Just how 'intangible' are neutrinos? as invisible energy waste

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Vance
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Just how 'intangible' are neutrinos? as invisible energy waste

Post by Vance »

Just how 'intangible' are neutrinos?

Let's say a 50 megaton bomb is detonated over a city but releases its energy entirely as neutrinos, does anybody notice?

As I understand it neutrinos were Curtis's novel explanation for how SW vehicles might invisibly shed astronomical energy in the case of starships or gigawatts in the case of smaller vehicles, even without melting the snow around them, right? So besides the transformation process (how do they transform energy into neutrinos), I thought this was good techy fluff from the ICS.

I dare say any significant (relative to destructive power) waste energy from blaster bolts & lightsabers (up to superlasers) would have to be invisible too, as to not disrupt the surrounding medium (air or water) as they travel through it because considering their yield, waste energy as visible light would be insufficient to explain any drop in intensity over distance (guys were stood safely just meters away from the DS superlaser....).
Yield reduction in blaster bolts might be caused by the "force bottle" cannibalizing energy to sustain itself during travel which might also explain the lack of identifiable waste energy besides the glow colour. The blaster bolt is self-sustaining after all, not remotely sustained by the blaster, and must be responsible for the wacky physics that facilitate all of the bolts strange characteristics, like various velocities at different ranges, noninteraction with air/water (despite containing high-energy plasma/laser), interaction with high-powered magnetic fields & lightsabers blades, and occasional strange momentum effects that lift people off their feet (unexplainable by bolts mass/velocity or plasma/laser content, & without equivalent recoil).

Edit; changed "projected to sustained". The blaster creates the blaster bolt but presumably does not remotely sustain the blaster bolt after the fact. The blaster bolt sustains itself until it runs into something solid.
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chimericoncogene
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Re: Just how 'intangible' are neutrinos? as invisible energy waste

Post by chimericoncogene »

https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

XKCD on supernova neutrino doses.

My guess is that the neutrino effects are negligible for anything smaller than a Star Destroyer... and probably negligible for that, too. A Supernova's neutrino dose is fatal at 2.3AU, 350 million km. A supernova is several hundred billion times brighter than our sun.

Even a Death Star style reactor with stellar power outputs in the neutrino spectrum would only be deadly at... a few hundred km in instants. Very few objects in the universe have Star Wars power densities, it seems.

So yeah, some effects from Death star superlaser discharges can be expected. Anything less... the neutrinos from a SD might get deadly over the years, but if you have an exhaust port, precautions and collimated beam, not so much.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... utrino_Gun

Atomic rockets on neutrino guns and paper linking to lethal doses.
chimericoncogene
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Re: Just how 'intangible' are neutrinos? as invisible energy waste

Post by chimericoncogene »

Solar proton neutrinos are 400keV, and google tells me we get two neutrinos per 28MeV of solar power output. So take these numbers for "highly efficient" processes.

As for your 50Mt bomb, the neutrinos don't register at all.
Boom table tells me that the Death Star's peak power output might be over 100,000 suns, BTW, so the neutrinos might be deadly a hundred to a thousand times further out than expected.

Solar output is 100 petatons, 400 billion petawatts, far in excess of any reasonable ground vehicle. Even a petawatt range reactor would not be deadly neutrino wise outside a few hundred millimeters... i.e. inside the reactor.

But chronic neutrino exposure might be more of a problem. Hence exhaust ports as before.

All estimates are ludicrously vague, as usual. I'm scaling supernovae down. This might be idiotic.


http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... Boom_Table
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