Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from hof dot com. Hello everyone, and welcome
Speaker 1: to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I
Speaker 1: am an editor at how Stuff works dot com. Sitting
Speaker 1: across from me, as always, his senior writer, Jonathan, the
Speaker 1: Seller of Lightning Rods arrived just ahead of the storm.
Speaker 1: Wait seller or seller s E L L E er uh.
Speaker 1: And technically that's cheating because that's the first line from
Speaker 1: chapter one of a book, but there is a prologue
Speaker 1: to that book. But I wanted to use that line
Speaker 1: because it kind of ties into what we're talking about today, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, comes to us courtesy of a little
Speaker 1: Facebook feedback. You and this comes to us from our
Speaker 1: friend Bassu, who says, Hey, Jonathan, our plasma ray guns possible.
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for the next podcast on this. Well, here's
Speaker 1: our next podcast on plasma reguns. But before we get
Speaker 1: into the idea of weaponizing plasma, let's talk a bit
Speaker 1: about what plasma is and maybe some common or at
Speaker 1: least more realistic applications for plasma that that we used today. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so plasma it is the fourth state of matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's funny to me because growing up, um, perhaps my
Speaker 1: my school system was narrow minded, although I don't think so.
Speaker 1: We we learned about solids likewids and gases. Those were
Speaker 1: the three states of matter and that's all there were. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the pronosaurus was a dinosaur exactly. You know, it's
Speaker 1: probably because I would guess it's probably more because growing up,
Speaker 1: plasma is a little hard to grasp. It's I figured out. Literally,
Speaker 1: I figured up, yes, because if you can't, it hurts. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'll the way I figure the best explanation would be
Speaker 1: look at it from the stance of molecular movement. Okay,
Speaker 1: so with solids, the solids are made up of molecules,
Speaker 1: and those molecules don't move a lot. They are moving.
Speaker 1: So even in that granite table that you might see
Speaker 1: that the molecules within that granite table are actually in motion,
Speaker 1: they're just not moving a lot. You can take it
Speaker 1: for granite that they'll stay put. Yes, And then in
Speaker 1: liquids you have a little more molecular movement, and the
Speaker 1: the actual composition of the matter it acts differently. Right,
Speaker 1: So ice is a solid. Water is a liquid, and
Speaker 1: then if you add more energy into the system and
Speaker 1: you create more molecular movement, you can make that liquid
Speaker 1: turn into a gas. And in the gas, you've got
Speaker 1: a lot more molecular movement. The molecules aren't as packed
Speaker 1: closely as close together as it would be in a
Speaker 1: liquid or in a solid, and that's when you've got
Speaker 1: the gas form. Well, plasma is the next step. It's
Speaker 1: when you've added even more energy into that that element,
Speaker 1: and this also tends to strip away electrons ionizing that gas.
Speaker 1: So you've got free electrons flowing through the gas that
Speaker 1: an ionized gas that is plasma. So in a way,
Speaker 1: you can think of plasma is sort of a subset
Speaker 1: of gas, but it's really its own thing because it's
Speaker 1: an ionized gas, Jonathan, it strips away electrons. Are you sure? Well,
Speaker 1: it pushes electrons way out into the outer shells. I was.
Speaker 1: I was going for the joke there they lose electrons.
Speaker 1: Are you sure? I'm positive? OK? No. The reason why
Speaker 1: I said that is because literally this week phil Plate
Speaker 1: the Bad Astronomer, wrote a post about ionizing atmosphere conditions
Speaker 1: and how that creates are the auroras to the Aurora
Speaker 1: borealis and the Aurora estrallis, and he had written about
Speaker 1: how it strips electrons away from oxygen and then later
Speaker 1: corrected himself saying, all right, technically that is not correct.
Speaker 1: What really happens is that the electrons are pushed to
Speaker 1: the further energy shells around the nucleus of the atom,
Speaker 1: and when the electrons come back down to their natural
Speaker 1: energy shell, photons are released. And that's the aurora. So
Speaker 1: that's why I wanted to not do the I'm positive
Speaker 1: off the bat okay okay, Um, you can tell we
Speaker 1: don't we We sort of prepare, but we don't rehearse. Um.
Speaker 1: It's funny too that that we think about plasmas being
Speaker 1: the fourth state of matter, and the way it's uh
Speaker 1: kind of strange because um plasma is far more prevalent
Speaker 1: in our universe, most plentiful state of matter, of all
Speaker 1: matter in the universe, all anything that's not dark matter,
Speaker 1: whether or not that exists isn't isn't totally different subject matter.
Speaker 1: But that's really too many matters. But yes, of all
Speaker 1: the matter that we have observed, plasma makes up. And
Speaker 1: you might think, well, that's weird be because everything I
Speaker 1: encounter tends to be either a solid liquid or a gas.
Speaker 1: I very rarely encounter plasma. Well, that's because you don't
Speaker 1: live on the Sun. I have encountered a couple of
Speaker 1: people who have encountered plasma firsthand, um, more than once,
Speaker 1: because they have been hit by lightning. Yes, and that's
Speaker 1: what I was saying with my quote at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the show. Lightning is something that can create plasmas.
Speaker 1: Where the ways that we can find naturally occurring plasma
Speaker 1: on Earth. The plasma does not last very long. Um.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into that in a second. And I
Speaker 1: would avoid coming into contact with plasma as often as possible. Now,
Speaker 1: there are other plasmas that we encounter. Anything, any sort
Speaker 1: of ionized gas is a plasma. There are some that
Speaker 1: are considered cold plasmas. And by cold, we're talking in
Speaker 1: terms of relativity here, right, you know, it's just it's
Speaker 1: colder than say the plasma you would find shooting out
Speaker 1: of the Sun. And then there's blood plasma, right, which
Speaker 1: is totally different, totally not the same stuff, but like
Speaker 1: a neon sign that's that's an ionized gas within the
Speaker 1: neon is ionized within that sign that technically is a
Speaker 1: plasma it's just not the same quite quite the same
Speaker 1: thing is what we would find, say a plasma cutter,
Speaker 1: which is kind of what I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 1: because plasma cutter, that's something that's it's a tool that
Speaker 1: we use that can cut through really sturdy, thick sheets
Speaker 1: of metal. And it's really impressive if you ever see
Speaker 1: one of these in action, because you might look at
Speaker 1: a sheet of metal and you think that, how the
Speaker 1: heck are you supposed to shape this so that you
Speaker 1: can use it in various applications like building airplanes. In fact,
Speaker 1: building airplanes is kind of where the idea for plasma
Speaker 1: cutters came into play. Yes, that's that's true. And they
Speaker 1: plasma cutters not only cut through metal, they do it
Speaker 1: like butter. Yeah, like butter. I'll give you a topic.
Speaker 1: Plasma Plasma cutters are are really, if you will pardon
Speaker 1: my again over simplification, really really fancy because not only
Speaker 1: are they cutting their cutting very precisely, and they tend
Speaker 1: to uh basically the way they cut through it, they
Speaker 1: do it uh in a temperature so hot that it
Speaker 1: it steals off the metal and prevents corrosion. Yes. Um,
Speaker 1: again that's an oversimplification. Let's get into what's really going
Speaker 1: on here. Sure, So back during World War Two, there
Speaker 1: was a demand for building aircraft very very very quickly. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's that's kind of a problem because aircraft are
Speaker 1: very complex, very large devices. So that meant that, you know,
Speaker 1: you had to find a new way to go into
Speaker 1: mass production. And so there were different experiments being done
Speaker 1: about new means of welding materials together. And uh, some
Speaker 1: folks discovered that if they used a gas and inert
Speaker 1: gas fed through an electric arc, so they create an
Speaker 1: electric arc between a couple of electrodes and they shoot
Speaker 1: gas through that arc, that they could create a very
Speaker 1: effective welding tool. Now, um, so that was sort of
Speaker 1: the basis of the plasma cutter. Now, this was not
Speaker 1: used to cut. This was used to weld, so welding
Speaker 1: different sheets of metal together, yes, exactly so, uh, but
Speaker 1: that that started the foundation. What happened was in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties some engineers figured out that they could actually
Speaker 1: increase the temperatures of this this uh, this plasma by
Speaker 1: speeding up the flow of gas and by controlling the
Speaker 1: diameter of the nozzle. So if they decrease the diameter,
Speaker 1: they're they're making it, you know, narrower, and they're increasing
Speaker 1: the flow of gas and they're pushing it through this electrode.
Speaker 1: It would actually increase the temperature quite a few orders
Speaker 1: of magnitude. Yes, And this is where the idea of
Speaker 1: using this to cut through metals started to come into play.
Speaker 1: And uh, technically, the typical plasma cutter uses the sheet
Speaker 1: of metal that it's cutting as part of a circuit.
Speaker 1: So you've got to think about the parts of a
Speaker 1: of a plasma cutter. You've got an electrode inside of it,
Speaker 1: that's what that's what's providing the the the charge. You've
Speaker 1: got the cutting gas that is inside of it. This
Speaker 1: is the the inert gas that's going to be passed
Speaker 1: through this electric charge and superheated to plasma. And then
Speaker 1: you've got a controlling gas that's around that that actually
Speaker 1: is used to help concentrate the flow of the cutting gas.
Speaker 1: It's it's so you've got the nozzle that's helping concentrate
Speaker 1: the flow, and if you've got a second gas that's
Speaker 1: also sort of pushing against that cutting gas, keeping it
Speaker 1: nice and tight. And then Once you put the the
Speaker 1: plasma cutter against the piece of metal, then that creates
Speaker 1: a circuit. The shock from or the charge from the
Speaker 1: electrode goes to the metal. The metal has sort of
Speaker 1: a positive charge to it the and and we know
Speaker 1: that the negative wants to go to positive, so the
Speaker 1: electricity hits the metal. The gas flowing through the nozzle
Speaker 1: is ionized, becomes plasma and superheats and actually turns metal
Speaker 1: into into molten material at the blink of an eye.
Speaker 1: And that's when you can just start cutting through it
Speaker 1: like it was as Chris said. But yeah, one, when
Speaker 1: you're reaching temperatures of thirty degrees fahrenheit, that's degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: That's pretty hot. And when we're talking about increasing the
Speaker 1: flow of the gas, we're talking this this gas is
Speaker 1: flowing at a rate of around twenty thousand feet per second.
Speaker 1: Do you know how many meters per second? That is?
Speaker 1: Courting on my fingers about six someone's been reading how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. We do have an article on
Speaker 1: how plasma cutters work at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: which is it's a good thing to read about. And
Speaker 1: if any of this sounds familiar to you, guys, then
Speaker 1: you've been listening to tech stuff for a really long time,
Speaker 1: because we did do an episode ages ago about plasma
Speaker 1: waste converters and what a plasma waste converter is. It's
Speaker 1: a really cool application of this technology. It's essentially using
Speaker 1: a device similar to a plasma cutter a plasma torch
Speaker 1: to create this incredibly super hot ionized gas in order
Speaker 1: to liquefy or gasify trash. So, depending upon what the
Speaker 1: trash is made out of, it will either turn into
Speaker 1: a gas because you know what's the plasma has applied
Speaker 1: to it, or it will liquefy uh. So essentially car
Speaker 1: carbon based uh elements, anything that's carbon based within the
Speaker 1: trash is going to gas suffi uh and everything else
Speaker 1: liquefies and um it's you can use that gas depending
Speaker 1: on on what you're producing. You can actually use that
Speaker 1: gas as fuel. And the liquefied stuff, once it cools,
Speaker 1: turns into stuff that looks kind of like obsidian. In fact,
Speaker 1: I have I have a sample of that because when
Speaker 1: I did the article, I visited a engineer at Georgia
Speaker 1: Tech who gave me a sample of this solidified waste
Speaker 1: which looked like it was a volcano rock, which essentially
Speaker 1: is what it is kind of. So anyway, that's another
Speaker 1: interesting use of plasma technology. Now let's kind of talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about the concept of plasma weapons. So
Speaker 1: we had our listeners specifically asked us, like our plasma
Speaker 1: ray guns possible? Um In a word, no, at least
Speaker 1: not with today's technology. And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different reasons for this. One of those is that um plasma,
Speaker 1: if you were to generate plasma at a at a
Speaker 1: temperature that would be considered weaponized. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: you know, hot hot plasma UM. You have the problem
Speaker 1: of heat dispersing too quickly. So, uh, the the ionized
Speaker 1: gas would lose a lot of energy as soon as
Speaker 1: it leaves wherever wherever you're generating it, right, So at
Speaker 1: the point of generation, it's going to be very, very hot.
Speaker 1: So if I were point blank right up against you
Speaker 1: and I pushed a weapon against you and I pulled
Speaker 1: the trigger, then yeah, you're gonna get cut in half,
Speaker 1: or you're gonna have a whole drill through you, essentially,
Speaker 1: But if you're you know, twenty feet away, this ionized
Speaker 1: gas is going to be losing energy at a very
Speaker 1: fast rate, and as it loses energy, it's going to
Speaker 1: revert back to a regular gas and you can't really
Speaker 1: get it to travel very far. And it also disperses.
Speaker 1: So if you were to have the ionized gas come
Speaker 1: out of the end of a ray gun, it's not
Speaker 1: gonna be a ray or a beam, right, It's not
Speaker 1: gonna move forward in a concentrated beam. It's going to
Speaker 1: disperse outward, it's gonna bloom. So in that sense, you
Speaker 1: also don't really have much of a weapon because the
Speaker 1: further away the person is, it's it's just like a
Speaker 1: shotgun in a way. You know, a shotgun shoots shot
Speaker 1: and that shot spreads as it goes out, So the
Speaker 1: further away someone is, the less concentrated the impact will
Speaker 1: be right right, So same sort of thing, except even
Speaker 1: on a bigger scale, because we're talking about individual atoms here,
Speaker 1: not just uh shot. And so that's another problem, um,
Speaker 1: And there are various ways of getting around this. If
Speaker 1: you had a gun that somehow could create an electrical
Speaker 1: charge all the way down to wherever your target is,
Speaker 1: it could ionize the gas immediately around the electrode. But
Speaker 1: in that case you're talking about some sort of superpowered taser. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: if you'll remember, if you think of it as as
Speaker 1: the plasma cutter, you'll remember that in our discussion on
Speaker 1: how it worked, just a moment ago, UM, Jonathan was
Speaker 1: pointing out that the metal that's being cut requires uh
Speaker 1: is is basically charged. It's part, it becomes part of
Speaker 1: the circuit. So if you were shooting at something five
Speaker 1: feet away, for example, UM, it's going to be very difficult.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't circuit. You can't you don't have
Speaker 1: a circuit. UM. Also, you'll remember that Jonathan was talking
Speaker 1: about the gas that's on the outside of the pressurized
Speaker 1: gas that is used to cut UM, that's controlling the
Speaker 1: the cutting of the plasma cutter. Without that, UM, it's
Speaker 1: exactly what Jonathan says. You don't have a real way
Speaker 1: to control it. And you might say, well what about lightning. Well,
Speaker 1: lightning it forks it's not controlled. UM. So yes, lightning
Speaker 1: can can travel a long distance, but it also it's
Speaker 1: a charge. We know that the ground and the clouds
Speaker 1: are charged differently. Yeah, it's essentially a circuit. It's a
Speaker 1: certually that only lasts a moment. But you know it's
Speaker 1: not so if you had if you somehow arranged it
Speaker 1: so that everyone on the enemy's side war of particular
Speaker 1: suit that should positively charge clothing, so that I could
Speaker 1: use this negatively charged electrode to create a circuit between
Speaker 1: me and you. Then I can vaporize you. That would
Speaker 1: be great. So yeah, it's a little tricky. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of other issues with this, but
Speaker 1: there that's not the only way to weaponize plasma. That's
Speaker 1: you know, that's if you were to have a gun,
Speaker 1: like in the Halo universe. In the Halo University, aliens
Speaker 1: have plasma weapons and they shoot these kind of blobs
Speaker 1: of energy, which you know, essentially it's like uh, blobs
Speaker 1: of of superheated gas and they travel as if it
Speaker 1: were a solid projectile and uh like little sunlits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these little energy weapons that can do massive amounts of damage,
Speaker 1: particularly literally to your shields, right against shields. So yeah,
Speaker 1: supercharger plasma pistol and then immediately switched to your regular pistol.
Speaker 1: It's in a great way of anyway. So that's just
Speaker 1: not viable right now. The equipment we would need to
Speaker 1: create plasma is much larger than what you could have
Speaker 1: in a handheld gun and you just wouldn't have those results.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only way. There are other ways.
Speaker 1: Like there's an example, there's a weapon that's been worked
Speaker 1: on by the US government over the last few years
Speaker 1: called a pulsed energy projectile weapon or p e P. Now,
Speaker 1: this creates a uses. It uses a very high powered
Speaker 1: um laser style weapon. So it's not a plasma weapon
Speaker 1: at its at its source, right, it's just create it's
Speaker 1: just firing off energy. It's an inner g weapon. And
Speaker 1: the idea is that when the energy contacts something solid,
Speaker 1: then it creates a plasma. It actually excites the material
Speaker 1: that it contacts with and that's what creates the plasma.
Speaker 1: So the plasma is not contained within the weapon, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's it's just it generates as soon as the
Speaker 1: ray hits something solid. And then at that point what
Speaker 1: happens is the plasma that's generated quickly starts to expand
Speaker 1: because the energy from the ray is continuing to hit it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that expanding plasma creates an electromagnetic magnetic pulse, and
Speaker 1: this pulse is geared to uh kind of short circuit
Speaker 1: our pain receptors. And the idea is that this weapon
Speaker 1: would either paralyze you. It would just make all you know,
Speaker 1: your muscles contract, kind of like a massive taser, or
Speaker 1: would paralyze you with pain. You would feel so much
Speaker 1: pain you would be incapable of doing anything else. This
Speaker 1: is the pain ray that people have talked about. And uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of concern in the International commu Unity
Speaker 1: that such a device would be used not to stop
Speaker 1: a riot, but rather as a divisive torture to h
Speaker 1: to really torture a person if you were trying to
Speaker 1: interrogate them. And of course the whole torture thing has
Speaker 1: its own issues beyond just the technical but that is
Speaker 1: a way that people are weaponizing plasma. It's just not
Speaker 1: using plasma as a direct weapon. It's just part of
Speaker 1: the weapon. And there are other ways as well. There
Speaker 1: are ideas of creating plasma to act as an antenna
Speaker 1: because they can be much more efficient than metal antennas,
Speaker 1: and or even use them in anti missile systems, where
Speaker 1: the idea would be that if you had missiles coming in,
Speaker 1: you could fire beams up into the upper atmosphere ionized
Speaker 1: part of the upper atmosphere so that when missiles were
Speaker 1: passing through them, they would detonate and not land and
Speaker 1: hit you. Um. So those are ways of weaponizing pla SMA.
Speaker 1: That's not not quite the same as having a a
Speaker 1: cool ray gun. You know, you're Q thirty five space
Speaker 1: modulator or whatever it's called. I'm sure. I'm sure someone's
Speaker 1: gonna write and so they know it was a Q
Speaker 1: thirty two space modulator. Sorry, that was the obsolete person
Speaker 1: I thought I've upgraded. Yeah, I'm It's also hard to
Speaker 1: imagine something that shot plasma that would, you know, stop
Speaker 1: at a certain person. So it would it would shoot
Speaker 1: through schools, it would seem really it would, yeah, if
Speaker 1: it if it were really a superheated gas um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were to find some way to
Speaker 1: control it so that it maintained its integrity and could
Speaker 1: travel best just distances, then what would stop it from
Speaker 1: shooting through whatever it was you hit and then going
Speaker 1: moving on. I mean, it would lose energy every time
Speaker 1: it contos. But if you're talking about superheated, if you're
Speaker 1: talking about temperatures that rival the temperature of the sun, UM,
Speaker 1: it's gonna take a while for that to to lose
Speaker 1: enough energy for it to um. If you could keep
Speaker 1: it concentrated like that, it would take a while for
Speaker 1: it to lose enough energy for it to stop, which
Speaker 1: just reminds me of the documentary Real Genius where they
Speaker 1: fire off the laser and it goes all the way
Speaker 1: through the entire laboratory and shoots through the head of
Speaker 1: a statue on the quad. Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's the basis for the whole idea about plasma weapons.
Speaker 1: I think I'm not going to go so far as
Speaker 1: to say they're impossible. It's just that with today's technology
Speaker 1: they are not really possible, and it may be that
Speaker 1: they could be possible but not practical. Yeah, it'll it
Speaker 1: may very well be that by the time we could
Speaker 1: create a plasma weapon, something even scarier is out there.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if there's
Speaker 1: there are further developments in attempting to weaponize plasma technology.
Speaker 1: But really, when it comes down to it, it's very
Speaker 1: useful tech for things in manufacturing and like I said,
Speaker 1: waste management or potentially in waste management. There are very
Speaker 1: few plasma waste converter facilities out there. There are only
Speaker 1: only a couple in the United States, and there are
Speaker 1: a few in Japan and uh, and that's about it.
Speaker 1: But but they have the potential to really change the
Speaker 1: way we deal with waste. I mean they could they
Speaker 1: could actually help reduce landfills because most of them have
Speaker 1: capacity so great that they would be able to serve
Speaker 1: not just the community on a daily basis, but also
Speaker 1: take uh garbage that has already been dumped in the
Speaker 1: landfill and start using that as well. So every day
Speaker 1: it would be using a little bit more of the
Speaker 1: landfill as well as taking care of all the daily
Speaker 1: trash that was generated by the population, plus possibly creating
Speaker 1: energy as a result through uh, through using fuel. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a it's an attractive prospect, but it
Speaker 1: also requires quite a bit of an initial investment. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this was going to be a short episode, So hey guys, UH,
Speaker 1: you're welcome, because a lot of ours have have topped
Speaker 1: over forty five minutes and a few of them have
Speaker 1: hit that one hour mark, so you guys are getting
Speaker 1: off easy today. But that was a great topic. It
Speaker 1: was very interesting for us to research. And uh, it's
Speaker 1: plasma is just cool, not literally it's actually really super hot,
Speaker 1: but I mean just checking it's neat. Yes, nifty if
Speaker 1: you will. So, Guys, if you have any requests for
Speaker 1: topics that you would like us to tackle, let us
Speaker 1: know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled. There is text
Speaker 1: stuff H s W or send us an email our
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com and Chris and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon. Brought to
Speaker 1: you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve Camri. It's ready,
Speaker 1: are you