Doomsday – Maybe sooner than we thought
In May of this year the National Ignition Facility officially dedicated the world’s largest and highest-energy laser facility. This monster, housed in a 10 story 3 football field sized building, contains a cluster of 192 laser beams that, NIF hopes, when all focused on one BB sized ball of frozen hydrogen gas will achieve nuclear fusion, in essence creating a star on Earth.
The good? If–being the key word–they are successfully able to achieve this it will be one of the biggest discoveries of our life times. This would be one of the first effective ways to create more energy than what was used to create it and could possibly solve global power issues in the future.
The bad? Maybe they haven’t seen Spider Man 2. The ‘star’ would have the same mass, gravitational pull and temperature-over 100 million Kelvin- as a star its same size. As you can see from the pictures below they have a special chamber to perform their experiments in which is an improvement to a bionic man with octopus arms and definitely a step in the right direction.
They will begin testing next year with an estimated live date of 2040 unless things go well from the start.
Worst case scenario we find out how black holes are made–just a little too late.
