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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Not the most economical manufacturing process, it has to be said.

The paper explains it more as an experimental process than a manufacturing process. Each granule of hiroshimaite captures a "unique" micro-environment. One could imagine an ethical version of this involving conventional explosives in a controlled environment containing a variety of metallic samples of different compositions.

Metals refining in space or a no atmosphere place like the moon. If an alloy is discovered that has properties we want I can see some future civilization popping nukes like pellets to produce it.

Using conventional explosives is a real thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosion_welding

You can probably skip the town in the ingredient list.

I know you’re joking, but unironically this might be untrue. One catalyst might be something only found in cities!

Granted, you could always replace the city with the catalyst of course :P

There were some nuclear fracking experiments where the nukes cost in the range of a few hundred thousand dollars. It's probably cheaper than you think.

The real expense is in rebuilding the city every cycle

It's more of an exploration technique.

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening which is also based on randomness.

It might be a bit tough getting the permits from the EPA.

Call it the Cheeto in Charge Manufacturing Center and you'll get a fastpass

Well it appears to be the cheapest method known to produce at least some metal alloys.

It's a real blast, though.

(In all seriousness, I hope we never, ever in this lifetime cause humans to suffer like we did on that day)

I mean, I'm probably just being contrarian and I too would appreciate it if people stopped suffering, but like, people are suffering worse than that right now as we type this.

Sure.

70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.

They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.

Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity.

Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"

I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.

They were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction.

Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.

> Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.

The application sure, but the novelty of it being nuclear rather than conventional kept parties interested in it for quite a while!

>"were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"

that's debatable. like, worst single instance atrocity? possibly is

I mean, even only considering bombing raids, more people were killed during the various fire bombing campaigns against japanese cities and so on, granted those took 1000 planes instead of 1, but somehow I doubt the people burning to death considered that a meaningful distinction.

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