The Genius Behind The First Force Field

To travel to distant planets we need a way to survive the radiation levels of deep-space. Active shielding has been explored since the 1960's but a breakthrough approach might finally make deflection shielding viable.

0:00 The 1972 Solar Radiation Event
1:27 Radiation in Deep-Space
5:05 The Insane Challenge of Active Shielding
12:30 The First Real Deflector Shield

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[DrBenMiles]

I planned the whole time to use a clip from Dune of the Holtzmans shields. 100% the best visual of an energy shield - other than I guess being able to make a real one...

[dannydetonator]

-What were you working on in NASA, dad?
_A CREW-HAT. But they rejected the design.._
-How hard can it be to design a new "NASA" cap.. Why did they reject it?
_It turned out too big and heavy.._
-How heavy?
_25'000Kg, but still a huge improvement.._

[aelisenko]

I think there may be an active shielding application for reentry vehicles. Watching starship form a plasma sheath made me think we could try deflecting the plasma as a way to heat shield the vehicle. May also apply to hypersonic aviation

[Will_Forge]

"Crew-hat" makes sense because you wear a hat to protect yourself from the sun. This hat protects the whole crew at once. 😂

[Purpleturtlehurtler]

A science channel that isn't clickbait? Subscribed.

[bendybruce]

You know I've been working on my first science fiction novel for well over three years now, and its yt channels like this that genuinely help me ground some of my absurdly fictional concepts in at least pseudo plausible science.

[Ri-ver]

At 4:21 you said 99.99 times the speed of light instead of 99.99 percent the speed of light and I was like hold up 😂
The graphic has the % though so it's ok

[MyrddinE]

I'm sure it's covered in more detail in the actual paper, but it feels like th shadow would be offset by the increased brightness when the protons are deflected into the unshaded areas; a shadow doesn't provide 'shade' if most of the light is still reaching the surface.

This feals more like it creates caustics, like light ripples on the bottom of a pool. Sure, the dark areas are darker but the light areas are brighter leading to the same overall radiation exposure. I'd be happy to be wrong.

[BenHaAdam]

1:01 I'm already building one. But now that I know one already exists it will make the project go a whole lot faster.

[dominicsimone]

If you're merely deflecting the particles, then aren't you just concentrating them into the non-shielded parts of the pattern? I suppose if you stacked enough layers of this matrix, then the " tortuous path" you created would have equal probability of reflecting or letting through any given particle?

[tomardans]

Any astronaut caught in the blast would, of course, develop superpowers.

[hervigdewilde]

I'm not sure it'd stop a photon torpedo, but it's a step in the right direction... 😄

[happyzahn]

Cool beans! i want one to wear around my head to shield from all the waves being shot around. Sometimes I can't even listen to the radio because of all the strong interference.

[caeli]

I think that to test this shield around the earth, there are enough radiation belts, inside which satellites like SUBESAT can be launched, which can then be returned to the ground and their surface examined under an electron microscope for radiation damage.

[JohnDlugosz]

Another reason for discounting the electrostatic approach, even for energies that are doable, is that some particles have the opposite charge.

[Randomknob]

You should check out the Boeing patents for the plasma shield. Pretty cool way to tank particles and all kinds of stuff. No details but I think it uses lasers to create a plasma and devices to control the magnetic fields to form the plasma into a shield. Stops bullets and even photons.

[JoshtMoody]

@DrBenMiles as an accelerator physicist, by and large I liked your video. However, I do have a comment about you saying what is achieved by old school particle smashers only being in the MV range, especially when showing what appears to be a synchrotron animation.

What you said was true about electrostatic fields ie Van de Graaf accelerators, etc. However cyclotrons and synchrotrons are not limited to the MV range. Otherwise we wouldn't have TeV protons at LHC at CERN. The difference is time dependent fields in microwave cavities, that can get up to TeV energy gains with a closed loop or GeV energy gains in linear systems like SLAC.

If you were, however, talking about accelerating gradients, in units of energy per unit distance, MeV/m, for example, you would be roughly correct. Our best microwave accelerators still only have gradients around a few 100MeV /m.

Luckily we have plasma acceleration, dielectric accelerators, etc, which push the gradient up to GeV or even TeV per meter.

It may be possible, with enough plasma density and energy in a laser pulse or particle beam, to get up to EeV or ZeV / m gradients before the high energy density physics gets so interesting that the plasmas are too unstable to provide that gradient over an appreciable distance.

Good luck out there!

[Cyber-Riot]

Ideally, we'd want to "capture" these particles, and translate their energy to into usable power for the craft.

[charleslaurice]

Thank you, Dr. Miles you are an incredible teacher. Thank you very much for bringing this.

[ZMacZ]

14:26 One step beyond is the RAM-scoop. Deflect the particles into a material chamber,
and expel as thrust on the back end of the vessel. Mere field tech and hardly new actually.

14:51 They can use a mere cyclotron for testing purposes. In nature NTL (near transfer of light) hadrons are unlikely.
If any vessel is moving at like 0.1 LS (c) the particles they encounter the most would not exceed 0.2 LS, which can be created artificially by a cyclotron. Specially single protons.
The problem isn't these charged protons, but the actual non-charged colloidal matter particles.
They'd need ionisation before they can be deflected by any field.