Wednesday is my sci-tech day.  With the recent passage of   Richard Garwin,   I'll assess where we are today on the Hydrogen Bomb, for he was the individual who was in charge of building the first one in 1951, at the age of 23.  Yes, he lived to be 97. My only link to nuclear energy is that I twice worked under Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  But this was in the 1970's, and for half a century I haven't done much in this field.  In any case, at LLNL I was with the laser fusion program.  Teller was not only the father of the Hydrogen Bomb, he also was director of this lab, where  John Nuckols  had developed a process to use a laser to produce fusion for power. Teller came to Hawaii in the 70's, proposing a bank of wind turbines at the top of the Koolaus.  This was so long ago that Google can't find that photo, which was on the front page of one of the local newspapers.  While there, I joined him and Momok...

I watched on Netflix last night:   Einstein and the Bomb .   Rotten Tomatoes  reviewers gave it an 83 rating. What surprised me was that while I knew it was his letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that got the U.S. going on the Manhattan Project, security reasons did not allow him to participate in the effort.  The film  Oppenheimer  covers the building phase of the Atomic Bomb, and a portion of it shows  Oppie meeting with Einstein . So I thought this morning, what can go wrong today to instantly eliminate us.  It then occurred to me that a nuclear war between Russia and the Free World would probably be it.   One list  has climate change at #1, nuclear warfare #2, pandemics #3, social media #4, The Butterfly Effect #5, quantum computing #6, AI #7, the death of all bees #8, asteroid impact #9 and alien invasion #10. But climate change will take time to kill us, and there are reasons to believe that we will gain contr...

Our planet is heating up.  How hot?  Says   Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy , if talks with Russia fail, it could lead to World War 3.  So, with 100 Hiroshima-size bombs, the   atmospheric temperature would fall around 2F.   Huh?  Yup, carbon particles will be tossed into the upper troposphere to reduce sunlight, and our weather will cool. 100 Little Boys ( fell on Hiroshima ) actually are almost nothing today.  That one 1961  Tsar Hydrogen Bomba  thermonuclear explosion of the Soviet Union imparted the energy of 1570 times those Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs combined.  Keep in mind, though, that this was only 25% the yield of the 1883 Indonesia Krakatoa eruption.  So nature can be worse. Scarily enough, nine countries have  13,400 nuclear weapons,  all more powerful than Little Boy.  1800 of those weapons are held in high alert.  That was old news, for the latest this year is that number is now...