Comment on Making Petrified Lightning – application to solar system colonization, global needs and new industries
TheBackyardScientist, Making Petrified Lightning …with electricity? at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7YznIKe7bU
3D printing metal. You can use metal or glass powders, control the current, and randomly choose next points – probably run on Arduino. You have all the skills and stuff mostly. Maybe someone already suggested. You might invent a way for YouTube viewers to work together, combine ideas into workable projects, then you or someone else can build and show results. Offline storage of videos and data can be linked for those who want to study the results. Science begins with observation, measurement, modeling, calculation, calibration, and sharing openly. Thanks for doing this but there are 7.8 Billion people on the planet now, and 1.93 Billion are first time learners from 5-20. You cannot force them all to buy shrink wrapped solutions, and most cannot afford any of the things you are sharing. But you might think of permanently operating experiments where all the data, studies and algorithms are shared globally. It has to work without words, because the cost of translation and then interpretation is too high. Direct sharing of experiences and phenomena, and then tools. If you get that working globally, the high performance computing, supercomputer networks can run the models that are too much for client side solving. The algorithms can be available globally. Universities and many citizen scientist and researchers and helpers can contribute ideas and uses for the data.
I recommend you try the Franck-Hertz experiment with molten glass. Partly because it is cool looking, but electrical conduction in gases and partial vacuums greatly expanded the human technological reach. You can set a foundation for welding, plasma cutting, metal printing, glass printing, high current industrial separation, and many other useful 3D forming methods. I saw a video on 3D printing a rocket, and it was so crude and slow. You could figure out a better cheaper way in five minutes. And putting your great brain to that would create ten new industries. But if you would help your millions of subscribers to work together (most likely not on YouTube, since they don’t seem to understand million of people actually working seriously together toward large goals), there isn’t anything they cannot accomplish, or at least investigate, then find who wants to know, to learn, to create. There are literally billions of people looking for work and meaning on the planet. (and soon more off the earth too). They need jobs, and they will come from new industries that don’t exist now, or totally revising and improving every existing human machine system now.
When the first people start living on the moon and Mars, their most available resource will be the oxygen and metals in the oxides that form the soil of these places. Molten glasses, use AC for melting and DC for separation, hyperspectral cameras for monitoring and control. And molten glass is a “transistor” so rather than gas plasma, you can use solid solutions and molten plasmas. It all works the same way, but the slow pace of molten glass and metals is an advantage for high power controls.
Thank you, best wishes. If you need any help, just write here, and I will get a notice. Please think about that, and tell YouTube, that they too can support and encourage and enable communities of people – working and designing together. But it has to be open, auditable, fair to all, and NOT gamed or used by them to benefit a few. That fairness and openness I think they might be toying with, but they are afraid to try it. Google has not seriously addressed the needs of all people, nor their global responsibility. The first trillion dollar industries are forming now (I can see most everything on the Internet) and the only ones that will be sustainable are the ones that are both accessible to all and fair to all, and efficient in helping the millions and billions to work together on common projects that evolve from collaborations..
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
