Anyone out there with the appropriate tech or scientific background care to comment on the possible existence of geophysical weapons ?
¶ 8:26 PM
Comments:
Mark - Do you have a particular link or idea in mind? There is indeed a lot of tinfoil-hat material out there, and I'd hate to have to google it up and then wade through it.
In general, the energies involved in geophysical processes are so high that they can't be contained in any practical or directed way.
In a few cases, like earthquakes, they might be unleashed by a relatively small amount of energy in the right place at the right time, but knowing what that place and time are is quite difficult.
# posted by Anonymous : Wednesday, 12 October, 2005
CKR, I agree that there needs to be specific ideas in mind in order to address it properly. Without thinking about it, the energies are phenomenal to cause a typical sort of geophysical catastrophe. We cannot yet compete with Nature in most cases. For example, the energy involved in a Category 5 hurricane is something like the equivalent of our entire nuclear arsenal (~10,000 warheads). This is also the energy estimate of the explosion that would result from a medium-sized asteroid equivalent to the one that hit in Yucatan (the ol' supposed dinosaur killer). I suppose we could create some pretty decent avalanches/rockslides, but beyond that I don't know what else would be possible/feasible.
I am _highly_ skeptical, if only because the idea was the premise for The Core (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/), one of the most hilariously atrocious sci-fi films of the past five years.
# posted by Anonymous : Wednesday, 12 October, 2005
Hi everyone,
My sources come from the Russian press Pravda online had it for example - very wild charges are being thrown in regard to American ( and Russian) research into such weapons.
I was very skeptical but since the Soviets poured money into such useless crap as ESP research,I thought perhaps there might be a grain of truth somewhere.
"Getting back to tsunamis and earthquakes, the great things about them are: there is no stored energy. This is what a wave does. It releases energy to travel a distance. The water that came on shore and caused so much damage was not the same water that the earth released its energy into. The only thing that moved was the energy of that portion of the earth that moved. That energy is called kinetic energy. Therefore, all you have to produce is the amount of energy needed to destroy a village and produce a wave at the same time"
A very important point. Thank you !
Follow up question that you just made me think of:
Would a tsunami be the best physical world analog effect to the behavior of the kinetic energy itself ? ( which I imagine radiates out in - well - a wave)