Re: "Mr. Fusion" (was Re: NANO: Nanonukes (Was: Goo prophylaxis))

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Sat, 30 Aug 1997 21:47:34 -0500

Forrest Bishop wrote:
>
> Eliezer wrote:
>
> >Inertial confinement only operates on a single pellet, the fuse. (Ha ha!)
> >The problem with inertial confinement is delivering enough energy.
> >Quantum-well lasers are something like 10 to 100 times as efficient, and I
> >believe they aren't difficult to construct given nano. Englobe the whole
> >pellet with lasers instead of using one. Then fire. I think that you could
> >probably deliver at least 1,000 times as much energy as in modern inertial
> >confinement. It'd take a gigajoule to set the thing off, sure, but then you
> >have a fusion explosion and you can use it to set off arbitrarily larger ones.
>
> ***Very, very good Mr. Yudkowsky.***
>
> What you have started to describe is a device I
> conceived several years ago and have not published, called "Mr Fusion". This in
> fact constitutes the first public disclosure. And yes, it is very much like
> current laser inertial confinement, except the EMP front is vastly more
> structurally refined. Each laser is individually addressable. It may be possible
> to convert some portion of the released energy directly to electric by using the
> QM well as receivers.
> See "The Optical Assembler" interview at the NanoTechnology magazine website for
> a description of a similar array.
>

"Shotgun creativity... a way of life." (*) I hope this excuses all the missed pellets.

And thanks for the compliment.

But, by the by, where is the NanoTechnology magazine?

--
(*) = A pun.  "Shotgun creativity" is exactly a way of life.

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.