Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Not that far out of the box

far out of the box
Robert — (archived)

I'm not so sure about violation of conservation of energy. There's an external source, the sun, and the greenhouse effect comes about because greenhouse gases preferentially pass energy at shorter wavelengths. The input heats the surface, which reradiates at longer wavelengths that can't pass back through the greenhouse gases. It's not a steady-state nor closed system, and can tip into a "runaway" cascade.

My understanding of the lasing effect is admittedly just the basics. But it seems to me that it's capable of--or perhaps inherently does--transform the frequency of energy. It'd have to in order to produce output of a single frequency. Right? Is the energy dumped into, say, an X-ray laser, of a lower frequency?

The "concentric shell" idea is in part inspired by the thought that interstellar gas clouds are said to lase; geometries other than the iconic cylinder could work. The general idea I'm grasping at is that two concentric shells of gas which preferentially pass energy at certain wavelengths might support trapping energy and reflecting it and, perhaps, "collimating" it, though that term might be stretched considerably in a spherical geometry. I think that it might have the same properties as a laser in a very different geometry.

Since that pretty much expresses my knowledge of lasers, it's all wildass speculation. Any grain of a possibility of a notion of a potential of even a glimmer of a tenuous connection to reality?

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