Extreme power estimates collide with waste-heat limits

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:02

   stop moving at zero feet at sea level. And if you use that acceleration where it accelerates at 5,400 Gs halfway and then decelerates the other half, you can try to estimate its power, but you need to know its mass. We don't know its mass. We know its approximate size. David Fravor described it as being about the size of an f18. And so what I did here is I just took one-tenth of the mass of an f18. So let's say it's one-tenth as light as, only weighs 10% of the weight of an f18. And if we do that and calculate the power, this is a graph of the power over time for the required for this maneuver. The maximum power needed is 1100 gigawatts. And that's really, really a lot of power. This is more than 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States.

2. 8:57

   Kevin, before we go on, I study the cosmic microwave background, which was pioneered by Bob Dickey. And so I'm very conversant with the radar technology and so forth. And I'm also a pilot, a private pilot, although I do have a jet type rating in several classes of jets and commercial pilot, instrument pilot, et cetera. Now I'm not anywhere near the courage. I said David Fravor has more courage in his left cuticle than I have in my whole body.

3. 9:24

   I know a lot about radar, and I know a lot about microwave energy and returns. So in order for this to be true, the returns matter much more to me than even Fravor, as great as an eyewitness he may be, and that I'll stipulate, even though I have counter examples that I can present later. But for radar to return, it has to reflect off something. So that can be any form of dielectric. It could be anything with a, you know, relatively large or small cross section.

4. 9:51

   You're assuming, you know, that it's actually smaller than the visible, visible cross section of the same encounter by a factor of, you know, 10 or something like that, which, which I think is more than fair, because you're trying to get, you know, a lower limit, you know, you're trying to have some credulity in this and not go to the extremes. But for this to simultaneously reflect and also be visible in the visible light spectrum and reflect it, that puts a bound on the dielectric constants that are permissible. We don't know what it was made of, but we certainly know that any material object that will make that return will have these ancillary characteristics, sonic booms, you know, extreme thermal heating, I mean, 10x, you know, the nuclear reactor output, is uh is not insubstantial so how do you rectify that as a scientist how do you you know square

5. 10:35

   the circle that this can't be something you know some unknown material it can't be it can't be a materials problem it has to be reflective and it has to be reflective in the visible and in the in the millimeter wave or microwave how do you how do you reconcile those facts i haven't thought about the radar return problem and i haven't thought about it that way in being able to You say something about the dielectric constants of the hull of the object or the surface.

6. 11:06

   So that's an interesting question. That's something I hadn't even considered. And with regard to the power output, yeah, 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States, that's shocking. Here's the real problem, and this is going to come up again when I talk about luminosities. But you're talking about 1,000 gigawatts of power, right? and no engineering no engineered object is 100 efficient right so let's say i mean the things we make are usually at best at best you're looking at 30 efficient for machinery right and so let's say that these guys are really good at what they do and they can get it down to you know an efficiency of 99.9% efficient, right? So you've only got a 0.1% inefficiency. Let's say they're really very, very good. Even if you have a 0.1% inefficiency, that means that 0.1% of 1000 gigawatts

7. 12:04

   is going to be leaking out in waste heat. That means a gigawatt of power in waste heat you'd have to deal with that would melt any craft in a very short order clearly something strange is going on we're missing something and it's not quite clear what exactly what that is could it be that these are not moving the way we think they're moving of course we of ideas about space-time warping, and, you know, these are rather far-out ideas that we don't actually have a lot of evidence for. But it's hard to reconcile these high Gs and having any machinery or living beings on top of it being able to survive accelerations like that. That's a whole different problem. And then there's other questions that a physicist comes up with, I mean, the things that bother you. So the thing accelerates to about 40,000 miles an hour at the midpoint and then

8. 12:55

   decelerates to zero where did that energy go when it decelerated energy doesn't disappear when this thing comes to a stop that energy had to go somewhere and you know this power is correct this should have been about an explosion about 250 tomahawk cruise missiles worth of explosion when the thing just stopped that should have been catastrophic and wasn't right so these things don't make sonic booms. I try to think about this as a detective. We have a lot of clues, but they're not fitting together very well. It's very odd. This isn't normal technology, clearly. But I think the power alone makes it clear that this is not human tech.