They’re trying to do what now?

So recently on the world famous Bridge 9 Board, there appeared a thread entitled “lab to create a star in california”. Avoiding the obvious jokes that could be made, there was a link to a news article from CNN (found here), followed by a statement from the thread creator.

“I dont know why, but shit like this freaks me out. Creating a star on Earth? I see nothing but bad news”

My first thought was, there is no way that a credible news organization named their article that, my second thought (upon opening the thread) was that science should be kept away from mainstream outlets of information. Not really, but it just bugs me when people look at harmless, often AWESOME science news and decide that it is bad because of what they’ve seen in sci-fi movies or what other ignorant sensationalists have told them. The rest of this thread was riddled with similar posts to the original poster’s comment with a few beacons of rationality sprinkled in between. Let’s dive in than, shall we?

First off,  CNN was indeed not stupid enough to call their article “Lab to create star in California”, the article’s actual title, “Can world’s largest laser zap Earth’s energy woes?”,  is much smarter and actually helps to describe what the article, and we, will be talking about.

“Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world’s largest laser — it’s the size of three football fields — to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.”

In my head, this is were 99% of the people who read this article stopped before weighing in with their wisdom. It’s not entirely their fault though, CNN is a business and they have to sell the content they have.

“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it’s stolen from the plot of an “Austin Powers” movie. But it’s no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

If they’re successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star.”

Things like that don’t exactly help. What they are talking about of course, is (as stated in the article) nuclear fusion. Obviously, that is not as flashy and intriguing of hooks to put into your articles as most people have heard of nuclear fusion. We’ve all seen the videos of nuclear bombs exploding, and we’ve seen the videos of the hydrogen bombs exploding. The first nuclear bombs utilized nuclear fission for their power, the later, much more powerful hydrogen bombs used nuclear fusion.

They of course aren’t talking about using bombs to create energy, but it is merely an article describing our latest attempts to harness the power of nuclear fusion in a controlled environment like we’ve done with nuclear fission for years.

The star metaphor is made because stars are bright and powerful because they are basically gigantic nuclear fusion powerplants floating in space.

Fortunately enough for us, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab is not building a star on Earth, but simply attempting to create a controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

A lot of the numbers in that article sound scary and dangerous, and taken out of context, they will do that.

“If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres. This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.”

Such quotes have lead to assertions that no human construction could contain such heat and pressure, or that it will melt a hole into the center of the Earth. Those of course, are not true or close to being true.

In fact, as far as things that are really hot on Earth, the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven Institute has already clobbered the Lawrence National Laboratory. In April 2005, the DOE’s analysis of results from their particle super-collider found that by smashing gold atoms together at near the speed of light, they had created a ‘perfect liquid’ which had temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, or 4 trillion degrees Celsius.The Brookhaven National Lab is still here, there is not hole in the Earth and we all made it through just fine.

This experiment in nuclear fusion has nothing on that. Also, let’s remind ourselves that if we want to get sensational comparing things to temperatures in the sun, the corona is the hottest part of the sun, not the center.

Making the point even more moot is the size of this reaction, which again, can be found in the original article.

“The star being cooked up in Livermore this summer is expected to die 200 trillionths of a second after it’s ignited, Van Wonterghem said.

And it will measure only 5 microns across, which is several times smaller than the width of a human hair.”

Try to comprehend a trillionth of a second. Chances are, you can’t.

Let’s toss another roadblock in the way just for fun.

Say we wanted to create a star here on Earth for some reason. You need a lot of mass to ignite a star, a whole lot. The Sun accounts for 99% of the mass in the entire solar system, but there are plenty of smaller stars in the universe with less mass than our Sun though, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison. Let’s look at the next biggest body in our solar system, the gas giant, Jupiter.

Jupiter is sometimes called a failed star because of how massive it is. Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and even at its immense size, the theoretical lower limits for nuclear fusion to occur and ignite a star is 75 times the mass of Jupiter. So if we were going to build our own star, where do you propose we get all of this hydrogen and helium to fire our own star? It’s impossible (until of course we are a much more technologically advanced space faring species). This would also of course seriously mess up the solar system in the process due to the gravitational effects and other things that I am not qualified to talk about.

People who haven’t been living under a rock might realize how similar this is to all of the noise about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider awhile back, where people were concerned that scientists at CERN might accidently create a black hole that would consume the Earth. It is unqualified people talking about things they understand very little.

We are a species who likes stories. Our imaginations tend to take over where rational thought should often be used. CNN knows we like stories, that’s why they wrote their article the way they did; to get people’s minds racing and sharing the story with people they know. To the normal, non-scientific populace, stories are always going to be more interesting than what often is the truth.

Anyway, you can learn a lot more about the Lawrence National Laboratory and their plans to move the field of nuclear fusion forward by listening to this podcast from Scientific American where they visited the lab and discuss the future of nuclear fusion.

Let’s cross our fingers though as nuclear fusion may be the key to solving all of our energy problems and could be key in fighting climate change.