Will Ula pull herself together in time to save Sergei from her dark other half? Tune in next time to find out!
The iconic lightsaber is one of the most recognizable weapons in sci fi, and emblematic of the Star Wars universe. It's also problematic in any number of ways. For today's blurb, I decided to deep dive on this famous speculative destruction device the same way I investigated the dubious Star Wars blaster guns in an earlier effort. The first question I had to answer is pretty obvious:
Michio Kaku proposed that a lightsaber is basically a plasma torch that you can slice things with; basically a weaponized blowtorch on steroids. But there's a major problem with this theory: In order to instantaneously cut through thick steel doors the way we see in the movies, a lightsaber needs to burn at crazy high temperatures. Wired.com science writer Rhett Allain used still footage from 'The Phantom Menace' to determine what temperature Liam Neeson's lightsaber was burning at based on the black body radiation of the metal door he's slicing through, and the temperatures range from 2700 Kelvin to 5200 Kelvin, which is just a smidge less than our sun's surface temperature. Needless to say, even at the lower estimates I've seen on his and other articles, activating a lightsaber would cause the guy holding it to immediately burst into flame, along with any of his buddies standing too close to him.
Okay, so this would not be the first time Michio Kaku was wrong about something. A lightsaber cannot be a naked plasma torch. If it were, then it would be about as useful a melee weapon as an explosive suicide vest. The best explanations I can find are that a lightsaber is a roiling pillar of burning plasma contained in some kind of magnetic force field. This is not only what gives the “blade” its shape, but also what keeps the insane internal heat from leaking out and flash frying the clueless Jedi bumpkin wielding it. Unfortunately, this explanation runs into problems of its own:
Lightsabers don't cut; they burn through whatever gets in their way. This is evident from the way they leave a molten mess behind when we see them used against solid metal doors or bulky navigational equipment in the movies. Whenever some random bad guy (or slightly less random good guy) gets sabered, the woulds are always bloodless and cauterized. But based on the amount of energy a lightsaber uses, the damage to a human body should be much more catastrophic than that. As this wonderful Youtube vid from the Nerdist crew demonstrates, getting that much heat rapidly transferred into your body would be devastating. Your body is made up of 60 percent water and when water is flash heated like that, it explodes. And so would you. Not very PG-13.
If you enjoy the lightsaber video, be sure to check out the Nerdist youtube channel for more pop culture inspired science videos, such as why stormtroopers' armor may not be completely impractical, and why death by falling into a pit of lava is not as romantic and cinematic as they make it look in the movies.
Okay, so that seems like an aesthetic gripe. So really a lightsaber should cause bad guys to blow up rather than die a clean and bloodless cinematic death. So what? Well, here's the problem: Remember how we said earlier that if your lightsaber were radiating all its energy freely into the environment that it would incinerate you and everyone around you? Well, if it's dumping all of that sun-level heat energy into the person or object you're cutting, then it's still basically releasing all that heat into your environment the moment you use it… which means you still end up a crispy critter. It's a dumb weapon; you might as well be holding a stick of dynamite.
And one last thing worth griping about: For the sake of argument, let's assume that space scientists a long time ago in a galaxy far far away did figure out a way to make this thing work, and in a way that didn't immolate the user the moment he tried to use it. The amount of energy required to operate one of these things is just silly. Luke Willcocks of the University of Leicester calculated that the power requirements for one lightsaber are comparable to the output of a nuclear power plant. Rhett Allain's article found that a portable battery capable of running a lightsaber would need an energy density over 167 times greater than the highest density energetic ion known to man. And it would probably weigh a ton. The point being that, if you have that much destructive power at your disposal, I'm sure you could find a better way to deploy it, like a force field that protects you while bug-zapping any baddies who come too close, or maybe surround yourself with a swarm of tiny field-contained plasma “gnats” that attack people and explode on contact, or something. But it just seems absurdly impractical to have a nuclear power plant's worth of energy in your hand, just to make a glowy fire sword.
It's that time again. What time, you ask? DRUNK DUCK AWARDS TIME, of course! You silly thing.
Voting is now open for the 2018 Drunk Duck Awards, and Transneptunian needs your vote! We're mainly trying to snag nominations for these five categories:
There's a lot of other categories to consider, and a lot of other great comics to consider for them. So, you should definitely take a minute and pick the best and most deserving comics. You can always come back and change your votes later on, and you don't need to fill out the whole ballot, so if you're not sure who to put down for a given category, you can just leave it blank and submit your vote.
Oh, and of course you shouldn't go through and vote for this (or any other) comic in every category, because the awards admins hate that. Niccea will hunt you down and kick you in the shins. Right square in the shins. With steel toed boots. And more importantly, they'll throw out the ballot, so don't do that. (not that I don't also care about your shins; I'm sure you have lovely shins, but… gotta have votes!)
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