Lockdown Leisure: Carbid Cannon

LOCKDOWN LEISURE CARBIDE CANNON

Looking a few months back, New Years’ eve was not as exciting as previous years. Not only weren’t you allowed to visit more than one friend, you were also not allowed to light or possess fireworks. To get over this disappointment, me and my brother decided to go ‘carbidschieten’ and to build a cannon ourselves. Having decided how to build the canon, I suggested to put it on our Suzuki Vo’tara (vitara), which is exactly what we did.

WRITTEN BY RICK KAPELLE

REACH FOR THE STARS

The Dyson sphere is a theoretical colossal space structure, which completely encompasses a star. It has the goal to harvest as much energy from the star as possible. Given that stars are basically giant fusion reactors, with our sun radiating as much as 3.83 × 1026 Watt and only a miniscule fraction reaching any orbiting planets, you can only imagine the amount of energy that can be harvested creating a structure this close to the star. Just to cover the surface of the sun you need 6.07 x 1018 m2 of material. This equals to over a quadrillion football fields of surface area! To even consider tackling such a project would mean that we would almost have exhausted all of earth resources and can’t meet the power demand. Instead of making this megastructure reality, maybe we should focus on limiting the use of earthly resources…