You know, I can't remember if it was Florida or maybe South Carolina where LEO had to plead with people not to shoot at the approaching hurricane. So I'm not shocked.
The gem in the xkcd questions & answers was the dude asking about strapping c4 to a boomerang. Why indeed would you want to strap explosives on an object design to fly back to you if it misses its target.
At the end of the day, the energy released by a nuclear weapon is peanuts compared to the energy that drives a hurricane. A nuke would do quite literally nothing to a hurricane.
It is annoying that the link has been redirected and you have to search for a more mealy mouthed statement that says it won't work but not that it is a bad idea. More "no criticism of king Trump" bs.
Probably. I'll have to try on my computer to reach the page. But the quote "needless to say, this is not a good idea," is not in the mobile version.
Edit nope, the quote is there, it is just hard to spot in the mobile format (after I scroll past all the stuff that isn't the item the original link pointed to and expand the thing I was obviously looking for that was hidden.)
It actually doesn’t seem like they looked at the idea very rigorously. I would like to know the minimum size nuclear blast we would need to disrupt a hurricane.
There is a small part of me that wants to believe that he's quite dumb, but not AS dumb as he comes across as, and that some situations like this he starts saying ridiculous shit just to see if people will have the "balls" to tell him no. Like it's a respect thing for him and he doesn't want people around who will tell him he's stupid, no matter how ridiculous his suggestions are. So I want to believe it's more likely that these things are kind of a test or a joke to him. Or we somehow allowed the craziest, unintelligent, unhinged, "millionaire" to be president for 4 years. That part just feels bad.
No, I think the joke is more of a superiority complex. Like " I can suggest the craziest shit and look at these guys squirm, they are too scared to tell me no." That would be closer to the mindset I would expect from trump.
This reminds me of the Chinese idiom, "Calling a Deer a Horse". It's based on the story of when the Prime Minister Zhao Gao presented Emperor Qin Er Shi a deer as a present in the court, but claimed it was a horse to see which ministers were more loyal to him than the emperor. The Emperor said he was mistaken as it was clearly a deer, but Zhao asked the assembled ministers if he was right or wrong. About half agreed it was a horse, some kept quiet, and the rest said it was a deer.
Later, Zhao had all the ministers who called the deer a deer executed on trumped up charges, and promoted the ministers who called the deer a horse. He also forced the emperor to commit suicide, but that was later.
I mean, it's an idea that a scientist proposed during the Eisenhower Era. It's not even Trump's idea.
When just spit balling ideas to stop a hurricane, it doesn't seem that absurd to think it might disrupt it. It doesn't work, as noted by some experts, but he isn't one and I doubt the briefer was either, so its not that bad.
It doesn’t matter it doesn’t work. Even if it did work would turning a hurricane into a mass spreader of radioactive fallout over massive swaths of ocean really be a good idea?
I literally didn't say it was a good idea. I'm just saying that it's literally not that absurd of an idea when spit balling ways to stop a hurricane. Again, the idea was first brought up by a scientist during Eisenhower's presidency.
Nuking a hurricane is an incredible absurd idea for obvious reasons, even if it would work.
Ok, Trump said bombing it, which is not as absurd, but when that came out he tweeted: "I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS!", so wth should anyone do with this.
I agree that it's bullshit that he denied saying it. To me, that just shows his willingness to deny wrongdoing and his involvement in anything that goes bad.
But the idea itself is one that was initially proposed by a scientist long before Trump and was studied. Its not an absurd idea when it comes down to throwing out ideas with no input from experts or preexisting data.
And just so we are clear, as I assume half the people here assume otherwise, I fuckin despise Trump and I'm not defending him. I'm just saying the idea isn't actually that absurd, all things considered.
Sure it isn't hard to believe, but it's just as easy to believe a "journalist" made it up to get more ad revenue because people will believe it and spread it.
I mean, Biden said,
I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... I mean, that's a storybook, man.
So if you read an article that says "a source" heard him say that black people are poor, dumb, and stink would you just believe it without question because he's said similar things in the past?
Ya of course. Just like so anonymous ex employee said he said he doesn't want black people working for him and another anonymous source said he said that Haiti is a shit hole. But since it's Trump well just take that as a fact he said it. And now the comments saying he said inject with bleach. I'd love to see the video of him saying that because he didnt. He did talk about a study saying disinfectant kills covid quickly and seeing if they could use that somehow as a treatment but never said let's inject people with bleach. But you know, reddit hive mind. I'm prepared for the downvotes.
You're thinking too much. This person and his team thought that if they downplayed COVID and protections against it it would disproportionately it blue urban centers... without thinking that liberals would listen to the experts and his followers would take the brunt of the hit.
The reason they called it racist was because the "travel ban" still allowed 27,000 American citizens to return from mainland China within the first month of the restrictions being put into affect. Additionally, U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to monitored for virus exposure.
I think it’s the other dude that’s thinking too much. I think he suggested nuking a hurricane to destroy it like all the articles say he suggested not to weaponize it which is based on nothing.
Well, Georgia did just elect a Democratic President & send not one, but two Democratic Senators to DC, so technically we could call them a blue state. Your point still stands though, just replace them with MS/TX on your list, that’s two more red states that are hit w/ hurricanes often.
It's an idea that Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, proposed back in 1990 (much more recently than I thought) as part of his decades long obsession with finding peaceful uses for the atomic bomb to provide justifications for avoiding nuclear arms reduction treaties.
His idea was to kickstart multiple smaller hurricanes before a big one could form, to bleed the energy accumulating. Teller just proposed it as a "what if" without having done any of the math about it and floated the idea as something that needed research.
However, nuking an already formed hurricane would be futile (in addition to being as environmentally nuts as Teller's proposal). Hurricanes are massive, a movement of atmosphere on a scale that's hard to wrap your head around, and they can contain energy on the order of 10,000 nuclear bombs. A hydrogen bomb in a fully formed category 5 storm would be nothing.
Trump probably heard about it decades ago when Teller's proposal hit the newspapers and just kept the idea around in the back of his head without worry much about the details, because it sounds kind of awesome in a dumb way, or he got it later from some other pro-nuke non-scientist.
Yeah.. it was real. No, it wasn’t a joke. At first, people thought he was making a bland and slightly inappropriate joke, but Trump is incapable of understanding humor. He actually wanted to use a nuclear bomb to stop a hurricane because he was aware of how damaging hurricanes could be to his golfing schedule.
In a serious note: Maybe you could moderately bother one hurricane with ALL of his nukes. However, nature regularly handles enormous forces. Your everyday thunderstorm has the energy of several nuclear bombs.
This reminds me of the injecting bleach into our lungs idea.
I first read that headline and thought “Alright, I hate Trump as much as the next guy but this is clearly taken out of context. He’s probably joking or something.”
Then I watched the video of him saying experts are working on injecting cleaning chemicals into the lungs and bringing light inside to kill COVID and he was in no way joking… it was very much in context.
And same here. “There’s no way our President actually thought you could nuke a hurricane or that this would in any way be a good idea. It must be missing context.”
Given the American petulance for violence, "can we just nuke it?" is a common response to problems among those who don't realize what a terrible decision it is to nuke, well, anything. Trump is not the first to propose it, though he might be the highest profile. He certainly won't be the last.
I vaguely remember hearing about this. Didn't officials have to explain to him multiple times why he couldn't (and shouldn't) fire nukes at a hurricane?
Maybe, just maybe, the President of the United States shouldn't just be blurting out whatever stupid shit pops into his head that he has literally zero knowledge of?
The president should not be asking about things like nuking hurricanes in places for the public to hear because anything the president says is automatically granted credence by large sections of the population. It's not as innocent as "just asking questions". He was "just asking questions" about our election, too, and it lead to attempted insurrection.
During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" according to one source who was there. "They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?" the source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks.
yeah, hurricanes are a very intricate but powerful system. they release the energy of 10000 nuclear bombs over its lifetime, or one atomic bomb per second.
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u/KirbyBucketts 29d ago
Tell him the only true way to stop hurricanes is with a massive wall of windmills.