Transcript “The Saturn V in perspective”

Many thanks to Linda for supplying this transcript!

[0:00] “As You Remember It: The Lift-Off of APOLLO 11”: “T-minus 60 seconds and counting”

[0:02] Thunderf00t: You know, risk comes to us in many forms, and sometimes death doesn’t even bother to wear a mask. And sometimes, if you wanna achieve great things, you’ve just gotta accept that dance with death.

[0:19] This is the mighty Saturn V rocket. It weighed about 3,000 tons—almost all of which was fuel. And that fuel had about the same energy density as high explosives.

[0:32] clip: “20 seconds and counting”

[0:34] Thunderf00t: That is, this beast was a barely controlled, 3,000 ton BOMB. Let me just throw that into perspective for you.

[0:45] This, on the same scale, is the B-17 Flying Fortress. It was the mainstay heavy bomber of the United States in early WWII. And it could carry about three tons of bombs to a distant target. And about a 1,000 of these guys could lay waste to a city. A thousand bombers at say, three tons a piece—that’s 3,000 TONS of explosives. That’s about the same energetic content as the Saturn V rocket.

[1:15] clip: “T-minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal”

[1:18] Thunderf00t: And man, [dramatic music] as frail as you or I, ascended ALL the way to the top of this rocket, which was essentially a 3,000 ton BOMB

[1:30] clip: “12, 11, 10,”

[1:32] Thunderf00t: -enough energy to lay waste to a city

[1:36] clip: “9, ignition sequence start”

[1:39] Thunderf00t: -and fully aware, at exactly what they were sitting on

[1:43] clip: “6, 5,”

[1:45] Thunderf00t: -they said, ‘Let’s light this candle’

clip: “4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engine running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff! 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11 . . . Tower clear! Tower clear!”

[2:03] Thunderf00t: And even with all those insane risks, I would’ve still changed places with them in a heartbeat, for the wonders that they saw.

Why cold fusion is bullshit

So why is cold fusion bullshit?

    Firstly you need to understand the orders of magnitude of energy.  Imagine a kilogram of explosive.  Blow it up and you get a lot of energy.  In fact that energy actually comes in the form of accelerated atoms/ molecular fragments, and the pressure and temperature from these is what causes damage.  Okay, so when you blow up explosive you are releasing chemical bond type energy, and that’s typically in the eV (electron volt) range per nuclei.

     Now imagine a fusion type event.  This typically releases MeV (a million times as much energy) per nuclei.  This is why 10kg warhead, when releasing its energy all at once, can give kilotons of chemical explosive equivalent energy.  Bear in mind that for chemical explosive, you have eV type amounts of energy per nuclei (about the energy of a chemical bond), while with fusion you have a million times that.  So you fragments from fusion type events typically have a million time chemical bond energy, and this is why they are so dangerous.  That can make a mess of your DNA and kill your cells.  The bottom line is it really doesn’t matter if your fusion takes place at room temperature or millions of Kelvin, the products still have CRAZY amounts of energy.

    This is why if you really did have cold fusion on your desktop, you would be a gold plated idiot to be in the room while the reactor was running.  This is apparently what our Italian scientists are doing while running their ‘cold fusion reactor’.  However for some strange reason our Italians don’t find any high energy radiation.  This was also the problem with Pons and Fleischmanns claims of cold fusion.  They were claiming to get enough energy out to boil water.  Hmmm well if they had had that sort of fusion energy flux, everyone in the room would have died from the radiation.

Cold Fusion, normally turns out to be a poorly calibration thermocouple.

     This is where the whole thing goes into the category of bullshit.  Fusion is great ‘cos you generate MeV per reaction.  If you don’t have those high energy particles, then whatever you are doing is not fusion!  Even more perculiar is if you wanted to work out what sort of fusion you had going on, the first thing you would measure would be the energies and fluxes of the radiation coming off the sample.  Not only have our Italians not tried the obvious analysis (well how can they when they have no high energy radiation) but instead they focus on the bloody silly metric of ‘excess energy’.  That is they claim to put X energy in, get Y energy out and ascribe the difference to fusion, even though it’s bloody obviously from the lack of high energy particles that its not fusion.  The nearest analogy I can think of its like lighting a firework, watching it generate more energy than was put in, then concluding that the ‘excess energy’ must have been cold fusion.