Oddbean

The only thing needed is much more reliable and dense energy storage. We've already got plenty of tech that can focus a beam on a target, it's just that the power supply is the biggest issue in making a man-portable gun. Or, you go full battlesuit with mini-reactor and go crush some bugs as a space marine.

Yeah that’s the main issue, that energy density. So for 10-20 years of tech progression I assumed better energy density. It’s not the only issue though. Lasers are a lot more fragile than normal guns. Guns get banged around all the time in the field for months and need to be incredibly robust, the electronics and optics of lasers kind of conflicts with that.

The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy https://a.co/d/6PPl61m this is a great book in my opinion it talks about how you can use more and more energy to make energy cleaner and more useful there are many many barrels of oil represented in the super precise clean energy of a laser that's used for eye surgery for example if we had enough energy we could burn coal in a clean way that's actually carbon negative, not that that would make economic sense per se

There’s a deep hole here starting with the speculation around Teslas ideas on the matter…https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-undying-appeal-of-nikola-teslas-death-ray/ If you think about an energy system like nuclear energy where you design to prevent the cascade of exponential energy within that system, achieve critical state (ie boron rod exposure controls neutron levels such input=absorption), it’s easy to imagine how you can get as much energy density as you want in any given system. Hard part is controlling it so it doesn’t blow up.

(populating the #notscifi hashtag with some more images) https://www.sciencehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/nikola_tesla_with_his_equipment_final-1024x773.jpeg nostr:note1v4kmveqapcyv72a075j9amrzdvkdx5fjdex4mgnt63wn2w57v9ns0n6vqm

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