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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Dwarf in the Playground
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    Default What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    Quarks are sub-sub atomic and that would probably be femtotechnology or even attotechnology but I’m wondering what would mastery of this realm would grant humans. Quark fusion has been debunked. I read an article on it. It does NOT release a massive amount of energy.

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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    If we could manipulate Quarks, we would have so much gold-pressed latinum!
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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    Quote Originally Posted by Maximum77 View Post
    Quarks are sub-sub atomic and that would probably be femtotechnology or even attotechnology but I’m wondering what would mastery of this realm would grant humans. Quark fusion has been debunked. I read an article on it. It does NOT release a massive amount of energy.
    Manipulation to what extent? E.g. we can technically manipulate atom-scale things right now, writing 'IBM' or assembling miniature violins on surfaces by pushing individual atoms around with light. But it requires a large external scaffold to manipulate just a few atoms like this - we can't e.g. 3d print chemical compounds en-masse, and we can't package the atom-controlling technology into something which is itself atom-scale and part of the material. The closest thing we have to atomic-level manipulation at the industrial scale is electronic chip fabrication, which requires dedicated facilities, clean room environments, etc. So rather than sci-fi nanotech with buildings that construct themselves out of available nearby matter, we have chips of matter that we've configured precisely but which are basically static artifacts.

    I don't think we'd get anything additional out of the ability to make static artifacts at the quark level, since free quarks aren't stable. So if you make any kind of spatial arrangement of quarks you like, they'll collapse into protons and neutrons and so on, and those will either escape as gas or collapse into heavier elements, and you'll end up spatially arranged atoms. An exception to that might be at very high energies where things are more labile, but we don't tend to try to build static structures out of plasmas...

    If, rather than manipulating quarks in the way that sci-fi talks about nanotech, you just mean that we could for example control the stability of different configurations of quarks, then I guess the technology I could see coming out of that would be that we could induce or suppress certain kinds of nuclear decay - either changing the rate at which it happens, or pumping in energy to make things go in reverse.

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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    If we could manipulate Quarks, we would have so much gold-pressed latinum!
    Not to mention all the self-sealing stem bolts.
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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
    Not to mention all the self-sealing stem bolts.
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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    It would be quite the lark!

    That would presumably let us build objects held together by stronger forces, so presumably the first use would be very potent bombs when the quarks tear free of each other.
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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    First, we could probably blow up the earth.

    Second, we could ... well, actually, I doubt if "second" ever comes up.

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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    As I understand it, quarks can't just happily hang around similar to protons, neutrons, and electrons. They can't exist in isolation.
    The only thing I can think of that could be done by manpulating quarks is to turn protons into neutrons and back, but that's not really anything new ot exciting. That already happens in hydrogen fusion and bog standard beta decay.

    There is a hypothesis that you could make a particle that consists of an up quark, a down quark, and a strange quark, which is called strange matter. Through some mechanism strange matter coming into contacts with protons and neutrons would also turn them into strange matter. And strange matter would be even more densly packed that neutrons in a neutron star.
    If you had strange matter on a planet, it would first consume its container, then the lab, followed by the building. Because of its density and weight it would fall through the planet's surface into the core and then consume the whole planet from inside like a black hole. (Thougj you'd end up with a brightly growing ball of strange matter a few hundred meters across.)
    Some recent Star Trek movie actually did that.
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    Default Re: What would be able to do if we had the technology to manipulate quarks?

    If we can perfectly manipulate them, we could probably use quantum entanglement for faster-than-light communication.

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