I hear the word "stepper" used sometimes talking about lithography machines. Makes sense I suppose that you'd need to precisely move the wafer around and expose small parts of it.
The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants cultivated for illegal purposes. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)
There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.
The paper explains it more as an experimental process than a manufacturing process. Each granule of hiroshimaite captures a "unique" micro-environment. One could imagine an ethical version of this involving conventional explosives in a controlled environment containing a variety of metallic samples of different compositions.
Metals refining in space or a no atmosphere place like the moon. If an alloy is discovered that has properties we want I can see some future civilization popping nukes like pellets to produce it.
There were some nuclear fracking experiments where the nukes cost in the range of a few hundred thousand dollars. It's probably cheaper than you think.
I mean, I'm probably just being contrarian and I too would appreciate it if people stopped suffering, but like, people are suffering worse than that right now as we type this.
They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity.
Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"
I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.
I mean, even only considering bombing raids, more people were killed during the various fire bombing campaigns against japanese cities and so on, granted those took 1000 planes instead of 1, but somehow I doubt the people burning to death considered that a meaningful distinction.
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