Pew! Pew! Plasma!

But we just want to talk about something else, some science fiction e kind of technology that maybe is not so practical. That's plasma weapons, right, And this is partially because I am still really bitter that I cannot end conversations that I don't like having by sticking a plasma grenade down someone's face and running away giggling. Is it a spider? Get it off? No, it's not spider, it's glowing blue. Is a blue spider? Get it off? It's

for my red versus Blue fans out there. Yeah, so plasma weapons is one of those staples in science fiction. But before we kind of talk about what plasma weapons are, it helps for us to actually think about what plasma is. Yes, here in the reality world, that we live in. Yeah, the place where you and I spend all our time, well, well most of our time, not half and half of our time, Okay. In this world, plasma is one of the four phases of matter, the others being solid, liquid,

and gas. And in fact, plasma is the most plentiful of all these stages of matter. Just not here on Earth, no, not not so much. But when you look at things like stars which are many, many, many times larger than Earth, that's what those are made out of. That's that's all plasma. Yeah, So it's ionized gas. Now that doesn't necessarily mean anything to you if you haven't had a science course in a really long time, or maybe you just haven't gotten to that one yet, since we have listeners of all

ages up there. So an ionized gas means that those atoms that are in the gas are made up of neutral particles. Uh. Then you have ions, which are atoms that have either gained or lost electrons. In the case of plasma, we're talking about losing electrons, and then you've got electron zipping around. So the ions are positively charged, the electrons are negatively charged um, and it's all moving around in this high energy gas. That also means that

electricity can actually flow through plasma. Plasma itself is a conductor. Yes, they're also affected by magnetic fields. Yeah, because whenever you have charges, then that means that it can respond to some sort of magnetic field. We've talked many, many times about the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. Uh, this

is the case with plasma. So if you have a plasma and you have a strong magnetic field, you can actually guide that plasma in a way or or or immobilize it or compress it, which is really important in some of the applications. But we'll talk about the applications in a in just a minute. So, plasma stars make it through huge amounts of heat. I mean you have to you have to really take gas and add energy to it to turn gas into a plasma. And energy

doesn't have to be heat. Uh. You know, for example, have florescent bulbs have have plasma in them, and they are obviously not that hot, so certainly not as hot as the surface of the sun or even an incandescent bulb. So how do we make plasma? So it does require that we add energy, uh, and like you said, it doesn't have to be heat. It can be in the form of electricity, which is what we see with fluorescent

light bulbs. It's also what we see with things like plasma torches, and we'll explain more about how those working a little bit. But um, I want to read this out because I got a little silly when I was

writing my notes. Already enjoyed. I enjoyed this note. Yes, and I don't know what was in my coffee when I started writing this one, but what I specifically wrote my notes was you make plasma by adding energy to a gas until electrons strip free of the atoms in the gas, and you've got ions and electrons having a sub atomic janet Reno dance party. So that's all my for all my Starday Night Live friends out there who

watched in the nineties like I did. Yes, yeah, it's it's it's basically just the nuclei of these atoms and and the electrons all going we yeah, especially if it's something like hydrogen, because then all you have our protons, which are positively charged subotomic particles, and electrons, which are the negatively charged subatomic particles zipping around. Now, uh, plasma does not necessarily have to just be hydrogen gas. It can really be any gas if you add enough UH

energy to it to turn it into a plasma. It's just hydrogen is the one we think of because that's what the Sun is made out of. Sun is actually using hydrogen gas. It's got this this plasma hydrogen that then fuses into helium. And that's the fusion process that we see in the Sun that we hope one day we can harness here on Earth or yes, harness, Yeah,

not replicate. We already replicate it right inefficiently. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, Unfortunately, the amount of energy we have to pour into replicating it is more than what we get out of it. So therefore it's not a good energy source. But it's a pretty light show. We are hoping that we can make the energy source. And if you've listened to our fusion episode, you know what we're talking about. Well, we'll cover it a little bit more in a in a

second too. So, yeah, we use UH an electric current apply to the gas to get that energy that's necessary to make the electrons pop off these these uh atoms, turning them into ions. So in the case with like a plasma torch, you've got these electrodes that create the negative charge when you bring that torch in contact with

positively charged metal surface. So for example, a big old hunk of iron, you complete the right and then that allows the negative particles to move towards the positive particles. In the process, you're injecting the torch with compressed air. That compressed air comes into contact with this incredibly powerful electric charge, turns into a plasma, burns super super hot, and that's what allows you to cut through like a and uh. And that's just one example of how we

use the the plasma here on our planet. Not all of them are so violent that one is actually kind of awesome. There are other uses for plasma torches. We'll talk about two. So when we're talking about a plasma like that, like in the case of a plasma torch, you're talking about creating a a ionized gas there's actually hotter than the surface of the sun in some cases. So how do you contain something like that very carefully? Right,

because if you don't, you just burn everything up? Well? Actually, fortunately, uh, once once plasma gets away from its energy source, it cools down very rapidly. Yeah, because you have to keep pouring energy in to maintain that plasma state. You know with the sun, it's just it's got that heat going for it. That's what keeps it going. Here on Earth. We would have to continue either applying heat or electricity

to maintain that plasma. If we didn't, it would start to lose energy, and as it lost energy, it would start to convert into a normal gas as opposed to a plasma um. And also if we wanted to maintain that that energy and keep the plasma going, we could control it with magnetic fields. Not the band which you know, I love Book of Love, great song, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about actual magnetic fields.

You could use those like electro magnets. You could use electromagnets to control and contain plasma because as we said before, the electrical charge of the plasma reacts to the magnetic field. Right, So if you just create it so that you are repelling the plasma from all sides, you can contain it into a little ball of plasma if you if you will,

or you know, various shapes. It's not really a ball necessarily, but that's something that you would have to do because otherwise it sort of blooms outward blooming is is one of those those terms that can be used in multiple ways depending upon what specific technology referring to. So with lasers, it's slight be different than with plasma. What I mean with plasma is that it does tend to to spread out.

It kind of dissipates. So let's say that you decide that you're gonna hop into the shower, take a nice hot shower, and in the process you're generating a lot steam. That steam will just essentially go everywhere to fill up the volume of the room you are in, assuming that the room you are in is not palatial, and that the steam can eventually cool down enough to condense into water. So, uh, you know, that's that's the same short thing with plasma. It's gonna spread out. It behaves the way of gas.

What it doesn't just uh maintain its shape. So that's why you would need something like a magnetic field to keep it in a specific shape if that was your goal.

And again, if it were spreading out, then that would also mean to be losing energy fairly rapidly, and cooling down doesn't necessarily mean that you want to stand too close to a plasma torch as it's going off, But it does mean that it's not going to you know, when we talk about something that can burn hotter than the surface of the sun, we don't mean that if you turn it on and immediately starts to burn a hole straight down through the through the earth, you know,

a couple of feet away, it's gonna kind of cool down enough that it's nothing. Yeah, yeah, and at least not enough for it to cause massive problem, like a structural integrity problem. That being said that, if you do have a plasma furnace, you have to have lots of cooling mechanisms in place to keep that operational if you're going to maintain a plasma burn. And we'll talk about that in a second. I like that we keep on

hinting the stuff we're gonna talk about teasers. We're actually kind of getting into it right now, so don't worry. It's not like we're holding off that far. So we've already kind of talked a little bit about what we use plasma for. For instance, plasma torches. We talked about that, and you mentioned fluorescent lights, but how exactly do fluorescent lights work, Like what is the the plasma application there.

What's what's happening inside of fluorescent Okay, so fluorescent bulbs are sealed tubes and they inject current into them through electrodes um. They're the tubes. The tubes are filled without with an inert gas, usually classical. They are gone and uh and a little bit of liquid mercury and um. So so when the current flow flows through these electrodes um, it causes the inert gas in the tube to plasma ify um. And I'm not sure if that's a real word.

Is excellent it is right now anyway, it's real enough for me. We are the music makers of dreams. Um. And and when when that when that gas plasma I fis um. The electrons begin migrating through the tube due to this electric charge. Okay, um, this this energy makes liquid mercury gasify. And then those uh, those those little gasified mercury atoms um collide with the argon plasma and the the electrons in the in the mercury atoms start getting excited by these collisions and and jumping up a level.

And now now that this this, this is basically how photons are formed. When um, when something flides with a particle and it gets those electrons excited, it jumps up a level, and then when it contracts back down to its former position, a photon is given off. Right, Because what's happening is you're pouring energy into the atom, which is allowing the electron to move to further out from

the nucleus. When the electron starts coming back into the nucleus, that means it has to release that the energy that was used to push it out in the first place. That release tends to be in the form of a photon. So a light particle on the keys with mercury. Most of those light particles are actually ultra violet correct um,

which which is invisible to the human eye. So it wouldn't be a very useful light bulb if that's all it did, I mean, apart from you know, maybe you wanted to have a wicked black light kind of thing going on, right, And that is how black lights work. Um. But but the the inside of most flash bulbs that are not black lights are covered with them with a powdered phosphor coating, and um this, these these phosphor atoms

get bombarded by the UV photons. Uh, go through one of those fancy electron jumps and in the process release a visible light photon. Right, So you're you're actually having two incidents of the same process going on within a fluoresce evolved. It's just one of them is what is giving us the light that we can see within the visible spectrum and uh and and the other is the more practical from a energy conversion and um. And also, I mean it's stuff like our goon gas is pretty

common and inexpensive. By the way, the fact that there is mercury and floresce involves is one of those reasons why you want to be very careful with fluoresce involves, especially and lick them. Yeah, when you're disposing of fluoresce involves, you need to be very careful because mercury is very toxic. Uh and it can make you go crazy and not in a fun Las Vegas kind of way. Science fact. Yes, So so that's one way that we use plasma along

with torches. Yeah. And and this this brings us actually to plasma TVs because plasma TVs are are essentially um made. A plasma display is made up of a bunch of very small colored fluorescent light right. Um. By altering the kind of phosphors that you're using in a florescent lights coating, you can alter the kind of visible light that comes out of it, right, so what color you actually receive? And uh? And these are are our gp uh green blue red green blue lights. Right. So uh And here's

an interesting thing. So one of the things that you know people who are home theater enthusiasts, and you know they either subscribe to l E D, l c D or plasma TVs. Uh. One of the things they talk about is contrast ratio, which is the difference between the whites that you can display on a screen versus the the shades of black that you can display on a screen.

And if you have a true black, that means that if you were to turn off all the lights in your room and look at your TV, it should just disappear. It should not even be noticedab glowing. Right. If you have an l c D television, chances are is that if you have all the lights off and you have a black screen on your TV and the TV is on, you can actually see more like a re really deep gray color. And it's because it has a back light, whereas plasma televisions do not have that backlight. It's just

relying upon that excitation of the gas. Yeah. There, it's just all of these little pixels of of red grit and blue light that are that are very small and uh, contributing to a larger picture. Right. So when it's when the screen is black, it's because there's nothing active. It's not that you know, there's like a little tiny shield between the back light and you, which is technically what's going on with most l c d s. The shield is very tiny, but it is what it is, uh.

And there were a lot of other like differences between plasma and l c d s, especially early early on. In fact, if you really want to experience the joy of learning about the differences, you can listen to one of the very first episodes of tech Stuff. We're talking like back, I think when it was five minutes. You would have to go to our RSS feed to find it.

But if you went to our RSS feed and scrolled all the way down and then looked a couple of episodes up from the very first one, you would see that Chris and I did an episode all about the difference differences between plasma TVs and l c ds. But in this case, plasma is um you know, one of the exactly what we're talking about, this ionized gas. Now, keep in mind, both with four essence and with the plasma TVs, these are not gases that are burning at

hotter than the surfaces right now. No, they're not. However, our next application will be Okay, well, are you talking about plasma waste converters? Um? I was going to talk about plasma torches, but we can also talk about plasma wast converters, right because we kind of talked about plasma

torches already, did we did? I? I wanted to mention that they they've actually been around since World War Two, when when factories working on military aircraft started adopting welding techniques that they that they realized were um uh, we're much more efficient because they um when when you're feeding that inert gas through through the electrical arc um, it creates a barrier around the world with the with with the airflow and um that that protects it from oxidation,

which is very use well when you're trying to make things stick together like metal, right, especially if it's metal that's going to be under tremendous stress, like poor conditions, you know, like like having salty water being tossed at it. Sure, Sure, but plasma waste converters are a little different. It's using the same technology as plasma torches in the sense that you have a plasma torch at the heart of the

plasma waste converter. And anyone who's listened to tech stuff long enough knows that I'm crazy about this idea because I just think it's so cool. The idea is that you are using plasma in the case, in the sense of a plasma torch to break down the molecular bonds of garbage. So you bring garbage in and the garbage gets exposed to a plasma torch within a furnace. The furnace itself is lined with lots of protective material to keep it at a workable temperature, so it doesn't, you know,

break down. But the garbage itself, when it's exposed to this intense heat, the molecules that hold it together, that those bonds that hold the molecules together rather they break and it turns. It's called molecular dissociation. Yeah, I've dissociated with some molecules in my time, and let me tell you, it's a violent process. And so In this case, what happens is the material breaks down into one of two forms.

Either if it's carbon based, it then turns into gas, or if it is not combon based, if it's not organic, it then melts down into slag. And usually before you would even go through this process, you would actually sort through this garbage, you know, take out anything that's metal

that you could recycle that kind of stuff. And so what you what you're left with is a gas that if you treat it chemically, you could actually make a synthetic fuel out of it, which is one of those promising future fuels that people talk about sometimes, right, And it's not that this is a fuel that would it's not that we would create enough of this to make it our primary source of fuel, but it could help

offset some of our gasoline. Yeah, and or even if you just had it on site, if you had energy production on site along with plasma waste converter, then you could actually generate electricity. Yeah, you can fuel a converter, and if you made enough electricity from the fuel, then it all depends on what the garbage is made out of.

But if you made enough, you could even feed electricity back into the pad so, but then the other stuff, the slag just melts off and it if you let it cool by air, it becomes uh, this rocky substance looks like volcanic glass, and you can use that in construction materials. If you cool it with compressed air, it turns into what's called rock wool, which is very uh effective insulator. Uh. If you cool it by water, it turns into this little pebbly kind of substance that you

can use for multiple purposes. It's just a neat idea, and it's you know, it comes at several different problems

all at once. Energy production, although on a very small scale. Again, it's not like this is going to it's not like it's gonna be Mr fusion, right, it's not gonna power in your car um but energy production as well as getting rid of garbage in a way that it would mean that we turn our garbage into fuel sources and eventually we could even if the if the facilities were large enough, get rid of landfills, we would eventually mind the landfills from fuel plus taken all incoming garbage now.

And this is in a relatively clean way, by the way, because it doesn't use oxidation. In the burning process, You're not you're not actually burning stuff. You're applying so much energy that it just breaks it down. So yeah, it's different from burning garbage and then releasing toxins into the air. Keeping in mind that the gases that you are getting from this process would be pretty toxic in some cases.

But that's why you have to have the chemical scrubbing part where you use uh special You cool the gas down in several in several steps, and once it's cool enough, you then combine it with other gases that will allow the useful stuff to pass through and become synthetic fuel, and the other stuff, the toxic stuff would mind with other agents to become essentially inert material that you could

then dispose of safely. At least that's the ideal. Um. All I've being said really expensive proposition, which is why we don't see it everywhere, right right, But but pretty cool though, um and uh and and this is possibly why people in science fiction decide that, hey, you know this thing where we're literally breaking down the molecular structure of atoms, Yeah, why don't we use that as a weapon? Weapad? I mean, if this is if this is something that

can turn stuff into just gas or molten slag. Wouldn't that make an amazing weapon? And in theory, sure, and that's probably one of the reasons why it's so popular in science fiction. But we'll we'll take a closer look at that before we get into the science fiction e

part and the actual weapon part. Let's take a quick break, all right, So we touched on it why you would want a plasma weapon because plasma is the stuff of stars, and if you were able to wield that in a weaponized way, you would be the biggest, baddest monster in the universe. You were looking at me to see how it was going to end that, weren't you, Because you're thinking, like, there are a lot of words that he could use to in that phrase, and some of them would require

a beap, but I was good. So yeah. It's it's this idea of transmitting huge amounts of thermal energy or heat. So if you think of our traditional guns, the stuff that we have right now today, most of those guns are weapons that transfer kinetic energy. The idea that I fire a projectile at a target, that projectile transmits kinetic energy to the target and that causes damage um. Now, you know, not all guns are that way. We've got some guns that use different methods, like you know, things

that even use things like sonic waves. That's a little bit a little sonic wave, still kinetic. But then you could have a weaponized laser that would be sort of a thermal weapon. Yea more burning, that's true. So the idea I think is that a plasma weapon would be uh, something that would cause damage to your target through massive amounts of heat, kind of the way we were talking

about with the plast and massive amounts of damage. Yeah, so it wouldn't just be like it lights up very pretty, although that's kind of the effect we get with science fiction. So yeah, why are why do we see them and so many different uh implementations in science fiction? I really do think it is because they look cool, and they look cool, and they make noises or whiter or brown noises. You know, it's not pupew laser. It's different from pupe laser.

But for example, we've mentioned this before. Lauren and I both are fans of the Halo franchise, and in Halo, the the alien bad guys, they tend to use plasma weapons. I think, in fact, all of their According to the Halo wiki anyway, um not not all of the weather there that the needlers the one kind of weapon under contention, but everything else that the Covenant uses is u is a plasma weapon, because they talk about plasma rifles. They

talk about plasma pistols. If you want to, Yeah, if you want a new combo somebody, you've got to have a plasma pistol and then a human pistol and then

you charge the plasma pistol really good for taking shields down. Yeah, And and that's that's the real purpose of it in the game, right, Some weapons are very good at doing particular things, Like the kinetic weapons are good at hurting people once their shields are down, but they're not so good at taking down shields, whereas the plasma weapons are

really good at taking the shields down. And if you're me, they you could shoot somebody a billion times with a plasma weapon and they never seem to die, whereas I can take a hit and a half and I'm done. Right. Also that I'm really bad at Halo. Let's be fair, I'm probably not hitting them at all. I think I'm hitting them, but in reality, I'm just kind of spinning around, pointing my gun in the air and going within within the Halo universe, by the way, And I find I

found this interesting just because I'm such a Halo nerd um. Uh. Supposedly humanity had tried to create a plasma tank at some point, because you know, because we were in this hypothetical future using um using plasma for garbage disposal and stuff like that, and uh, but it never came to fruition, right, and whereas the Covenant certainly did, as the Wraith, as

I recall, does fire uh giant blobs of plasma. And the interesting thing is that in the within the Halo universe that these plasma projectiles behave in a very particular way. They seem to go straight out from the weapon. They don't. They don't bend to gravity in any way. They do not. So it's almost more like a laser in that sense.

It's like an energy weapon in that sense, but it's an energy weapon where it is a cohesive blob, and in a very slow cohesive blob compared to, for example, the airspace of a of a swallow no no bullet or right, yeah, yeah, the the physical projectiles, like if you're using a pistol. It's not like you can track the motion of the bullet in Halo, right, You just you see whether or not you hit something by the reaction. See a sniper trail. But yeah, yeah, you can see

a trail, but you can't see the bullet itself. You know, you see the evidence of where the bullet was, whereas with the plasma weapon, you can actually track the projectile as it fires across the field of battle. So, and also I wanted to mention that star Chreck a lot of a lot of the plasma cannons, bombs, bullets, torpedoes, beams, um as, some forms of phasers are are also supposedly plasma based. Interesting. Yeah, I think it's just mainly because

it sounds scientific and interesting. And again they you know, when you know that a plasma is an ionized gas and can be a superheated gas, then that tells you, oh, well, you could have this blob of stuff. But it starts to raise some pretty tough questions like could we have a science fiction e plasma weapon? And if not, what, what's the problem? Where where are we hitting the challenge of doing this? And there's a few physics really is the problem it's a big one. So one of those challenges.

We kind of hinted at it already when I was talking about taking a shower. So imagine you're taking that shower and you want the steam to all go into one place in the room and stay there. Really hard. How do you do that? Um? Yeah, it's some people have pointed out, like, think about if you had a gun that could fire steam. Sure, if you were just right there, right where the barrel of the gun is ended, and you've ever gotten a steam burn, it's it's bad. Yeah,

it's bad. You know, if you're at point blank range for a steam gun, that would be bad business. It would hurt a lot. So same thing with like a plasma torch, except it wouldn't hurt so much as you would start to dissociate. Um but uh, but if you get more than a few feet away, Yeah, if you get more than a few feet away, it all disperses it.

It has this blooming problem again that it just starts to that there's nothing holding the plasma into a shape like a projectile so that it could maintain some sort of coherence until it hit a target. So if I shoot a steam gun at Lauren and she's fifteen feet away. She's just gonna sit there and say like, nice smoke machine you got there, idiot, Whereas I'm thinking like, uh, shoot, should have got the other weapon, like the crossbow or something.

This isn't terrible. It's a portrait. You might get a little damp. Sure, So so this is basically uh, Doctor Horrible's friend moist. I think this is pretty much so. Now, granted, with plasma, you're talking about a super high energy gas, and it's not that it would lose its energy instantaneously, but it would be you know, it disperses pretty quickly. So another thing is that plasma tends to be less dense than atmosphere, especially if it's like a hydrogen gas.

I mean that's not Hydrogen is the lightest of all elements, right, So if you were to fire out a blob of hydrogen, the first thing it would do is float up into the atmosphere, assuming that you are firing in an atmosphere and you're not in space. So if I, if if I'm shooting at you in our own real world Halo, and I have a hydrogen based plasma weapon, you're just gonna see my projectile shoot straight up as it's dispersing, so it's just getting it's a blob that's getting larger

and grow and floating up. Meanwhile you're just giggling, and I'm still still shaking my hand unloading your sniper rifle at me um But luckily I serpentine. So anyway, the the this is a problem. You would have to have a super dense plasma so that it would not just float straight up. But that means that it would behave

according to the rules of gravity. So just like an actual projectile, if you fire a gun with a physical bullet and you have a you know, you have plenty of space that that bullet will hit the ground if there's nothing to interrupt its flight. It's going to hit the ground in the same amount of time, by the way, as it would take you to drop the bullet from the height of the gun. So if I dropped if I dropped a bullet straight down, and I had a gun that is parallel to the ground, right, it's not

pointed up in any way, it's not arcing. Uh, And and I fired the gun and I dropped the bullet at the same time, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time. It's just the bullet that's fired from the gun will hit the ground really far away. But that's because gravity. So gravity would would also effect plasma because you would have to have it super dense enough so it doesn't flow in the air. But that means that down. So there's that issue. And then how

do you keep the plasma together? How do you keep it so that it's a projectile. The only way I can think of is that you use some sort of traveling magnetic field that keeps it in that shape. So you would have to have something that could create a magnetic field around your plasma and travel with the plasma projectile until it gets to its target. We don't really have anything that can do that, and if we did, I'm not sure that a plasma weapon would necessarily be

the most interesting thing that we would do with that. Yeah, we might be able to find other ways of weaponizing just that. The fact that we can make a traveling magnetic wave that we could control in so precise a manner as to maintain the shape of a plasma ball, you probably can weaponize that in a much more effective way. Uh. In Halo, the plasma sword is is said to be controlled by by a magnetic field genera that whole the

blades of of ionized gas in that shape. Some people have theorized that a lightsaber is in fact some sort of plasma sword um, Whereas I just say what Lucas said, that it's a magic sword. So with magic, you don't have to have a scientific explanation. You don't know, it's just magic. But anyway, so yeah, you'd have to find some way of keeping that together. That's challenge number one.

So we are nowhere near the point where we would be able to generate a plasma of the sufficient density and then keep it in the right shape and have it act as a projectile. We just don't have that here, So that's first challenge. Second challenge propelling the plasma. How do you get it to go out of the gun towards your target and maintain any sort of speed? Um. I don't know. Maybe again, another magnetic field. Possibly you could use a a very strong magnetic feel to to

repel the plasma towards your target. Doesn't seem like it would be terribly accurate. It's almost like just shoving someone and also also still not I mean, if you can, if you can really direct that sort of Bagnac field you get back into the territory of win. Why we just weaponizing that? Yeah? Or you if you're talking about a plasma where you are generating the plasma by pushing compressed air past electrodes, as opposed to already having generated

plasma and then firing that. If you're making the plasma on site like you would with a plasma torch, then uh, I guess you could have it be kind of like a plasma flamethrower that's as cloth or maybe as doing a quick puff or a vortex of air. Have you ever seen those air cannon that kind of had the elastic back? And then you know, I leaned back from the microphone to visually display that for all of our listeners.

I appreciate that because it told me that you actually understand what it is that you immediately knew what I was talking about, because you were making the universal gesture of this jerk is about to hit me with an air cannon. Um, if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, they're these air cannons. They're sold as novelties. You didn't find them all over the place. I think

think geek has them. But you can use them to fire a puff of air at a person all the way across a room, and that air will maintain its shaped by creating this vortex, the swirling uh motion of air that allows it to kind of be a projectile over decent distances. It does eventually disperse. It's not like it's going to maintain that indefinitely. But you maybe your plasma weapon would create a vortex similar to that and be able to be propelled through a quick puff. But

you know, it's still kind of an issue there. That's how do you do that? If if you were able to generate enough kinetic energy through uh the magnetic field, like you said, why not just make a kinetic weapon rather than a plasma weapon, um, and then finally have the energy that would be required to make a plasma weapon work, right, because yeah, it's you would really need. You would need so much that it really wouldn't be mobile, right. Yeah.

First of all, just to generate a super hot plasma, you would need quite a bit of electricity, and you need a sustainable amount, So yeah, you wouldn't. Any battery that we have that's portable right now would not work. So we'd have to have incredible, like maybe like a little fusion generator and whatever the weapon is. And uh, and then you're talking about carrying around a fusion mom in pistol form. Otherwise you are essentially connected to an

enormous power facility by a cable which is not terribly mobile. No, ums, certainly not fair personalized weapon. Yeah, And and it's beyond just the generating of the plasma, right if we also have to have this magnetic field, that energy has to

come from somewhere. And if we're talking about propelling this plasma in any sort of way that actually makes it a you know, something that's more deadly than the moona nights laser beam, which moves it like one click a second, then you have to find even more energy to make that go forward. At this point, we're talking about so much energy to go into firing one single weapon that again, you could probably use that same amount of energy weaponize

it in a different way that's far more effective. So what we're coming down to is right now, a plasma weapons not truly in the sense of the science fiction

plasma weapons. A plasma weapons not really feasible. It's not not possible with the technology we have, and it's not really practical because again, with that amount of energy we would need, we could probably find more efficient ways of killing each other, all all kinds of more efficient ways, like any of the ones that exist right now, right yeah, so uh yeah, it's just it's probably not a very

likely outcome. I don't think we're ever going to see plasma weapons the way they are depicted in video games and movies. However, that being said, once, once we are all carrying around, say Mr. Fusion maybe, but even then, like, why not just use a laser gun at that point, right, Other than the fact that you want the cool blobby effect, I mean points for style, I guess you can just use a laser gun and Saylor Yeah, yeah, that's how

I would do it. So that makes that there are weapons that exist, either in prototype stage or very early stages now that do have plasma as a component. But it's not like you're firing a projectile of plasma. And one of those is something that we commonly refer to as a lightning gun. Uh. It's because because lightning in fact does plasma ify air around it, right, So in this case, what you're doing is it's it's pretty ingenious you're using a very high powered but very brief laser.

It's only on for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. We're talking about fimpto seconds here. So you you you blast out this this high energy laser, that high energy laser. As it travels to whatever its target destination is, it creates a plasma channel because it's so high energy, that's just plasma ifying the atmosphere between it and wherever the target is. So you've got this

plasma channel. That means that if you wanted to, you could fire off a blast of electricity, a huge electric charge down this channel. And because plasma does conduct electricity, lightning essentially will travel down this plasma channel target, assuming that your target does in fact conduct electricity. So there's

no like like, here's the thing. It's not terribly accurate in the sense that if I'm aiming at Lauren and she happens to be no, I don't know two yards away because these things, I mean, a laser has no effective real range on it as as far as you know, No, that's too far out. Um really kind of line of site is really what theoretically this would work as so

I've aimed at Lauren. I've pulled the trigger, and this this channel has opened up, and the electric blast immediately follows, like almost to the point where it's all to us. It would seem instantaneous, But Lauren happens to be there's a clear line of side. I can see her, and I'm firing this at her because apparently she's really cheesed me off. But there happens to be an enormous tank that's sitting yards between the two of us. Um, it's off to the side, so it's not like directly in

my line of fire. However, this enormous tank is a conductor, and there is a very good chance that the lightning that's going down is going to zap onto that tank, as opposed to continuing down and zapping Lauren the same way that For example, UM, if you're if you're standing next to a very large tree. Um, you know that that that tree versus an open plane. If if you're in an open plane, you don't want to be the

tallest thing in it. If if you're in the middle of a lightning storm, because and if there's a lightning storm and there's an open plane and a very tall tree. You don't want to be under the tree because again it's it's gonna be that. You know, you can't predict exactly where this is going to go. It's a somewhat of a chaotic event now, but but the largest conductor

nearby is a pretty good guess, right. So if Lauren's the largest conductor nearby, first of all, there aren't any other people around, which is tiny, but uh, then she might actually get hit by this lightning blast. Now, to be fair, or the applications that I have seen for this weapon are not meant to go against human targets or even vehicular targets, although that has been uh something that's been proposed. Instead, it's a means of detonating what

is a suspected explosive device. So the idea is that you get a safe distance away from the device, you aim this thing at it, and then this blast of electricity hits the device and would then uh activate it or or destroy it, so that you wouldn't have to worry about endangering someone's life. You wouldn't have to try and deactivate it in person, or you wouldn't even have to send a robot to it. You just blast it from a distance, So that's the proposed use of it.

It's really kind of again not as far as I can tell, it's not something that's widely deployed. It's still very much in that sort of testing, testing and waiting for for money kind of thing where it may even be perfectly viable. It's just that you have to get to the point where it funds and then it actually gets into the hands of the people who want to use is it. Then there's something called the pulsed energy

projectile weapon or PEPs PEPs. Yeah, these are often referred to as non lethal weapons, and in fact, Chris and I did an episode on non lethal weapons. If you haven't heard that one, you should go back and listen to it. That we do cover PEPs in that one less more than five minutes. Yeah, this one, this one is one of the longer ones because it was a couple It was like maybe a year or two ago when we did it. So U these PEPs are they're classified as non lethal, but they can be quite lethal.

The idea here is that you use a laser. Again, you point the laser at your target, and the laser is very high powered and it ends up vaporizing part of whatever the target is, whatever it comes into contact with. In the process, that area, then plasma fis turns into a very rapidly expanding pocket of plasma. That expansion is super super fast, and during that expansion you get a couple of things that happen. If it's faster than the speed of sound, then you actually get a shock wave

like you would like a sonic boom. You know, it might not be on the scale of a jet flying overhead, but it could still happen. That would be enough to really knock your silly. But then on top of that, you get an electro magnetic pulse as well, which could be enough to overload your nervous system, right right, It's it's really not the not the heat of the plasma that that you're worrying about in this case, it's the

sensory overload. Yeah. So you would essentially end up feeling a massive amount of pain and possibly be paralyzed for a certain amount of time. Yeah. So it's it's meant to incapacitate the target, and in fact has been referenced as being a weapon that would be used in something like riot control. Kind of terrifying. Yeah, yeah, I mean I mean, for reals, set your phasers to stun kind of kind of weapon is really nifty and Star Trek when everyone is a good guy, um, and they're only

using it on bad guys. But here in the real world is a little bit a little bit, especially since since it is said to cause tremendous pain. Yeah, it's not like it's something that just you don't just don't just go, you know, it's more like, yeah, and then you can't do anything. Um. So yeah, it's but those are two examples of existing weapons that are using plasma in some way. It's just not in the way that

we think of when we think plasma gun. So you know, it's not that plasma is completely useless in the in the weapons field. It's just that it's not directly used as a projectile the way we think of when we play Halo. There is UM. I did read about about

something called a plasma shield. Have you heard about this one? No? Um, It's it's a device that's using a dynamic pulse detonation and um and it's basically a short but intense laser pulse creates a ball of plasma and then a second laser pulse generates a shock wave the way that we were talking about a moment ago. With the PEPs um, it creates a shock wave within the plasma that generates a flash bang. Wow, that would sounds like that would

be terrifying. Yes, yeah, and loud and and very loud. Yeah, and and and that this this also, you know, being being more defensive than offensive. It's meant to disorient. It's meant to disorient and to distract and to allow your forces to either withdraw or to engage in a way that the opposing forces cannot anticipate because they're currently dealing with the fact that their ears don't work anymore. Um. Yeah,

that's scary, scary stuff. And I mean, anytime we talk about weapons, obviously it's gonna be But but I hope that that kind of that was This was a fun one to take another science fiction topic and really look at and say, how could we make this possible? And would it even be worthwhile? I think I think the consensus is it wouldn't be worthwhile in the sense of

a plasma projectile. But there are other ways you can use plasma that are both uh beneficial as in uh they do useful work for us and also scary and that they can make you fall over and go out. Useful and terrifying. Yeah, just like we are. We're useful and terrifying. Yea yay. So guys, if you have a suggestions for future useful yet terrifying episodes of tech stuff, you should write in and let us know our email addresses. Tech stuff at Discovery dot com or find us on

Facebook or Twitter or handle at both of those. Is tech stuff. H. S. W and Lauren and I will scare and terrify you in a thrilling way. Really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has staff works dot com