{"id":60,"date":"2008-02-20T19:10:48","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T00:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/60"},"modified":"2008-02-20T19:10:48","modified_gmt":"2008-02-21T00:10:48","slug":"solar-sails-and-squirrels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/60","title":{"rendered":"Solar Sails and Squirrels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the XKCD blag, Randall discusses <a href=\"http:\/\/blag.xkcd.com\/2008\/02\/15\/the-laser-elevator\/\">solar sails and levitating squirrels<\/a>.  And he&#8217;s absolutely right \u2014 the Back-to-the-Futuresque 1.21 Gigawatts will levitate about a kg, assuming perfect reflection.  Assuming absorption, you vaporize the squirrel in a couple of milliseconds.<\/p>\n<p>(1 kg of water requires about 2.5 million Joules to boil away, starting at body temperature.  Or not \u2014 the latent heat of vaporization is the dominant term)<\/p>\n<p>I think the <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/\">XKCD cartoons<\/a> are often quite funny, BTW.  A link, if by some odd chance you were unaware of them.  I just got a new light box to replace my broken one.  Must find time to draw cartoons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the XKCD blag, Randall discusses solar sails and levitating squirrels. And he&#8217;s absolutely right \u2014 the Back-to-the-Futuresque 1.21 Gigawatts will levitate about a kg, assuming perfect reflection. Assuming absorption, you vaporize the squirrel in a couple of milliseconds. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/60\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,22,27,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartoon","category-humor","category-links","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}