Posted on 09/28/2004 8:12:49 PM PDT by ableChair
Greta Van Susteren reported that a Delta pilot enroute to Salt Lake City was lazed in the cockpit this last Wednesday. Only country I know that has that hardware (for lazing bomber pilots) was the Soviet Union. Pilot reportedly required medical treatment and this was not a minor injury (weak laser) wound. More will come out to tomorrow as this story hits the print press.
Sometimes you can count them, but SOMETIMES you should treat light as a wave!
Oh wow, my mistake. You suggested the atmosphere absorbs only 19%. You're way off. It absorbs 95% of radiative energy.
Actually I got the numbers from here:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/dees/ees/climate/lectures/radiation/Kushnir_Lecture1.pdf
Of course it depends on where you are on the earth among other things...
Yes, and a lot of other things too. Maybe that figure was was the power input to the laser and the laser was very inefficient. Do you have a link to that source? Was it referring to an xray laser? If so, they weren't very collimated. The beam could have expanded a thousand miles wide. And also what does this have to do with atmospheric absorption? SDI was to shoot down missiles during the boost phase after they left the atmosphere.
If the the atmosphere absorbed 95% of the radiative energy the atmosphere would be seriously hot and I don't think we'd be here down below.
How about another thought experiment? The premise of my objection is that it would take something much more energetic than what could be easily assembled at home to burn out an eye at significant distances. Recall the space heater. Suppose we were to measure the heat of the air around a laser beam and find that the air heated up by, say, 1 degree C over the firing time. Now, measure ALL points for the FULL length of the laser beam, say, 10 miles. The total temperature increase would almost certainly exceed the heat generated by the space heater. You can even set t1=t2 for comparisons sake, and set the power equal, at say, 1000 watts. Same output energy, but clearly different heat energies. This suggests that the energy at the target is infinitesimally approaching zero, not enough to burn out an eye. In reality, the heating of the atmosphere would taper off as you approached the target, but the idea is the same.
Dude, that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs 95% of all incident radiative energy is a well known, publicly accessible fact. See the Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy. Trust me.
I'm assuming you meant re-radiated energy, in which case the wavelengths involved are extremely long IR and totally beyond the wavelengths of any laser. On the other hand, if you truly meant incident radiant energy, as in the energy arriving from the sun, then in that case, the atmosphere only absorbs 27%.
In either case, I fail to see the relevance to the present discussion.
--Boot Hill
Trust me, that link is wrong, or you read it wrong. This is a common mistake people make. You're confusing radiative and convective energies.
I'll say it again, it is a publicly accessible fact. Look it up...see the Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy.
LOL, then explain the operation of a Fabry-Perot Interferometer based upon photons! J
--Boot Hill
BTW, this point was brought up by a previous poster who was trying to argue that the atmosphere doesn't absorb much light; even though the light he is talking about is non-coherent and I don't even know if that's a valid comparison.
Hey, that's off topic :-) Light is schizophrenic but don't tell them that!
I think it was your point to another poster to site references, not to make others find your "facts" for you.
Your making a claim. Find a link to support it and I'll read it.
I sited my source. Your turn. I believe you are wrong by a large factor. Prove me wrong and I'll accept it.
Well, my source is a hard-copy. How about a direct quotation from the Atlas? Otherwise I have to go hunt it down on the internet at 3 a.m.
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