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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

> ...one of them, uranium-241, had never been observed before and that it marks the first time since 1979 that a neutron-rich uranium isotope has been discovered. The researchers also calculated that uranium-241 likely has a half-life of just 40 minutes.

So - If the "hard" SF novel you're writing needs some sort of Unobtainium for its big hand-wave...this discovery probably doesn't fit the bill.

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For that you are going to need something in the predicted "Island of Stability", which ironically is a great name for a hard SF series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

For SF you could also claim that an external magnetic field has a subtle influence on stability and is sufficient to go from 40 day halflife to indefinite stability. This can also be used as an additional critical element.

You dont have to use anything complicated, just accelerate it to the speed of light and the half life will stay the same but we would observe it for significantly longer.

Plus you get to invent portable closed-loop particle accelerators...net win, I'd say.

I was just thinking that theres another way to store short half lives or other perishables, just create a miniature black hole, it will fall for infinity but you could retrieve the item once you stop feeding the black hole energy and it'll evaporate by hawking radiation in microseconds.

Ive been watching too much doctor who and now I want a thermoscan based on black holes for my tea

what kind of shielding would be required to keep all of that radiation from killing you? i still don't trust the shielding on my microwave, so i can't imagine trying to shield the effects of a black hole

There is no safe way to be near a black hole.

If you have one of a "mere" 606 million tons, the Hawking radiation is hot enough to directly include fast moving positrons (and has a luminosity of 1.178 GW), while still massive enough to spaghettify you (370g at 10cm).

If the black hole is lower mass, the radiation gets even more energetic. The radiation from 606 thousand ton black holes (sometimes suggested for Hawking radiation drives for spacecraft) is hot enough the radiation will either include antiprotons, or at least the photons will be energetic enough to spontaneously create them on impact: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/05/14/no-a-black-...

Alas, the way you feed energy to a blackhole is by dropping things into it.

(Yes, there is a well-known paradox/open-problem implied by this.)

Nuclear Isomers are a wonderfully complex landscape of what-ifs.

Cool idea! A million plot possibilities could easily plug into "whoever controls the Unobtainium Handwave Device absolutely must keep the Para-Critical Core Stabilization Magnetic Field Generators super-cooled and fully energized at all times...".

>> Cool idea!

Once upon a time I wondered if magenetic fields influenced nuclear reation rates. Some googling suggested the answer is no, but I found very little in the way of actual experimental results testing it. In more recent times I think I did see one referene to an actual effect but I don't recall what it was. So IMHO this door is clearly open for fictional exploration.

It's generally a bad idea to use an already known substance as Unobtainium, as it forces greater suspense of disbelief for those who know, or can predict, the properties of the substance.

Ice-9, Dilithium, magnetic monopoles, are all much better Unobtainiums.

The first two now have the same problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_IX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium

Sort of, but not in context of their original usage. Vonnegut's Ice 9 predated the naming of the real Ice 9, and Dilithium in Star Trek is not Li2. But yeah, in general I agree about dilithium. It would have been better if Star Trek had chosen a different name.

Indeed. I like that in Babylon 5 they went with "Quantum 40".

SG-1 kinda has the same problem, when you learn that Naqada is 20 km from Luxor and Kelowna is close to where the show was filmed.

Someone, somewhere, always has to suspend disbelief about locations in movies and TV shows, especially TV shows. :)

It's easy to imagine that Naqādah the place was named by the Goa'uld because it had something to do with Naquadah processing or experiments. The expository dialogue writes itself there.

Kelowna is more of a stretch, but I'm betting that someone in the writers' room said "Hey, we already had a Salish episode; if anyone asks, we could just say that some native spirits influenced the names on both planets!" Apparently those people actually were the first inhabitants of that area. So all they'd need to do is connect them to Langara!

Kelowna is just the name of the planet on which Naquadria is found, so it makes sense that it would be a place name.

And it's not like place names and material names are mutually exclusive. Silicon Valley is an example of a place named after an element, and Berkelium is an element named after a place. There are 26 elements are named directly or indirectly after places.

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