> Eugene Leitl wrote:
> > [ stellify Jupiter, by Jove! ]
>
> SImple: Jupiter is not dense enough. To stellate it you'de have to use
It is not dense enough for sustained fusion, sure. But though metallic
hydrogen is lacking tritium (which is bred from lithium by fission nuke
primer), it has a fairly high proton density. Otoh lithium deuteride is
compressed, before it is ignited... I dunno, lacking a calculation I
cannot say anything. Has anybody made such a calculation? Hydrodynamics
codes for star simulations should probably be able to do this....
> the Von Neumann machine trick Clarke thought up for 2010, to increase
> the density of jupiters core enough to collapse and heat up enough
> hydrogen for a sustained reaction. After that, you're ratio of hydrogen
> to heavier elements (the ones you needed to make it dense enough in the
> first place) would make Jupiter age quickly, probably with a life of not
> more than 10,000 to maybe as much as 1 million years.
I was thinking about briefly warming one's hands in the afterglow of the
short flareup... (if there is a flareup, that is).
ciao,
'gene
P.S. One even more outlandish way to generate power, would be to create
tiny singularities, then feeding them with matter until their blackbody
Hawking emission maximum moves into the visible range. But how can one
create singularities? The sun is losing about 2 Mt of matter/s in form of
radiation, if we could harness some of it... E.g. concentrating _a lot_
of laser beams on a tiny focus, setting up a particle accelerator in the
solar orbit, imploding a piece of matter by an antimatter shell
(provided, we can generate antimatter much better efficiency than now)