Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (10 page)

Jorge recollected his time back on Earth. It has been nearly two years since he has been back, but it felt just like yesterday. He recollected the 4 months they spent in quarantine. Both Mischa and he had felt guilty when their two children had come to visit. They had been shocked at how much they had grown in those two years they had been away, especially their younger daughter whom he now had to force to see as a young woman rather than his little girl. Both of them were now in college. Mischa felt guilty for not being there for them especially their younger daughter as she entered college. Mischa had cried and cried that night.

Jorge’s thoughts jumped back to those 10 months after the battle of Titan, when they struggled and started prying open the secrets of first Shaitan language and then their technologies. His personal struggle to begin to understand the physics of the fusion reactor. Then his thoughts jumped back at the last two years as he and his team struggled to understand new concepts in quantum physics and nano engineering.

“As you are all aware, the Shaitan fusion reactor is one piece of equipment that cannot be transported back to Earth by us, and hence has to be studied in-situ. As I speak, there are 20 of the world’s top physics and engineering minds who are studying the reactor on Titan, and are in constant touch with hundreds of academicians and scientists studying and experimenting with the knowledge we have learnt till now.

There is good news and there is bad news on fusion reactor front. The details of our report is available to you all in the docket that all of you must have received in your emails. I will just summarize here. The good news is that after nearly three years of studying the Shaitan variable geometry fusion reactor, we believe we understand the principles on which it works.

You all must be wondering why I keep referring to the reactor as ‘Variable Geometry’ reactor. It is because fundamentally that is the difference between the fusion reactors that humans have attempted to construct with mixed success till now and the Shaitan fusion reactor technology.

As you all know that our sun and every star for that matter is essentially a fusion reactor. It is a very stable reactor, at least till the star has enough hydrogen fuel, due to just one thing – its enormous gravity. The star has a very simple geometry, the simplest possible in space – a sphere. It is just a spherical ball of gas crushed at its core at unimaginable pressure due to its enormous gravity.

This unimaginable pressure generates incredible heat, which is nothing but the speed at which the molecules are moving in a gas or plasma. The heat and the pressure causes hydrogen atoms to crash into each other fast enough for them to fuse and form helium, releasing energy in the process. This explosive energy released by fusion in the core of a star is held in check by the enormous gravitational pressure trying to crush the star.

We humans have tried to mimic this same process in our fusion reactors till now. Unfortunately we don’t have the enormous gravity of a star to hold the explosive force of fusion reaction in check. So we have used magnetic bottles, essentially very strong magnetic fields surrounding a heated hydrogen plasma which prevents the fusion energy from exploding or fizzling out of its containment.

We have met with limited success so far. You have to remember that we are heating up the hydrogen to a temperature of 100 million degree centigrade. It is not easy to hold something that hot stably for long periods of time, without the containment magnetic bottle breaking up. At such temperatures even a tiny rupture in the magnetic confinement will stop the fusion reaction.

As a result we have not been able to have a reliable, long running and sustainable fusion reaction in any of our reactors despite 100 years of research on the subject. The best we have achieved is fusion reactors that can be restarted quickly when the magnetic bottle ruptures, and the reactions themselves last a few hours. That is hardly a reliable reactor.

Even when we have been able to achieve such reactors, we find that in many cases we are putting in more energy to sustain the nuclear fusion reaction, than we are getting out of it. A reactor’s objective is to generate energy not consume it, so needless to say these reactors are a failure. Some of the latest human reactors do produce more energy that they consume, but only just. They can hardly be considered efficient.

So this ladies and gentlemen was the litany of failures we humans have had in the last hundred years trying to build a nuclear fusion reactor. When we started studying the Shaitan reactor, we were certain that it follows a very different design principle. It was obvious from its compactness and its cold temperature. Now that we have a fair idea, we physicists have been kicking ourselves that we did not think of it earlier.

The Shaitan nuclear reactor does not try to mimic the brute force method of a star. There is no brute force gravity available, so we were wrong to try to mimic the brute force method. Instead they take a very subtle approach, thereby reimagining the entire fusion process.

The hydrogen molecules do not care how hot or how much pressure the gas is under when it undergoes fusion. All it cares about is how hard one atom slams into the other. If you can slam two atoms hard enough against each other, they would undergo a fusion reaction and release energy not matter how cold the gas is overall.

We humans knew that, we scientists do it all the time in particle accelerators like the 100 km diameter accelerator under the Mojave Desert, or even the venerable Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. We smash a few molecules against each other in such particle accelerators.

We however do not know any other way to do fusion at a large scale, to create enough energy other than the process that goes on inside a star. That is where the genius of the Shaitan ‘Variable Geometry’ design comes in. If you were to do a thought experiment and imagine that you could keep track of every atom in a fusion, and somehow you could nudge those atoms in any direction you desired, then you would realize we could repeat the same process that goes on in our particle accelerator, but with quintillions of atoms simultaneously to yield energy, without having to heat up the reactor to a 100 million degree.

This is what the Shaitan fusion reactor achieves with the help of a quantum computer and ‘Variable Geometry’. As you may be aware that we don’t even know the theoretical limits of a quantum computer. A dedicated computer inside the Shaitan fusion reactor keeps track of fusing atoms.

Well… I am oversimplifying the description. In reality the computer keeps track of a space just a few nanometers wide. There could be few tens or hundreds of atoms within this space which it keeps track collectively by monitoring the temperature and pressure. It is not that the quantum computer lacks computing power to keep track of individual atoms, but the sensor and control equipment cannot be made even by the Shaitan technology smaller than a few nanometers.

To that extent, this the limiting factor – Shaitan manufacturing technology, that limits the fusion process from being more efficient. Having said that, the overall process is pretty darn efficient, unimaginably more than the current human fusion process.

The reactor smashes the first few atoms at the Nano scale, which does not take too much energy, then directs the high energy atoms emerging out of those first fusion to smash more atoms. Thus starting up a sustained fusion reaction. It draws out energy from the reactor by drawing out the high energy Helium plasma which is the byproduct of fusion, and continuously supplies new hydrogen to reactor, all at a Nano scale.

The high energy helium plasma can be pushed out directly from the nozzle of a spaceship to provide thrust. Else the ionized plasma can be used directly to generate electricity. Like all machines in the universe, the Shaitan fusion reactor is also governed by entropy and second law of thermodynamics. It can harness about 50% of the energy generated into useful forms, the rest dissipates as heat and radiation.

The size of the Nano cells where fusion takes place has been engineered such, that the radiation profile has very little of X-Rays and Gamma rays, which are harmful to biological beings, so with a very light shielding, it is perfectly safe for us to approach next to the reactor. The heat dissipation is very mild relative to the amount of energy being generated. In the context of a spaceship, it is actually a good thing, as it keeps the ship warm from the cold of space.

Now 50% energy efficiency might sound low, but I would like to remind you that the most efficient human power generation plants work at a 40% thermal efficiency. So the Shaitans actually have a more efficient power generation process compared to us.

You all must be wondering, where ‘Variable Geometry’ comes into the discourse. Most of you, who have seen the Shaitan reactor know that it is a solid but disturbingly shimmering sphere. There seems nothing variable about it. That is because we are looking at it at a macro scale. If we were to look at it in micro scale, or Nano scale to be more precise, we would find that each of those Nano cells where fusion is taking place is constantly being twisted and distorted by the quantum computer to direct the atoms in one way or the other. The geometry of each of those cells is variable.

That brings me to the bad news. If you remember I opened up by saying that I have good news and the bad news. The good news being that we understand the reactor to a fair degree now. The bad news is that we don’t have the manufacturing technology to replicate it. It requires building material at Nano scale and hooking it up to a functioning quantum computer, both of which we don’t have at the moment.

I am hoping that the next two speakers will be able to give us some hope on that front. With that I will invite Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan to take up the stage. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your time.” Jorge concluded and motioned Ramesh to come up to the stage.

Ramesh started his report in a similar way. “I take a cue from my friend and start with the same statement. We have good news and bad news. The details of the report of the computer science group as mentioned earlier are in the docket mailed to you.

The good news is that, not only do we understand the Shaitan computer systems with a fairly high level of confidence, we have found that fundamentally there is very little difference between in the computer architecture and organization between us and the Shaitan technology.  

Basically we design computers in a very similar way, and consequently we program in a very similar manner. Of course there are a lot of things they do differently, but not at a fundamental level, and these differences are more to do with the cultural or biological differences between the two species.

For example we use programming language to program a computer, while they use electro chemical signals to program. If we were however to look at the structure of the resulting program, we would find that both of them are very similar in logic. This is not surprising. Binary logic is the same across the universe.

As you are aware, we have been constructing and experimenting with rudimentary quantum computers for over 60 years now. We now have functioning quantum computers that can perform simple computations. We have developed a specialized language which we call Q++, which is a modification of the standard G++ language that is suitable for programming a quantum computer.

After studying the Shaitan quantum computer we realized that unlike the fusion reactor designers, we were always on the right track. There is no fundamental difference in philosophy or approach between our quantum computers and the Shaitan ones. The only difference was that ours are primitive, clunky that need to be cooled to nearly absolute zero temperature, with so few quantum cells that they can perform operations that are comparable to that of a pocket calculator, while as Jorge mentioned the Shaitan ones can keep track of every atom in a fusion reactor.

That is where the good news stops. The bad news is that we don’t have the manufacturing technology to replicate the level of sophistication and miniaturization that the Shaitan quantum computers display, as mentioned before by Jorge.

The materials used to make the computer is another issue as well. Our most successful quantum computers use superconductors which need to be cooled to near absolute zero, which is not very practical outside a lab. We have always been aware that there are other materials that can be used. One of the most promising being fullerene based carbon nanotubes. We however have not been able to grow carbon nanotubes large enough for any practical use yet.

The Shaitan quantum computers use a fullerene based carbon nanotube as their computational engine. They obviously know how to manufacture large fullerene chains. That is the reason they not only have a very dense quantum computer with computational cells at a molecular level, giving them almost infinite computational capacity. It is also the reason their computers can run at an almost normal -2° C, which makes it eminently practical to place them almost anywhere including a spaceship.

This brings me to our next speaker, on whom we now pin our hopes for getting us the breakthrough needed for us to benefit from Shaitan technology. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our gracious host Mr. Sarvesh Gupta.” Ramesh yielded the stage and Mr. Gupta got up to speak. His missing arm meant that he had to climb up the podium slowly.

“Thank you Jorge and Ramesh. You have put onerous responsibilities on the material sciences group, and I hope we don’t let you and humanity down. I will start by saying that our group has good news and well… not so bad news. The good news is that not only do we understand some of the Shaitan manufacturing techniques at the Nano scale, we have been able to replicate a few of them ourselves in the lab.

I would like to clarify that we do not understand everything yet. In fact we understand only a small part of their manufacturing process. There is still decades of research and reverse engineering ahead of us before we can claim we understand how every part of Shaitan machinery has been manufactured.

However after nearly 3 years of research and reverse engineering, we do understand some of their critical manufacturing processes and some of the materials used. The Shaitan fabricators captured, and especially the one transported back here have helped in that process beyond measure.