this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Hell, a big enough chunk of any material from the periodic table will do a person in if it's thrown hard enough.
Idunno, a lot of those chunks would be too cold to throw in solid form..
watches as some of the world's foremost engineers and chemists collaborate on a billion dollar project to build a machine that creates solid helium and then chucks it at random passersby
Throw 'em fast enough, they won't have time to melt. 🤷♂️
Napkin math plan: a really big fucking laser. Use aforementioned big fucking laser to generate optical vortices; with the specific intent of creating a brief localized vaccuum state along the desired trajectory. This will require R&D during building. Concept is similar to how lightning works; "ionize" (or in this case, vaccumize?) a path, then send the payload. From there add in whatever condenser you need to generate solid forms of the substance you want to chuck and some kind of mag lev style launch rails to accelerate it into the vaccuum path. Theoretically if you can create an effective enough vaccuum along the trajectory, you shouldn't have to worry about the payload being affected by drag heating in transit.
Possible? Probably not. Would the government give general atomics a few billion to try anyway? Probably
Aren’t they already using lasers to cool down the hydrogen? Or maybe I’m just thinking of atomic cooling for absolute zero experiments.
Yep! To both I think? I remember back in like 2021 there was a paper where some team used lasers to induce radiation pressure in a beam of hydrogen and got it to cool down significantly, but I don't remember if they reached or were shooting for absolute 0. My napkin plan was thinking more along the lines of "optical vortex --> optical tweezers --> OAM molecules in the trajectory out of the way" rather than cooling them down. I'm pretty sure optical tweezers have only been achieved in close range lab conditions manipulating a very small number of particles, so the idea of doing it on enough particles to create a flight path and also at the distance you'd want to fire a projectile is probably unhinged