity of those consequences if we were able to make this work. So there are a lot of incentives to getting fusion to work. Oh yeah, yeah, uh And and really, I we've been joking about it, but I want to hammer home that

this is not the beginning of death star technology. I read a really good blog post by a physics PhD student by the name of Matt Springer who calculated the gravitational binding energy of the Earth a k A, the amount of force that it would take to blow the Earth apart, and he said it was about two point two times ten to the thirty second power jewels, which is a few more than the two hundred jewels that

it takes to run this laser. So, in other words, this laser is not fully operational now, at least for death stares, not for death star purposes. There are a lot of different organizations around the world that are already planning on building either comparable laser systems or ones that would be even more powerful than and this one. So this one, as of the recording of this podcast, is well, it has the greatest power output laser in all of Earth.

It's people bigger about what most powerful laser really means, because there is a time element to operating a laser. But at any rate, uh, it is the one that has the greatest power output per unit of time than any other laser out there. But there are other ones that are going to be bigger, assuming that they get built. The Extreme Light Infrastructure is an organization in Eastern Europe that has plans to build a laser that will be

ten times more powerful than the elfects. So well, yeah, I mean well, I mean if it works for fusion, if it does get fusion to make sense, then this will be a huge practical um improvement in the lives of people all over the world. But even if it turns out that lasers are an important part but not the secret sauce to getting fusion to work, we still

have opportunity to learn so much. And like we've said on this podcast multiple times, learning you can't you can't put a value on learning because you never can anticipate the sort of things that can come out of what you learn. You might be able to come up with something that we cannot anticipate right now, simply because we don't know what we don't know. And that's why I love any sort of scientific endeavor that's purely for scientific purposes,

because it's never purely for scientific purposes. There's something that will always come out of that that will be of some practical use somewhere down the road. We just can't anticipate it. Yes to Hey, I'm just saying I have plans for twenty and in order for them to come about, lasers need to really get on board. That's all I'm saying. So, uh, this is really a cool story and there's plenty for

you to read up on. You can actually see picture of the facility, and you know when you see it you're like, so that's what a laser looks like, because it's enormous, right, it's a huge like they're scaffolding everywhere. Yeah, you're like, yeah, it's kind of like when you first see the large hadron collider and you're like, whoa okay deal for something that's just pushing protons around. This thing

is enormous, so really interesting stuff. And guys, if you have any suggestions about things we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking, some sort of topic that you want to know what is the future of this? Let us know. Send us a message. Our email is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Google Plus or handle at both of those is FW thinking, or go to Facebook. Type in FW thinking in the search bar.

We'll pop right up. You can leave us a message there, follow us, be our friend. We need more of those, and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this topic and the future technology. This is forward Sinking dot com problem, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places