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If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous

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What is that in firecrackers?

Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.

Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!

Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.

The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/

I don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.

There’s Anatoli Bugorski [1] who accidentally put his head into the path of a high energy proton beam.

The injury resembled nothing like being hit by tennis balls.

> He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.

He’s still alive today, age 83.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

Oh my god i never read this thats so cool

Which kind of mosquito? European or Asian?

E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.

indeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale)

indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations

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

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

8 minutes to do a mere 1AU. Pretty slow.

(not /s for clarification)

499.004783836 seconds. So, more like 8.32. I initially looked it up because I misremembered AU being a diameter rather than a radius.

> c^2 is a big number.

Famous tweet about conversations with God.

[1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219

Except the fine structure constant

Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

When we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an "approximately".

I'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)

It's also the difference between 1lb and 6lbs also, so the analogy isn't perfect. The problem is that once you approach the limits of the average human ability, multipliers can transform something possible into something impossible.

I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before!

(It does depend on where, of course.)

Even though you can't lift the 600 lb object it's still in the correct ballpark for illustrative purposes when dealing with orders of magnitude.

In a similar vein a 20 gallon fishtank and a small bathtub are approximately the same despite that I can't actually fit in the 20 gallon fishtank myself.

Sorry, you're right, I misread the results (wow that makes me sound like an LLM, I'm not, I promise)

It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable

It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway

But we have to reroute power from life support because auxiliary systems are down!

Only on the unoccupied decks!

What about the brig?

It's just Wesley in there, no big

Try reversing the polarity

If it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies for the redundancies.

None of it matters if the controls aren’t responding. You’ll know, too, because they make that sad static beepy noise like some sort of Tactile Control Panel ACKnowledgement failure.

Well, in a crunch I wouldn't like to be caught without a secondary backup.

I’m betting they sprung for the cheaper Cardassian ones without the redundancies. O’Brien is not going to be happy.

He does feel more comfortable having those Federation tertiary backups in case.

Considering all the weird encounters Star Fleet vessels encounter over the run of a TV series; who can blame him?

If all else fails, at least we always have artificial gravity!

For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton?

For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...

Chicxulub impact estimated 300 ZJ, zetta being 10^21 giving us 10^23 and 10^-10. Avogadro's constant is 6×10^23.

So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.

I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).

According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.

That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.

*184, a particle annihilates with its antiparticle and both of them are converted into energy, so 92 antiprotons will also destroy 92 standard protons. but yes, C^2 is a very big number

Baby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the night sky

Or a warp core!

It was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.

Traveling the cosmos by folding space is recommended to avoid these types of issues, because "The Spice Must Flow!"

First thing that I did was also to do that calc and I was surprised by how little energy it was.

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