Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

> We are certainly aware of the fact that this kind of device can not only target the nuclear bombs but other kinds of weapons of mass destruction and also, unfortunately, any kind of living object including human. But we should emphasize that the device itself is not a weapon of mass destruction. The reason is as follows: The calculation in section 2 and section 3 shows that it takes 1 second for this device to cover a 1 m2 with the radiation dose of 1 SV. It takes more than a year to cover the area of 10 km2 with this value of dose per unit area. It is extremely unlikely that no measure is taken after a few minutes of exposure of this kind.

I don't get it: it seems to be dangerous for people inside the beam, but it isn't? What kind of measures you can take if a city is aimed to with an invisible beam, probably from space?

Yeah, telescopes can see where the beam is aimed to buy then what? Neutrinos go through every shielding.

What am I missing?

The only thing I can think about is that to build that structure in space you have to be sure to suppress any missile from Earth and to win the war that your enemies will fight against you down here. Those are probably the measures to be taken.

> only thing I can think about is that to build that structure in space you have to be sure to suppress any missile from Earth and to win the war that your enemies will fight against you down here.

Absolutely. There are many technologies where if your enemy manages to create it you are already in an un-winnable situation. For example nuclear warheads pre-positioned in orbit with solid reentry boosters. If you have that you can nuke anyone with seconds of warning. The correct counter to this strategy from your enemy is to kill you before you can implement this plan.

Because of that you will want to sneak it by your enemy. But with this… even that is hard. Surely they will see when you light up this much energy generation no matter how sneaky you built it up? Unless you provide some plausible explanation, like hide it in an active carbon capture scheme or something.

Or you might build it in such a way as to avoid attribution. For example make a very stealthy von-neumann probe launched at the asteroid belt designed to reconfigure matter there for solar power harvesting and build this particle accelerator in-situ. You can disguise the initual launch as a failed interplanetary mission perhaps. And when it lights up pretend you didn’t know who did it?

It's going to take quite a while before humanity will start to routinely build those kind of structures in space, and disguise them among the others as we could do with satellites now.

The preparations and the launch of something that has to build a 1000 km wide structure won't go unnoticed. Add to it all the time it will take to build the accelerator in relatively plain sight for anybody that has a strategic interest to monitor space for weapons.

There not arguing it's safe. They're arguing that after firing for a few minutes at most, nuclear capable nations will have noticed it. Thus, the largest area you can "wipe out" is very small. Compare that to an actual wmd which has an effective area of many square kilometers.

They're just saying it would be an extremely inefficient weapon. You could kill a couple people with it but so could a drone or some deadly gas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com