Feels like something real disastrous can come of this! When will humans be satisfied! Oh I know... When they destroy themselves!! Check out this story where scientist use a Major Laser (and not the kind with Diplo in it) to recreate a Celestial star.
Livermore, California (CNN) -- 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.
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.
The
lab's venture has doubters, to be sure. Nuclear fusion, the type of
high-energy reaction the California researchers hope to produce, has
been a scientific pipe dream for at least a half-century. It's been
pitched as a miracle power source. But it hasn't yielded many results.
To make matters worse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office
this month released an audit of the lab's work that cites delays and
mismanagement as reasons it's unlikely the scientists will create a
fusion reaction this year.
But researchers in Livermore, about an
hour's drive east of San Francisco, say it's not a matter of if but
when their laser-saves-the-Earth experiment will be proved successful.
"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the
target within the next two years," thus proving that controlled fusion
is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a manager of the project, which
is called the National Ignition
Facility.
That would put the lab a step closer to "our big
dream," he said, which is "to solve the energy problems of the world." CONTINUE READING...