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What lies beyond the year 2000? Science Fiction
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The weapons used in science fiction shows use highly advanced technologies. There are laser guns, ray guns, phasers, light sabres and starship weapons. A few of these are improbable. In Star Trek* one of the main hand weapons, is a phaser. They can stun people, kill them, burn them or vaporise people. The amount of energy required to vaporise a person is more than is contained in a nuclear weapon of our time. Even though that amount of energy will be feasible to be in such a small device in the future, it is improbable that a weapon like that would be stable. Lasers. Lasers are Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Today, we use lasers for many purposes, including laser pointers, diamond cutting, weapon aim and guidance and many others. Today, a laser gun would not be very feasible, lasers today can basically only burn through things at a very minute level with great accuracy. And the lasers that can generate enough heat to be useful are quite big. So, if we could even get a laser down to the size of a gun, the most it could do would be to burn a small hole (quite small) through someone. However, there are some inventions on the drawing board (well, some theories that could allow the existence of such a weapon). First off, if enough heat and wideness of the beam can be established, then it may be possible to kill someone easily with it. Another way, is called a Nuclear Laser. When a nucleon sheds energy it emits what is called a gamma ray photon. This gamma ray photon is extremely 'energetic', or powerful. The problem is that the nucleon sheds it energy at random times. The amount of time before the nucleon decays is called the half-life. Right now, we cannot control the release of gamma rays, but, if we were able to shorten the half-life, it would decay sooner. According to some theories, we cannot shorten or lengthen the half-life of a nucleon. But, a team consisting of US, Russian, Ukraine, Romanian and French scientists have been able to shorten the half-life of a nucleon. We would be able to create these nuclear lasers a million times more powerful than what we have available today. As for the wonderful defence systems of starships that is portrayed in science fiction. Most of it seams feasible enough, for the future that is.
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