This video is part of an unintentional two-part series on the end of the world! Catch up on part 1 here: kzread.info/dash/bejne/ZXeGvMyrnsesn7g.html

it blows my mind how underrated your channel is. This is very valuable content. I feel privileged to have found you. Cheers from Romania

@DrAndrewSteele

10 ай бұрын

That’s very kind! Cheers from Berlin :)

@oggy55

9 ай бұрын

Yahh love from India

If Oppenheimer _had_ stopped the Trinity test, somebody else, probably Soviet Russia a few years later, would have been far less cautious, and with far fewer scruples. It was, by 1945, known to be _extremely_ unlikely (though not _entirely_ zero risk) that atmospheric Nitrogen Fusion would be likely to have happened. But -- it's that lottery ticket moment that you don't _really know_ for sure 😬

@DrAndrewSteele

10 ай бұрын

Yes, totally agree! As the physicists observed at the time, since it’s physically possible, it was a matter of when not if…

What I heard was that the concern about Trinity igniting the Atmosphere was that the extremely high temperatures might somehow cause nitrogen and oxygen to combine exothermically. They do combine all the time, for example in lightning, but the reaction is self-limiting. The question was whether a nuclear bomb would be fundamentally different. You can say this doesn't matter, as we would all be dead either way, but the chemical reaction idea seems much less of a stretch than fusing nitrogen into silicon.

That’s cool that this came out the same time as Veritasium’s video.

@lauriparkkamaki4854

10 ай бұрын

I wonder was it intentional

Castle Bravo was the real watershed moment for nukes, because it was so powerful and devastating that it made people realize nukes are not just really powerful conventional weapons, as they had been viewed before that, but potential world-destroyers. There's a Castle Bravo documentary out there that is really revealing about just how the scientists miscalculated and how badly things went wrong, with interviews from the men actually involved. One said, "I've never regretted my role in developing the H-bomb...but I wish the politicians would stand on a ship 30 miles away and feel the heat from an explosion before they make any decisions."

I sometimes think that the end will come from something really unexpected, like a fungus that would learn how to surpass our immune system. Very mild COVID-19 showed that we'd be about as prepared as our ancestors were during the plague times. Thank you, Andrew, it's always a pleasure to watch your opinion videos.

@DrAndrewSteele

10 ай бұрын

Thank you :) And yeah, I worry too about both the unexpected and the next pandemic…

@squamish4244

4 ай бұрын

Well, maybe not The Last of Us. But yeah, another deadly pandemic is certainly in the works. One would hope that our early warning systems have been upgraded since Covid hit.

This is a really good channel, and I predict it’s really gonna take off. By the way, I’ve always felt that, intuitively, it wouldn’t be possible to ignite the atmosphere like that because then the atmosphere would be like a star, and it doesn’t seem that there would be nearly enough gravity or pressure to sustain such a reaction

@DrAndrewSteele

10 ай бұрын

Thanks so much! Hope you’re right and the channel can start a (non-thermonuclear) chain reaction… Re: fusion… I was really fascinated thinking about this: if you made a big enough part of the atmosphere hot enough, it really could cause a self-sustaining chain reaction. Like you say though, the gravity and pressure of the sun really helps: that’s why you ‘only’ need 15 million °C to do fusion in there, whereas you’d need to heat up a 57-metre sphere of air to several billion degrees (according to the Manhattan physicists’ calculations). So incredible to think about (but perhaps impossible to do, even in theory!).

@insidejazzguitar8112

10 ай бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele “start a non-thermonuclear chain reaction..”🤣

Awesome content

Trinity yield was 25 kilotons of TNT. It is 25000 tons, or 25 million kilograms of TNT

@DrAndrewSteele

10 ай бұрын

Oh no! Thanks for pointing that out! As you can see from the comparisons to other bombs later in the video, I did know that… Dammit! Edit: added a correction and fixed in the subtitles at least…

Good vid i was looking exactly for this answear

Hey can I get some work for you anything you need to do like personal assistant for your side work...any work I will like to do.

yes