US Air Force Wants To Plasma Bomb The Sky To Improve Radio Communication (newscientist.com) 159
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: [The U.S. Air Force has plans to improve radio communication over long distances by detonating plasma bombs in the upper atmosphere using a fleet of micro satellites. It's not the first time we've tried to improve radio communication by tinkering with the ionosphere. HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska, stimulates the ionosphere with radiation from ground-based antennas to produce radio-reflecting plasma.] Now the USAF wants to do this more efficiently, with tiny satellites -- such as CubeSats -- carrying large volumes of ionized gas directly into the ionosphere. As well as increasing the range of radio signals, the USAF says it wants to smooth out the effects of solar winds, which can knock out GPS, and also investigate the possibility of blocking communication from enemy satellites. [There are at least two major challenges. One is building a plasma generator small enough to fit on a CubeSat -- roughly 10 centimeters cubed. Then there's the problem of controlling exactly how the plasma will disperse once it is released. The USAF has awarded three contracts to teams who are sketching out ways to tackle the approach. The best proposal will be selected for a second phase in which plasma generators will be tested in vacuum chambers and exploratory space flights.]
Re:And I want to remove all cell towers in major c (Score:4, Interesting)
I am sure that radio astronomers would agree with you on that one, as well as oppose this 'plan'
After all, while such plasma will help reflect internal signals, it will also help block external ones,
including signals to most other satellites - seems like a winner (although the effects are very
frequency dependent).
I suspect this is someone in charge of old systems wanting to get more funding for their little
fiefdom without looking at the modernisation of communications, where ionosphere bounce is
rapidly becoming an outdated method.
That and the fact that suggesting military NOT spend big money on any idea they come up with
if bordering on treason these days, right?
Mind you, the HAARP conspiracy crowd will LOVE it, make them even more paranoid ;)
Re:And I want to remove all cell towers in major c (Score:5, Insightful)
where ionosphere bounce is rapidly becoming an outdated method.
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication, which means it's just as effective as when it was first discovered. Your massive satellite/cable network is great for when everyone's playing nice and is OK with a small group of people having control of almost all the information flow, and your ionospheric propagation remains good otherwise.
tl;dr Progress is good, but should not be misidentified nor misinterpreted. 2.
This said, changing propagation characteristics of the ionosphere seems to be a crap idea. Or, rather, it's an obvious idea with consequences that haven't really been thought through.
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Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication, which means it's just as effective as when it was first discovered.
Plasma bomb deployment systems sound like infrastructure to me.
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Or, rather, it's an obvious idea with consequences that haven't really been thought through.
Which is true of so many things, although it's usually politicians having those ideas.
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Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication
So making it infrastructure dependent will be a bad idea, right? Once you start deploying plasma bombs, all device makers will start depending on it. Lower costs, more efficient, etc. If you want to keep the "infrastructure free method of global communication", you need to keep it active and alive.
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Look at the bright side. For the first time, scientists and nutjobs will stand united in their complaint about something.
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Look at the bright side. For the first time, scientists and nutjobs will stand united in their complaint about something.
AGW? If you think they don't have any nutjobs, well... you might be the nutjob.
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I think I saw this movie: https://youtu.be/kAH9ACUL_iI [youtu.be]
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I was thinking Highlander II ....
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Remo Williams plot was more on the mark- it was even about HAARP! And Satelites! And fake vaporware to get tax dollars (the bad guys even blew up the evidence, so that they could claim Remo did it and never have to prove that it didn't work!)
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Geez, I just bought new TVs...looked at and even bought and returned newer LCD ones, event he SUHD ones....just too much motion blur, artifacts..etc.
I finally got an OLED..which is close to my old Plasma...but just isn't quite as cinematic....
Oh well..back to the story...
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Yep, I tried that (good advice)...but still didn't make the LCD image look as good as the Plasma.
The OLED is close...but I still gotta find some guide out there on how to 'tune' the colors and all better.
The LCDs also didn't have the quality blacks that Plasma did...the OLED is very very close.
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The military just wants to be able to do it on their schedule and with more intensity.
Yeah, so it'll be JUST like what the Sun does.
Oh, wait...
Re:China please (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually China will surpass the US in both economic activity, and probably, military spending. You will one day look back upon US hegemony with nostalgia. As counterproductive and clumsy as US foreign policy is, it rarely includes expansion or annexation.
Re:China please (Score:4, Insightful)
They think they're looking forward to it, but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and I can guarantee the Chinese hegemon won't taste so good.
In any case, just having a powerful economy or military isn't a free ticket to global domination, they'd need to work for it and something tells me they wouldn't be unopposed.
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They certainly won't be unopposed. But is the US going to go all-in against an equal to defend Taiwan? How about the South China sea? China will take what it wants from that region if the current regime remains in power.
That's a big "if". If China's economy grows to rival or exceed the US, that implies a richer, more educated populace that might not be happy with their lack of freedoms. An economic decline of any size could send the government into crisis.
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As counterproductive and clumsy as US foreign policy is, it rarely includes expansion or annexation.
Well, lately. Might want to discuss the matter with someone knowledgeable about the history of Mexico.
Or Hawaii.
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Or the Philippines. Cuba. Indians, "Manifest Destiny", Monroe Doctrine, etc. We could go on.
But we collectively like to think that the world has left the 19th century ideas of western colonialism behind.
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Not even in the 20th century.
It's easy to see the parallels between, say, Iraq and Rwanda and Yugoslavia, if you look at each country as one created by colonial powers without regard to the languages and religions and ethnicities of the people there.
After the colonial powers withdrew, conflicts suppressed by the colonizers or their puppet governments eventually or immediately occurred, and you see the civil wars and/or genocides.
"Nation-building" can be a horrific waste.
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Maybe. I also look at the history of Europe and see even "independent" countries at war continuously for centuries. People are generally just dicks. Some blame it on colonialism or religion or a number of other things, but I think tribalism is inherent and something that we need to actively fight.
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Today, that is true. At around 8-10% per year increases, it won't take long to catch up or eclipse the US - which has flat spending. We're talking 20 years at the outside.
Of course, past results are no guarantee of future blah blah blah.
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Unless you are arguing that China will not do this, I don't understand your point.
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I won't miss the incessant "We're number one" that Americans love to preach, when it's clear to the world you fail at so much.
Yeah, that has to get old. Too bad humans, in groups large or small, like to do that.
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I don't worry one wink about the US and China going to war directly - as you say, a nuclear deterrent is a hell of a thing.
But I do see possible scenarios where China asserts itself over large sections of the Asian Pacific region with only token opposition from the US - simply because the US would no longer have the same relative capacity to respond effectively. Why actively defend Taiwan if it means losing much of your Pacific fleet and air force, leaving Japan vulnerable. Why inject yourself into local dr
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
What is the real reason here? It is not as if we have a problem with communication these days. I post this in Europe, people all over the world can read it after a fraction of a second. Bandwith and latency are solved problems too - go download something or play online games.
Cables and satellites work fine. Why make short-lived modifications to the ionosphere, that need to be constantly replenished? If they can afford a set of satellites, why not simply use those as communication relays? The lag is not so
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
There aren't enough cables. The Internet is such absurdly critical infrastructure, and we have only a handful of cables even for the most-dense connections. While the Internet routes around damage efficiently, the amount of time it takes to route around damage is longer than would be desired these days (where an assumption of failure is the norm for critical applications), and a small reduction in capacity could easily be catastrophic.
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Cables don't interfere with each other the way that radio signals do. Technology will improve, but you need a certain amount of separation between the channels in order to get a clear signal. The closer the signals are together in terms of frequency, the more susceptible both signals are to interference from outside sources of radiation.
Cables also have a much more predictable amount of penetration and absorbtion. We know that no matter how wide a wall is, that a cable will or won't go through. With wireles
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If safety critical systems can fail catastrophically, the designer already failed miserably at his job.
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Environments differ, and your knowledge of your mother's basement has little application to a battlefield in Afghanistan or anywhere else with rugged and inhospitable terrain.
That's odd, my mom used to tell me my room looked like a war zone.
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"Sorry Mr. President, we can't move in to take that territory until we run some more fiber, should take a few months at best. I'm sure the enemy will wait around for us, no problem."
Oh wait, I forgot enemies are illusions and humans are all really one big happy family who would never want to kill each other for any reason other than nation states and religion. My bad.
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They would like that shit a lot less if they had to do the fighting.
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> What is the real reason here?
US air force trying to justify their budget?
"Generals and Majors always
seem so unhappy 'less they got a war -"
- XTC
Correction: Senators & Congressmen trying to justify their lobbyist's budget wishes. Far too often, the military has things pushed upon it that it doesn't need or want.
Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already Do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my hobbies is critiquing unpublished authors, and there's a certain group of writers who write post-apocalyptic "gun sci-fi" where it's more important to get the minutiae of gun technology right than it is to get the science right. Their science tends to come straight from other stories. The EMP scenario is sufficiently popular that I decided to spend a weekend afternoon doing the research into EMP that they should have.
EMP is not magic, like in the movies or on TV. It works by physical effects that require energy to be propagated to the affected device, which can be shielded and otherwise radiation hardened. You would need a massive attack that saturates all of near space to take out all satellites from geosynchronous orbits down to LEO. Terrestrial effects are amplified by interaction with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but even so the kind of blanket destruction of electronics we see in TV sci-fi would require many, many warheads. Many small warheads work better than a few (or usually ONE in the stories I read).
So an attack on communication satellites would tend to be targeted at individual satellites or groups of satellites. Taking out all LEO satellites (assuming they can't be shielded) would require an attack similar to blanketing most of the surface of the Earth.
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Interesting. What does an EMP do to a living creature's nervous system, if anything?
Re: Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already (Score:3)
Severe brain damage, to an extent which qualifies them to be a Slashdot editor.
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Rekt
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Real "fate worse than death" shit then, huh?
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Nothing.
Electronic components lying around in their plastic tubes likely won't be affected either. It's currents induced in wires and circuit traces that create problems for vulnerable components. Streetlights for example are very robust, but are attached to very large networks of wires that act like antennas.
Nervous systems use chemical signalling; since this involves the movement of charged atoms across neuron membranes that can be disrupted by relatively high electron currents, but it is not very respo
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Maybe they know something we don't. This setup will allow for an alternate comm path should the current satellites and cables become unavailable. Hams and the government would still be able to communicate. Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
If current satellites are disabled then likely these satellites would be too. An EMP would take them out too. Offering protection to other satellites from solar winds sounds interesting but it still seems like we are missing something from the discussion about what the real objective is.
Current satellites are already targeted by the other major powers. One of the primary purposes of these cube sats is that there are so many, and so small as to make the idea of taking them out nearly impossible.
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Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
You may have it backwards. Hams are known for collecting what are known among hams as "boat anchors"...vintage equipment using vacuum tube technology. Attend any hamfest and you'll see almost literally tons of such equipment for sale/trade. Some of the more recent tube-type shortwave radios ('60s-'70s) are even capable of SSB (Single Side Band) and other modes of operation besides the traditional CW (Morse) and AM voice.
Tube-based communications equipment by it's nature is usually capable of surviving far h
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FTFY.
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Some of the equipment is even capable of ssb, eh? All of the last generation of tube based transceivers from the 70s/80s had the same basic functionality as todays rigs - that certainly includes SSB, AM, CW, digital modes, slow scan TV, and some FM. Even now, most brand new high powered RF amplifiers for hams sold today are still tube based, though solid state amps are getting more popular.
Sorry, was talking to younger people that likely have no clue and think if something uses tubes it's a step above the abacus at best. I've owned walls full of all sorts of old radio gear and used to have a repair shop back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Usually had a table at the hamfests upon which such things as E.F. Johnson transmitters/amplifiers, Yaesu FT-series transceivers, Collins Radio gear, Hallicrafters gear, all the old classics, might be found on any particular occasion, but I almost invariab
Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time the USA fucked around with the ionosphere was a bit of a disaster. Please do not do this again; just leave it alone. Wired article [wired.com]. They are also an object group on stuffin.space [stuffin.space].
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Yes Wired sucks balls. That's why I posted the Wikipedia and stuffin.space links as well.
Should we boycott paywall and anti ad-blocking sites (Wired, Forbes, etc...) completely?
Ionospheric Skywave Propagation at HF freqs (Score:3)
Re:Ionospheric Skywave Propagation at HF freqs (Score:5, Informative)
You can still get near-vertical incidence skywave propagation during the day on the lower HF bands, but these are only good for a few hundred miles and can be subject to a higher than normal noise floor in the summer due to phenomena such as regional lightning.
Re:Ionospheric Skywave Propagation at HF freqs (Score:5, Informative)
I thought Solar UV deionized the skip layer during the day, which is why AM band signals travel farther at night?
No, solar UV ionizes the skip layer during the day down to lower altitudes, leading to refraction of AM band signals from those lower altitudes back to the ground closer to the transmitter than they would at night. At night, the ionized layer is higher, the refraction takes place at higher altitudes, so the signal hits the ground farther away.
There is another effect, too: The higher ionization during the day also leads to increased absorption (attenuation) of the AM band signals at even lower levels of the ionosphere (the D layer) than those at which they are refracted. The D layer disappears at sunset, so absorption by this cause goes away, increasing the received signal strength at distant locations.
The above behavior is for the AM broadcast band (~1 MHz). Above around 10-13 MHz, the situation reverses; during the day, these higher frequencies refract from layers at higher altitudes and suffer less from absorption (the absorption goes as an inverse square of the frequency), so they travel great distances, while at night, there is insufficient ionization to refract the signals back to ground, so they continue out into space and are lost. And above around 20-50 MHz, depending on the state of the sunspot cycle, there is insufficient ionization even during the day to refract the signals back to ground, so one has to resort to secondary mechanisms (e.g., ionization trails of meteors) for long-distance propagation.
Typically, typically. The above is a gross generalization: The effects of the ionosphere on radio waves depends on their frequency, their polarization, their direction and location relative to the geomagnetic equator, the time of day, the month of the year, the status of the sunspot cycle (solar wind), the magnitude of the Earth's magnetic field, the magnitude and direction of the magnetic field in interplanetary space, and eleventeen other factors. Radio propagation prediction software (e.g., VOACAP [voacap.com]) deals in probabilities, not certainties.
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Thanks, great explanation. I used to know much of this, and, not really needing it, forgot much of it. You brought me back up to speed. Plus a little bit about the FM that I never realized.
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All of those things you suggest are either reusable or durable. The military wants something that is neither. They want something they have blow up because that way they get something they can keep buying over and over again, so their procurement guys keep getting their kick backs. Congress persons want something they can blow up because its continuous stream of pork to their district.
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Because when the enemy takes out your satellites you can't communicate anymore. And if you can't command and control, you've lost.
Quite right.. Which is why the Iraqi Army lost two back to back conflicts with the USA. The Command And Control networks where degraded to the point of ineffectiveness within an hour of the bombing starting. They where reduced to passing notes and carrier pidgins which left the front line troops with no backup and no way to coordinate the hasty retreat they so desperately needed.
Yup, seems legit (Score:1)
What could possibly go wrong?
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Buried at the bottom of the article, the real reason for wanting to do this " the possibility of blocking communication from enemy satellites."
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Mr(s) President we have good news and bad news.
The good news is that we now have excellent radio communication.
The bad news is the atmosphere will be be too thin to breath in about 20 days.
on a side note, we had figured out how to achieve ludicrous speed.
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What could possibly go wrong?
Oblig. Morpheus. [youtube.com]
Brought back from the dead (Score:4, Interesting)
This is excellent news if true. Short wave broadcast radio has been in decline all my life and radio hams have increasingly turned to the more exciting fields of digital communications and microwave. If it livens up the bands again then I am all for it. I assume that the objective is to learn how to thicken it up enough to locally cut off communications from space thereby killing the enemies communications network. The only downside might be disruption of radio astronomy, but we should be doing that from the moon anyway.
Re:Brought back from the dead (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Brought back from the dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Although the sun naturally "pollutes" the ionosphere every 11 years in the sunspot cycle and spread spectrum short wave communications is still a major military technology?
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> The only downside might be disruption of radio astronomy, but we should be doing that from the moon anyway.
We should but we're not. We would rather spend billions on killing others then having a research base on the moon. :-/
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> The only downside might be disruption of radio astronomy, but we should be doing that from the moon anyway.
We should but we're not. We would rather spend billions on killing others then having a research base on the moon. :-/
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
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Wanting to get along with others makes someone a nutter?!?!
--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
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If we had the capability to do radio astronomy from the Moon, then we would still want to have the ability to do it from the Earth. That's a pretty impressive baseline distance to be able to perform interferometry using.
Are they serious ?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you're saying there's a chance!
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Yes, especially if they manage to trigger some cascade effect in the van-hallen belts.
I really hope that's a typo. Anyway, "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", called; they want their plot device back. Or "Voyage to See What's On The Bottom", if you prefer the Mad Magazine version.
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The question is whether a tiny cubesat can emit enough plasma to be even *detectable* with radar or other ground based communications (like ham radio). There is very little mass available. I suppose this is a science experiment to characterize the dispersal and recombination of plasma clouds in LEO. That might be useful for understanding natural processes -- or as a prototype for some *serious* propagation enhancement project in the future.
IIRC, there have been experiments like this in the past with sub
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Let me try to quantify it. Ionospheric electron content is measured as a column density of free electrons, where ~10^17 electrons/m^2 is typical (though it can be a factor of a few larger or smaller than this). Given the surface area of the earth, this gives us a total of ~10^38 free electrons. If the "plasma bombs" were made entirely of hydrogen, which was perfectly ionised, they'd need ~2*10^14 g = 200 trillion tonnes of fuel to double the current electron content of the ionosphere.
The people running t
Here is what I think (Score:1)
Some Generals need a plasma bomb exploded straight up their arseholes. Damn people always f$&%ing with nature only thing that is truly valuable.
Bullshit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just put order of magnitude in this plan, and you see this is pure bullshit.
Chemtrails are real! (Score:2)
shame... shame... shame... (Score:3)
Itâ(TM)s ... weâ(TM)ve ... CubeSat â" roughly ... thereâ(TM)s
bling bling bling!
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First, why is this still happening in 2016?
Second, why is this still happening in 2016 on a supposedly technically-oriented website?
Spaceballs episode 1? (Score:2)
This sounds like the type of thinking that would had caused the condition of Spaceballs.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:1)
It sounds simple enough. There's no chance of any problems whatsoever. It's completely 100% safe. Don't worry about it. Everything will be fine. We know what we're doing.
You can't take the sky from me... (Score:2)
But apparently you *can* bomb it.
Cover Story? (Score:3)
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Anybody know if they are still using OTH Radar?
Oh, yes, somebody's still using it. It corrupts many shortwave services from time to time. Heard it myself last month.
Goodneighbor (Score:2)
Living here in Vault 81, I'm pretty sure there's no danger from plasma bombs in the atmosphere.
It's only A Matter of Time (Score:2)
It's only A Matter of Time, 109 days to be exact (nine months and five days) before they burn up the atmosphere of Penthara IV.
Terrible idea (Score:2)
i would rather not have it (Score:2)
Impact Study (Score:2)
An impact study for something like that would take hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, to determine what effect it would have.
There are still people so naive that they believe that we could do no harm so great that it would make the human race's survival difficult and worthless.
Matrix? (Score:2)
Morpheus: We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
On Measurement (Score:2)
10 centimeters cubed = (10 cm)^3 = 1 litre ~= 1 Quart ~= 60 cu. in. ~= 1/28 cu. ft. ~= the bottom half of four 16 fl. oz water bottles arranged in a square.
Just trying to make sure people picture things correctly.
So You Wanted Man-Made Climate Change? (Score:5, Insightful)
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
Why does Damnation Alley movie (Score:1)
come to mind when I hear that they want plasma bomb the atmosphere
unwanted side-effect? (Score:1)
Military "intelligence" (Score:1)