July 1, 2013 • 43 mins
What is plasma and how do we use it? Why are plasma weapons so popular in science fiction? Are plasma weapons realistic?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey what everyone, and welcome to
text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Volkslam. And
today we want to talk about a science fiction ee
kind of thing. This is not our our promised Independence
Day extravaganza. It seems that people are really into the
(00:26):
idea of us kind of taking a movie and just
deconstructing all the technical issues that we have with it.
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
(00:49):
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,
(01:10):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:37):
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
(03:58):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:03):
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,
(05:24):
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.
(05:48):
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
(06:10):
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,
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:42):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:22):
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.
(08:42):
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,
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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.
(09:46):
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,
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:11):
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,
(11:32):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:14):
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,
(12:36):
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
(12:57):
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
(13:18):
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.
(13:40):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:21):
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
(14:41):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:49):
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,
(16:12):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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,
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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,
(18:02):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:44):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:29):
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,
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:53):
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
(21:14):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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.
(22:20):
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
(22:43):
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,
(23:05):
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.
(23:28):
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
(23:51):
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.
(24:14):
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
(24:35):
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
(24:56):
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
(25:16):
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,
(25:39):
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
(26:02):
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
(26:25):
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.
(26:45):
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,
(27:09):
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,
(27:29):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:10):
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,
(28:31):
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
(28:52):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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.
(30:43):
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
(31:03):
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
(31:28):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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.
(32:54):
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
(33:15):
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
(33:38):
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
(34:00):
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
(34:21):
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
(34:44):
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
(35:06):
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
(35:27):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:10):
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,
(36:32):
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
(36:53):
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
(37:15):
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.
(37:36):
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
(37:59):
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
(38:21):
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
(38:42):
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
(39:03):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:46):
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
(40:07):
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
(40:30):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:16):
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
(41:39):
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,
(41:59):
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,
(42:21):
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
(42:42):
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,
(43:03):
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
(43:24):
for more on this and thousands of other topics because
it has staff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey what everyone, and welcome to
text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Volkslam. And
today we want to talk about a science fiction ee
kind of thing. This is not our our promised Independence
Day extravaganza. It seems that people are really into the
(00:26):
idea of us kind of taking a movie and just
deconstructing all the technical issues that we have with it.
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
(00:49):
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,
(01:10):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:37):
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
(03:58):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:03):
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,
(05:24):
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.
(05:48):
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
(06:10):
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,
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:42):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:22):
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.
(08:42):
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,
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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.
(09:46):
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,
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:11):
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,
(11:32):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:14):
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,
(12:36):
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
(12:57):
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
(13:18):
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.
(13:40):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:21):
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
(14:41):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:49):
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,
(16:12):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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,
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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,
(18:02):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:44):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:29):
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,
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:53):
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
(21:14):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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.
(22:20):
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
(22:43):
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,
(23:05):
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.
(23:28):
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
(23:51):
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.
(24:14):
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
(24:35):
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
(24:56):
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
(25:16):
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,
(25:39):
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
(26:02):
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
(26:25):
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.
(26:45):
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,
(27:09):
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,
(27:29):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:10):
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,
(28:31):
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
(28:52):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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.
(30:43):
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
(31:03):
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
(31:28):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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.
(32:54):
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
(33:15):
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
(33:38):
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
(34:00):
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
(34:21):
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
(34:44):
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
(35:06):
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
(35:27):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:10):
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,
(36:32):
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
(36:53):
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
(37:15):
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.
(37:36):
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
(37:59):
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
(38:21):
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
(38:42):
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
(39:03):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:46):
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
(40:07):
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
(40:30):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:16):
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
(41:39):
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,
(41:59):
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,
(42:21):
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
(42:42):
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,
(43:03):
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
(43:24):
for more on this and thousands of other topics because
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