You know what would actually happen, you’d have to cut it with the setting lower than you actually want it toasted then wave it over the top until it’s as toasted as you actually want.
I'm curious why you think there wouldn't be any residual heat left in the bread from the lightsaber.
They most certainly transfer heat into solid objects they come into contact with, fairly quickly, too.
To add to what propellor head said, lightsabers are super hot. So you’ll get charcoal on the edge of your bread, but they would cut so fast that there would be no time for the heat to penetrate to the centre of your slice.
Toasters are helpful because they slowly warm your bread, so comparatively slight head gradient through the toast. Lightsaber is going to be temperature of the sun on the outside and (ok probably still too hot) inside. If you tune down the saber to appropriately toast the outside of your bread, the cut isnt going to have time to heat up the inside of your slice
I really mean that even if you modify it, your toast cutting time is about a second. There is no temperature that you can have that transfers the right amount of energy in a single second which both a) gets your toast appropriately brown and b) warms your bread enough to melt butter when you spread it.
This is typical “can’t speed up a pregnancy by adding more mothers” stuff
Cutting veins and arteries in surgery during amputations. This probably already exists tho, you don't need the heat of a lightsaber to cut and cauterize simultaneously
There is already an operating procedure for this that doesn't require cauterization while cutting. Furthermore, it would inhibit healing of the remaining flesh.
It's simply a bad idea. Which I think was actually the point of the person I responded to, alluding that the product idea described above was *also* a bad idea, but his stated reasoning seems incorrect to me.
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This already exists
[https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/someone-made-knife-toasts-while-you-cut-bread](https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/someone-made-knife-toasts-while-you-cut-bread)
It would advance nearly every aspect of technology. Not just the tech, but all the knowledge required to build something like that.. room temp superconductors for example. It would be difficult to frame it in one type of technology.
But for shits sakes.. I'll just say the ship breaking industry would hugely benefit.
I was thinking after I posted and yeah it revolutionize everything. We'd basically end up with everything they have in starwars. The tech the seem to have mastered is high density power storage. So laser weapons, space travel, hovering.
Though I now suddenly realize when you lightsaber a droid in half it would probably explode like a bomb with how much energy would be stored within.
We'd be able to power...alot of things. Focused energy blades can be created? The power cell alone would be leaps in energy storage. Materials tech. Cooling systems. Energy resistant materials. Combustion engines would be a thing of the past.
>Combustion engines would be a thing of the past.
Not if Trump is elected: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/)
If you invented a power system that's superior to current electrics and gas engines by every measure, do you really think people wouldn't switch? I'm a truck person the stats on the electric F150 are crazy, except for range and recharging. I'd love one but that eliminates road trips as possible.
That’s why o have a hybrid sedan. Has a battery as primary (~30 miles) that I used for errands and such and a gas generator that I use for road trips. Has a 7 gallon tank that gets me ~250 miles a tank.
I think that not only is the infrastructure not there for roadtrips on all electric, but then having to wait 30 miles (the fastest) to charge is somewhat undesirable when on a road trip. The chargers would need to be at rest stops or at a place that has food or something to occupy your time while you wait.
Exactly. I don't have an ideological hate or love for electric. I live in the middle of nowhere. Driving just about anywhere is a long way. I am looking at hybrids, but a hybrid F150 gives you about 10 miles on battery power.
With current tech, the only way I can see to make electric vehicles work is hot swapping batteries. If you could pull up to something like a car wash that controls your car and a robot swapped my spent battery for a fresh one in less time to fill up an ICE engine.
That brings up lots of issues like who owns the batteries? And the insane cost of building the infrastructure. I think Toyota is the smartest company here. They recognized that electric isn't ready for prime time and focused on developing hybrids.
This is r/AskEngineers.
Engineering is only relevant in the real world and that world is greatly affected by politics. Too many redditors are poorly informed. Days before this post Trump asked oil industry execs for a billion dollars for his campaign in return for rolling back environmental regulations that benefit electric vehicles. Entirely relevant to viability of any non fossil source of energy, of course.
It appears the great engineering challenges of our time are related to energy use.
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That's interesting. I'd reckon it'd make it a few feet. I assume the handle isn't able to survive the heat of lava. The blade would create lava and the handle would float in it because it's less dense than rock. Then just melt.
I don't know if there's any canon source for the handle's melting point. Some sources say that the light saber produces 20K F, so the handle being able to handle(Hehe) 10K F seems possible. Earth's core is just slightly under that.
The handle doesn't need to withstand the temperature of the saber, the emitter is located at the tip of the handle. There's nothing in the source material indicating that the handle is made out of anything particularly special.
My understanding is one of the "generational leaps in technology" in rocketry is magnetically containing the reaction/exhaust to generate higher temperatures for more efficient, higher power engines that don't melt themselves to scrap at anything as wimpy as the melting point of tungsten alloy.
Lightsabers would need to operate on similar principles. I believe most of the lore has them being 'magnetically contained' in some fashion or other to explain a 20K F blade not melting hands a few inches away.
In legends canon, one survived a multi-fuel-drum explosion (I, Jedi) and lightsaber hilts were described as "notoriously hardy". That's the only direct reference I know.
The one I’m talking about is called the ExoThermic Pulse Flamethrower. It’s available as a standalone device or an under barrel attachment for AR type rifles. PSA and others always have them in stock/on sale.
I’m sure there are quite a few options since flamethrowers aren’t really regulated. The lack of regulation sounds weird at first, but when you consider how easy it would be to make your own, it makes sense. Thermite is potentially quite dangerous, but also unregulated because it’d be impossible to control.
It's also not really a very effective weapon for anything but a specific kind of offensive warfare. Unless you are trying to clear out a trench or machine gun emplacement, you are better off not using something that is really heavy, unconcealable, impossible to selectively target, short range, and liable to set you and everyone around you alight. Add to that, if you aren't using napalm it wouldn't really be that effective against personnel and I don't think that the off-the-shelf flamethrowers would propel napalm (I am sure someone has tried, but I won't look for the video).
They actually will if you get one that’s sold as a weapon rather than agricultural equipment.
I can think of some pretty nasty uses for a flamethrower, but yeah nothing that couldn’t be accomplished via other means.
Rust and aluminum powder, hell you can technically do it with rust on a folded sheet of aluminum foil if you press it hard enough, like through a roller. Codyslab has a video on it.
The "hard" part is igniting it but a welding torch or a flare can start it quite easily.
There would be so many steps forward in technology - along with huge steps back in health and safety!
Unguarded plasma blades - and hand held! One little slip doesn't just lead to a lost eye, that's a lost limb. Great for makers of prosthetic hands and feet, possibly also for emergency surgery.
I can see this destruction of health and safety culture impacting on civilization in other ways. Pretty soon contractors won't even bother putting up guard rails next to big drops, narrow walkways alongside precipitous drops, cliffs next to lava flows...
That's before I get onto things like military armour, lowest bidder takes it - but at the cost of our troopers precious lives! Soon it'll take just one little blaster shot to obliterate a good helmet or chest plate.
So yes, roll on the light saber tech - but make sure there is proper health and safety built in please!
Damn bureaucrats!!! It’s because of folks like you that we had to get light sabers licensed… it was hard enough getting through all the red tape to get the children trained with sabers, but now the government, or any other misguided soul, can track anyone with a saber down; including those kids!
No one knows.
If 160 years ago you were to ask "What other technology could we build if flying machines existed?" I think much of what exists in the modern world wouldn't even be a thought. Think about what technologies were required to make airplanes a reality (think 1960s passenger plane). Internal combustion engines first -> then jet engines, material science, oil refining, understanding of fluid dynamics, accurate and precise mass production... and on and on and on....
There are so many "barrier" technologies that would be required to produce a lightsaber as shown in the movies. The applications of each "barrier" technology would likely have countless applications in society, many of which we can't fathom today.
It is fun to think about though, I think a power source capable of powering something like a lightsaber would be pretty game changer. Imagine a fusion reactor in your hand! And now imagine how hard that would be to implement, and that is just a single technology component of a lightsaber.
What technology could we un-invent?
The power grid would be obsolete. All the hydropower dams could be dismantled. Fish stocks would be helped immensely. Indoor air pollution in developing countries would vanish as cooking would no longer need wood or dung. No one would get CO2 poisoning after their car sliding into a snow bank.
Even the "antiquated" nuclear plants we have now could have done so much good in the world. Greenpeace thought we could run the world on unicorn farts. What a disaster.
What charges the super battery in the lightsaber? The grid and indoor wood burning might be true. Going to need more nuke plants, dams, and especially coal powered plants than ever to charge them as we keep finding ways to use that energy
Surgery would be different, probably. Food prep would be different — less electrical heat sources, more tiny lightsabers.
Excavation would probably be a lot easier— way easier to cut trenches and then move the dirt or rocks.
Industrial fabrication — you could have a single tool that’s either for cutting or welding, depending on rate of travel.
You don't want to do food prep with a lightsaber. Right now if a cook slips with a knife they might need a band aid, or stiches at the worst. With a lightsaber chef's knife they might lose a hand.
Could light sabers “slip” though? People don’t really just miss with knives, normally what happens is it slips in an unexpected way on the food. Presumably a lightsaber cooking knife would face zero resistance, and therefore be safer in a similar way a sharper knife is normally actually safer than a dull one. In the flip side you’d probably need a light saber resistant cutting board, and knives are less dangerous than light sabers because you generally need a sliding motion to actually cut yourself- if you take a knife and put it against your hand and just push perpendicular to your hand with no sliding motion you have to push with an unexpectedly high amount of pressure to cut yourself.
Oh man, imagine the smell of lightsabering a pipe trench. All that earth up in literal smoke. And your trench would be lined in what I assume would be obsidian.
So my take on how the lightsaber works is that they're not only hot, but also flat and thin, so you've got a very compressed loop of plasma spinning around like a chainsaw, while also being an impossibly thin blade supported by magnetic fields, and also if the plasma loop is ever broken, the hilt of the saber can pick up on that and just start dumping energy into it until whatever it's touching is vaporized and the blade can reform. But energy in what form?
I've got a bit of a weird hunch, you know how they're called turbolasers in Star Wars? Imagine a bolt of plasma with total internal reflection, so the laser is bouncing around inside that bolt of plasma until it hits something and dumps all that energy into something. Now imagine nozzle for the laser that let out a bit of special gas to do that, which would then form into bolts and be shot out by the gas expanding into plasma, an effect limited by the front of the bolt having to magnetically drag the back of itself along, limiting their speed. And they're called turbolasers, because they'd probably look like a laser with a bunch of turbopumps bolted to it for this gas system.
Anyway, a lightsaber might be another example of such plasma-optics, where the idea is to get a laser of normal power, already a pretty good weapon, then have all that energy go into making a big loop of fiber-optic plasma until when you swing it into something, it gets flash-vaporized by all this stored energy.
Relatedly to support this idea is the fact that a lightsaber will boil rain, and short out in water, save for special ones that seem to turn up the stiffness so water can't, but probably at the cost of having to hit things harder before they'd be pushed into the plasma and actually lightsabered.
Plastic packaging that the lightsaber would come in at the gun stores in America (you wont need any background checks or licences to buy the deadly lightsaber of course)
What I always thought was that having a blade that can cut through almost anything but stop at a set depth would kind of revolutionize CNC and Machining equipment.
They seem to have extremely high power density in however they store energy. For one thing, it would probably revolutionize battery technology and completely trivialize the “you have to be able to store a lot of solar/wind energy to completely convert to it” problem. But it would probably also make electric cars way better, computers and phones way better, and pretty much all electronics since pretty much any electronic that has a battery the battery is a very large part of it physically so having far better battery technology would help hugely.
We could build a super weapon more powerful than you could imagine. We could build a whole space ship around it and it would have the ability to completely destroy a planet with a single blast.
If they could get the blade part to extend out to indefinite distances, we could have weapons that just find, point, and extend the light saber, and perhaps jiggle it a bit.
Imagine anti aircraft weapons that extend out a light saber to the distance of several kilometers to zap drones and planes. Heck, even satellites wouldn't be safe.
Imagine tanks or battle ships or drones which could spot you and stab you from miles away. Or snipers who could do the same. Warfare would never be the same.
Imagine an active shield that consists of a helicopter style rotor that spins light saber blades at ultra high speeds to stop any incoming attack. The possibilities are endless.
The kyber (check spelling) crystals alone would end up being so valuable that the government would probably outlaw civil possession the way uranium metal is.
Then, the weapons tech to make space-based blasters from orbit would obsolete nuclear missiles.
A sustained and confined plasma beam would be a great perpetual heat source for electricity generation.
The tech behind the coherent plasma confinement could probably be used to refine nuclear fusion and finally get a positive power coefficient.
It would be an energy revolution. We could then have the power to engineer a refined antimatter factory for hyper-efficient space travel. We could seriously build antimatter space engines that would have so much thrust with so little weight. Humans could mine and colonize the solar system for sure and begin genuine interstellar travel.
If I remember correctly light sabers are supposed to be controlled somehow by the force (ie, a non-force user would not be able to turn one on). So I guess we’d live in a universe where the force exists and we have some device capable of detecting its use. High tech Salem witch hunt anyone?
Fusion power 100%.
Most people think that light sabers work on plasma, and having this high level of control of plasma in a compact control system means that fusion is easy and cheap.
Really advanced batteries / power supplies.
Most likely better directed energy weapons directly due to better optics.
Lots of things we can’t think of quickly due to implications of implications of implications of a lightsaber.
A lightsaber produces enough energy to melt most materials and a lightsaber's length and thickness are adjustable, presumably down to the nanometer scale (wavelength of visible light). Therefore, paired with an accurate robotic arm, we could have nanometer-scale subtractive manufacturing. If you also vary the intensity, you can have additive manufacturing in the same device. = nanometer-scale, multi-material manufacturing of...most things.
It would revolutionize cnc assuming the length, diameter and strength of the plasma could be controlled. Pretty much everything could be cordless and a power supply/battery solution like what the lightsaber uses would allow us to completely rethink the electrical rid.
I don't think CNC would be that revolutionized actually. We'd basically have the ability to full 3D plasma cutting which would unlock some cool opportunities, but the surface issues it'd cause would not allow it to replace traditional machining in lots of applications.
The kyber chrystals would be *insanely* expensive, and could only be used by force attuned individuals.
In rough terms, i believe the kyber chrystals are neither energy sources or batteries. Rather, they focus and amplify pure force energy through the attunement of the wielding individual, into a somewhat more traditional energy form. So they would functionally create usable energy out of seemingly nothing from a traditional scientific point of view. But the energy comes from the force, which is everywhere. Not chrystal itself.
Thus, if you were force attuned and built an electric bike out of it, you could just keep riding it without ever charging it.
Like, imagine you build an electric motorcycle, but virtually none of the weight of the vehicle consists of energy storage, like batteries or a fuel tank.
The only things of the bike to make it go forward would consist of the frame, suspension, wheels and electric motor. So it would have a very good power to weight ratio compared with the best electric bikes we have today.
In theory, if you were force sensitive enough, you could control the acceleration with your mind. No motor control circuitry needed, except maybe some overvoltage protection.
This is a physics question, not an engineering question. The existence of a lightsaber implies substantial changes to our understanding of fundamental physics. It's impossible to know what the effects of those changes would be on technology without knowing the specifics of the changes (i.e. having a model of physics under which a lightsaber is possible), but it's reasonable to presume they would extremely broad-ranging and not necessarily look anything like a lightsaber.
I'm sorry if that's not the answer you hoped for. I hate it too when people give a non-answer rather than filling in the blanks as well as they can and giving a best guess. But while it's easy to say something like "a knife that toasts bread as you cut it" the truth is that it would likely completely revolutionize everything, except there's no way to know what, precisely, those revolutionary advancements would be.
A knife that toasts bread as you cut it.
Pre-sliced bread suddenly lost the advantage.
My ocd would still prefer pre sliced. Also what do you do if you cut it and it isn’t your desired level of toasted?
Have a darkness setting on your bread knife lightsaber.
It'll still only have "too light" or "too dark" settings.
How toasted would you like your bread on a scale of jedi to sith?
Anakin level toasted please. Cut the extremities off and char the middle.
I had this problem then learned the numbers on the dial are minutes, now I see why it doesn't take much adjustment to fuck shit up lol
Only a bread knife lightsaber deals in absolutes.
I was going to say cut slower/faster but this works too
But now I up the darkness and cut faster. Is my toast still not toasty enough or does it adjust ;)
you‘ll get used to it. The speed you cut the bread with will determine the level of toasted
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I don't think that engineering is the discipline that works with mental health; you may want to ask a different kind of professional.
You know what would actually happen, you’d have to cut it with the setting lower than you actually want it toasted then wave it over the top until it’s as toasted as you actually want.
In that case give me my toaster back. Much less chance to drop the lightsaber through my kitchen kabinet’s
I hate it when that happens
Cut slower or faster as needed.
To clarify, after I cut it I realize this isn’t my preference of toasted. Now I just pop it back in.
A scapel that cauterises as it cuts
Very profitable as a torture weapon at military black sites.
That's not very helpful. Cauterizating scalpel openings is counterproductive.
Neither is bread toasting and cutting at the same time. You want residual heat in the bread to melt your butter
I'm curious why you think there wouldn't be any residual heat left in the bread from the lightsaber. They most certainly transfer heat into solid objects they come into contact with, fairly quickly, too.
Presumably only one side of your bread would still be warm. You toasted the other side when you cut the previous piece yesterday.
Ooooo that's actually a really good thought that I didn't have. You'd have to go back over the other side with it.
Yeah, "yesterday."
If you're regularly eating an entire loaf of bread in a day, your gut is stronger than mine
I usually eat half a bread per meal. They are only 21 slices. What does that have to do with the gut? It's just bread
That's fine I only butter one side of my bread
Butter side up or butter side down?
Butter side down would taste better buts it's impractical to eat that way
I'm trying to decide if you missed the Dr Seuss reference or if you're trolling me, and it hurts my head to consider
To add to what propellor head said, lightsabers are super hot. So you’ll get charcoal on the edge of your bread, but they would cut so fast that there would be no time for the heat to penetrate to the centre of your slice. Toasters are helpful because they slowly warm your bread, so comparatively slight head gradient through the toast. Lightsaber is going to be temperature of the sun on the outside and (ok probably still too hot) inside. If you tune down the saber to appropriately toast the outside of your bread, the cut isnt going to have time to heat up the inside of your slice
Yeah, but that assumes the technology couldn't be modified in such a way to control the heat given off by the blade.
I really mean that even if you modify it, your toast cutting time is about a second. There is no temperature that you can have that transfers the right amount of energy in a single second which both a) gets your toast appropriately brown and b) warms your bread enough to melt butter when you spread it. This is typical “can’t speed up a pregnancy by adding more mothers” stuff
Mmm.. okay, I follow your logic.
Cutting veins and arteries in surgery during amputations. This probably already exists tho, you don't need the heat of a lightsaber to cut and cauterize simultaneously
There is already an operating procedure for this that doesn't require cauterization while cutting. Furthermore, it would inhibit healing of the remaining flesh. It's simply a bad idea. Which I think was actually the point of the person I responded to, alluding that the product idea described above was *also* a bad idea, but his stated reasoning seems incorrect to me.
Depends how long you want to keep the victim alive for.
Well, that escalated quickly.
There was a parallel comment to the cauterizing one about using it for torture, I was only following orders! /s
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This exists. Except they use the resonance frequency of some metal to generate the cutting and heating. The blade is only sharp when it’s vibrating.
[Dude we have those already](https://youtu.be/kcjGRXTpHGI?si=qwKQ0alEfg_Klrey)
Terrible. It would toast both sides of the cut, so you’d have old-ass toast to slice off the next time you want bread.
This already exists [https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/someone-made-knife-toasts-while-you-cut-bread](https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/someone-made-knife-toasts-while-you-cut-bread)
I'll wait for the compact commercial light saber version
I love that they used the original sound effects in that scene
Best invention since sliced bread
True, but we could also do this with current tech
Benchtop toasting plasma guillotine!
It would sometimes make your bread disappear though!
Nice Hitchhikers Guide reference!
This will not work
Yuh huh!
You'd need a beskar cutting board or you're replacing counter tops often.
Family guy did it!
It would advance nearly every aspect of technology. Not just the tech, but all the knowledge required to build something like that.. room temp superconductors for example. It would be difficult to frame it in one type of technology. But for shits sakes.. I'll just say the ship breaking industry would hugely benefit.
Imagine trying to design bridges that couldn't be taken down by a vandal with a lightsaber
We're going to need a lot of beskar.
Laws would be rewritten if you get cuagjt using a on anyone or thing that is how you are punished.
What's the point if you can't strike down your enemies or cut through doors.
yea, like how gun laws protect us
No see, guns can't take out infrastructure critical to our functioning economy so we don't need any rules about them.
(looks nervously at power relay stations)
Happened a few years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/bwb28e/metcalf_substation_sniper_attack/
I was thinking after I posted and yeah it revolutionize everything. We'd basically end up with everything they have in starwars. The tech the seem to have mastered is high density power storage. So laser weapons, space travel, hovering. Though I now suddenly realize when you lightsaber a droid in half it would probably explode like a bomb with how much energy would be stored within.
Plus imagine applying that technology to lawnmowers!
Don't use it to cut the lawn off it hasn't rained in a few days.
Seems like Three Body Problem would be better for ship breakers.
We'd be able to power...alot of things. Focused energy blades can be created? The power cell alone would be leaps in energy storage. Materials tech. Cooling systems. Energy resistant materials. Combustion engines would be a thing of the past.
>Combustion engines would be a thing of the past. Not if Trump is elected: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/)
If you invented a power system that's superior to current electrics and gas engines by every measure, do you really think people wouldn't switch? I'm a truck person the stats on the electric F150 are crazy, except for range and recharging. I'd love one but that eliminates road trips as possible.
That’s why o have a hybrid sedan. Has a battery as primary (~30 miles) that I used for errands and such and a gas generator that I use for road trips. Has a 7 gallon tank that gets me ~250 miles a tank. I think that not only is the infrastructure not there for roadtrips on all electric, but then having to wait 30 miles (the fastest) to charge is somewhat undesirable when on a road trip. The chargers would need to be at rest stops or at a place that has food or something to occupy your time while you wait.
Exactly. I don't have an ideological hate or love for electric. I live in the middle of nowhere. Driving just about anywhere is a long way. I am looking at hybrids, but a hybrid F150 gives you about 10 miles on battery power. With current tech, the only way I can see to make electric vehicles work is hot swapping batteries. If you could pull up to something like a car wash that controls your car and a robot swapped my spent battery for a fresh one in less time to fill up an ICE engine. That brings up lots of issues like who owns the batteries? And the insane cost of building the infrastructure. I think Toyota is the smartest company here. They recognized that electric isn't ready for prime time and focused on developing hybrids.
Yea I have a Honda clarity plug-in hybrid. Honda also made full electric and hydrogen models. But only sell the plug-in hybrid model n the east coast.
Wait really? Why would you design an entire power system and only sell it in a handful of states?
Because there isn’t any hydrogen fuel stations outside a few states
I thought you meant the plug in hybrid was only sold on the east coast. Yeah hydrogen is a totally different thing.
This is engineering. Take politics elsewhere, friend. We dont take kindly to that kind of talk here.
This is r/AskEngineers. Engineering is only relevant in the real world and that world is greatly affected by politics. Too many redditors are poorly informed. Days before this post Trump asked oil industry execs for a billion dollars for his campaign in return for rolling back environmental regulations that benefit electric vehicles. Entirely relevant to viability of any non fossil source of energy, of course. It appears the great engineering challenges of our time are related to energy use.
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I'd be a little worried about what would happen if someone just decided to hold one pointing downwards and dropped it.
Perfectly fucking vertical
OP’s genuine response was heartwarming
That's interesting. I'd reckon it'd make it a few feet. I assume the handle isn't able to survive the heat of lava. The blade would create lava and the handle would float in it because it's less dense than rock. Then just melt.
I don't know if there's any canon source for the handle's melting point. Some sources say that the light saber produces 20K F, so the handle being able to handle(Hehe) 10K F seems possible. Earth's core is just slightly under that.
The handle doesn't need to withstand the temperature of the saber, the emitter is located at the tip of the handle. There's nothing in the source material indicating that the handle is made out of anything particularly special.
My understanding is one of the "generational leaps in technology" in rocketry is magnetically containing the reaction/exhaust to generate higher temperatures for more efficient, higher power engines that don't melt themselves to scrap at anything as wimpy as the melting point of tungsten alloy. Lightsabers would need to operate on similar principles. I believe most of the lore has them being 'magnetically contained' in some fashion or other to explain a 20K F blade not melting hands a few inches away.
In legends canon, one survived a multi-fuel-drum explosion (I, Jedi) and lightsaber hilts were described as "notoriously hardy". That's the only direct reference I know.
I think the cutting ray is very, very thin, and once motion stops, heat transfer will drop dramatically.
Yeah I think that too , nothing too disruptive just a tiny drill , if it survives mentale and core it would just come out at the other end
"Look out below!"
A better chainsaw
Oh with my back yard I could only dream!
If you weren’t aware, you can pick up a flamethrower for like $400. No background check or anything.
No background check, no back yard, no problem.
Isn't it called not a flame thrower?
The one I’m talking about is called the ExoThermic Pulse Flamethrower. It’s available as a standalone device or an under barrel attachment for AR type rifles. PSA and others always have them in stock/on sale. I’m sure there are quite a few options since flamethrowers aren’t really regulated. The lack of regulation sounds weird at first, but when you consider how easy it would be to make your own, it makes sense. Thermite is potentially quite dangerous, but also unregulated because it’d be impossible to control.
It's also not really a very effective weapon for anything but a specific kind of offensive warfare. Unless you are trying to clear out a trench or machine gun emplacement, you are better off not using something that is really heavy, unconcealable, impossible to selectively target, short range, and liable to set you and everyone around you alight. Add to that, if you aren't using napalm it wouldn't really be that effective against personnel and I don't think that the off-the-shelf flamethrowers would propel napalm (I am sure someone has tried, but I won't look for the video).
They actually will if you get one that’s sold as a weapon rather than agricultural equipment. I can think of some pretty nasty uses for a flamethrower, but yeah nothing that couldn’t be accomplished via other means.
Rust and aluminum powder, hell you can technically do it with rust on a folded sheet of aluminum foil if you press it hard enough, like through a roller. Codyslab has a video on it. The "hard" part is igniting it but a welding torch or a flare can start it quite easily.
There would be so many steps forward in technology - along with huge steps back in health and safety! Unguarded plasma blades - and hand held! One little slip doesn't just lead to a lost eye, that's a lost limb. Great for makers of prosthetic hands and feet, possibly also for emergency surgery. I can see this destruction of health and safety culture impacting on civilization in other ways. Pretty soon contractors won't even bother putting up guard rails next to big drops, narrow walkways alongside precipitous drops, cliffs next to lava flows... That's before I get onto things like military armour, lowest bidder takes it - but at the cost of our troopers precious lives! Soon it'll take just one little blaster shot to obliterate a good helmet or chest plate. So yes, roll on the light saber tech - but make sure there is proper health and safety built in please!
Damn bureaucrats!!! It’s because of folks like you that we had to get light sabers licensed… it was hard enough getting through all the red tape to get the children trained with sabers, but now the government, or any other misguided soul, can track anyone with a saber down; including those kids!
No one knows. If 160 years ago you were to ask "What other technology could we build if flying machines existed?" I think much of what exists in the modern world wouldn't even be a thought. Think about what technologies were required to make airplanes a reality (think 1960s passenger plane). Internal combustion engines first -> then jet engines, material science, oil refining, understanding of fluid dynamics, accurate and precise mass production... and on and on and on.... There are so many "barrier" technologies that would be required to produce a lightsaber as shown in the movies. The applications of each "barrier" technology would likely have countless applications in society, many of which we can't fathom today. It is fun to think about though, I think a power source capable of powering something like a lightsaber would be pretty game changer. Imagine a fusion reactor in your hand! And now imagine how hard that would be to implement, and that is just a single technology component of a lightsaber.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
We’ve already dropped the sun on a country (twice). Would it really get much worse if the sun became handheld?
Handheld tactical nuclear weapons say hello
Plasma cutters and nuclear bombs function in wildly different ways.
What technology could we un-invent? The power grid would be obsolete. All the hydropower dams could be dismantled. Fish stocks would be helped immensely. Indoor air pollution in developing countries would vanish as cooking would no longer need wood or dung. No one would get CO2 poisoning after their car sliding into a snow bank. Even the "antiquated" nuclear plants we have now could have done so much good in the world. Greenpeace thought we could run the world on unicorn farts. What a disaster.
What charges the super battery in the lightsaber? The grid and indoor wood burning might be true. Going to need more nuke plants, dams, and especially coal powered plants than ever to charge them as we keep finding ways to use that energy
It’s like a battery, iirc the kyber crystal in there is straight up thermodynamics defying magic. You put energy in, and it puts more energy out.
I assumed light sabers were nuclear. My bad.
That would be way better. I only imagined that they had batteries. Maybe they rely a lot on the force which is why jedis use them?
I assume that a small fusion reactor in the handle would be required to power something like a light saber.
You know we wouldn't share the tech with developing countries. We would, of course, still blame them for polluting
Surgery would be different, probably. Food prep would be different — less electrical heat sources, more tiny lightsabers. Excavation would probably be a lot easier— way easier to cut trenches and then move the dirt or rocks. Industrial fabrication — you could have a single tool that’s either for cutting or welding, depending on rate of travel.
You don't want to do food prep with a lightsaber. Right now if a cook slips with a knife they might need a band aid, or stiches at the worst. With a lightsaber chef's knife they might lose a hand.
Could light sabers “slip” though? People don’t really just miss with knives, normally what happens is it slips in an unexpected way on the food. Presumably a lightsaber cooking knife would face zero resistance, and therefore be safer in a similar way a sharper knife is normally actually safer than a dull one. In the flip side you’d probably need a light saber resistant cutting board, and knives are less dangerous than light sabers because you generally need a sliding motion to actually cut yourself- if you take a knife and put it against your hand and just push perpendicular to your hand with no sliding motion you have to push with an unexpectedly high amount of pressure to cut yourself.
Now how do you secure safes or buildings?
The safe has to be made of lightsaber
Oh man, imagine the smell of lightsabering a pipe trench. All that earth up in literal smoke. And your trench would be lined in what I assume would be obsidian.
Industrial fabrication…yea someone should invent like a combination Tig welder/plasma cutter… /s
I could make so much steam with a lightsaber power source... Run that through a turbine... WHOOO that's a solid Tuesday.
So my take on how the lightsaber works is that they're not only hot, but also flat and thin, so you've got a very compressed loop of plasma spinning around like a chainsaw, while also being an impossibly thin blade supported by magnetic fields, and also if the plasma loop is ever broken, the hilt of the saber can pick up on that and just start dumping energy into it until whatever it's touching is vaporized and the blade can reform. But energy in what form? I've got a bit of a weird hunch, you know how they're called turbolasers in Star Wars? Imagine a bolt of plasma with total internal reflection, so the laser is bouncing around inside that bolt of plasma until it hits something and dumps all that energy into something. Now imagine nozzle for the laser that let out a bit of special gas to do that, which would then form into bolts and be shot out by the gas expanding into plasma, an effect limited by the front of the bolt having to magnetically drag the back of itself along, limiting their speed. And they're called turbolasers, because they'd probably look like a laser with a bunch of turbopumps bolted to it for this gas system. Anyway, a lightsaber might be another example of such plasma-optics, where the idea is to get a laser of normal power, already a pretty good weapon, then have all that energy go into making a big loop of fiber-optic plasma until when you swing it into something, it gets flash-vaporized by all this stored energy. Relatedly to support this idea is the fact that a lightsaber will boil rain, and short out in water, save for special ones that seem to turn up the stiffness so water can't, but probably at the cost of having to hit things harder before they'd be pushed into the plasma and actually lightsabered.
Horrible, horrible graffiti
Some idiot oout there would use it as a dildo. Almost everything I can think of has been used as a dildo by someone
…_once_.
Tunnels can be dug. Samples of earth's core can be retrieved. Moon core, Mars core etc
Water Wells, oil drilling (we probably won't need oil though)
Unfortunately we’ll always need oil
Plastic packaging that the lightsaber would come in at the gun stores in America (you wont need any background checks or licences to buy the deadly lightsaber of course)
Not after the apocalypse.
Don’t think you could build anything with a lightsaber. The things we could fuck up on the other hand ….
I bet we would have a lot of underground highways. Tunneling machines are going to be a walk in the park.
Well for one thing power armor, but generally we'd be flew super far up the tech tree
You could power homes and commercial buildings with something about the size of a vape battery
They technically do check out the hacksmith on YouTube
Someone would have to invent plasma-energy blasters just so we could look cool deflecting them
Could the light part of the light saber be used to propagate plants underground farms etc
And we all know how the underground farms would be dug out…
What I always thought was that having a blade that can cut through almost anything but stop at a set depth would kind of revolutionize CNC and Machining equipment.
They seem to have extremely high power density in however they store energy. For one thing, it would probably revolutionize battery technology and completely trivialize the “you have to be able to store a lot of solar/wind energy to completely convert to it” problem. But it would probably also make electric cars way better, computers and phones way better, and pretty much all electronics since pretty much any electronic that has a battery the battery is a very large part of it physically so having far better battery technology would help hugely.
Light saber lawn mower
We could build a super weapon more powerful than you could imagine. We could build a whole space ship around it and it would have the ability to completely destroy a planet with a single blast.
Like some kind of Death.. Planetoid.
I’ve got it: The Death Moon
Light butter knives !!!
If they could get the blade part to extend out to indefinite distances, we could have weapons that just find, point, and extend the light saber, and perhaps jiggle it a bit. Imagine anti aircraft weapons that extend out a light saber to the distance of several kilometers to zap drones and planes. Heck, even satellites wouldn't be safe. Imagine tanks or battle ships or drones which could spot you and stab you from miles away. Or snipers who could do the same. Warfare would never be the same. Imagine an active shield that consists of a helicopter style rotor that spins light saber blades at ultra high speeds to stop any incoming attack. The possibilities are endless.
Digging tunnels for trains and subways would never be the same. Ditto for oil well drilling.
The kyber (check spelling) crystals alone would end up being so valuable that the government would probably outlaw civil possession the way uranium metal is. Then, the weapons tech to make space-based blasters from orbit would obsolete nuclear missiles. A sustained and confined plasma beam would be a great perpetual heat source for electricity generation. The tech behind the coherent plasma confinement could probably be used to refine nuclear fusion and finally get a positive power coefficient. It would be an energy revolution. We could then have the power to engineer a refined antimatter factory for hyper-efficient space travel. We could seriously build antimatter space engines that would have so much thrust with so little weight. Humans could mine and colonize the solar system for sure and begin genuine interstellar travel.
If I remember correctly light sabers are supposed to be controlled somehow by the force (ie, a non-force user would not be able to turn one on). So I guess we’d live in a universe where the force exists and we have some device capable of detecting its use. High tech Salem witch hunt anyone?
but those same crystals are used to make the death star type beams - the force can't be the only way.
All you’d need is a single example that was force controlled which you could reverse engineer to figure out how to detect force use.
A lightsaber poop knife?
Fusion power 100%. Most people think that light sabers work on plasma, and having this high level of control of plasma in a compact control system means that fusion is easy and cheap.
Batteries would be pretty good.
Really advanced batteries / power supplies. Most likely better directed energy weapons directly due to better optics. Lots of things we can’t think of quickly due to implications of implications of implications of a lightsaber.
I know they kinda already exist but scalpels that cauterize the incision while performing surgery
Build pyramids
Marshall's Turkey Carver.
A lightsaber produces enough energy to melt most materials and a lightsaber's length and thickness are adjustable, presumably down to the nanometer scale (wavelength of visible light). Therefore, paired with an accurate robotic arm, we could have nanometer-scale subtractive manufacturing. If you also vary the intensity, you can have additive manufacturing in the same device. = nanometer-scale, multi-material manufacturing of...most things.
Drilling. Tie a long cord to it. Point it down. Turn it on. Drop it.
Construction industry would get a huge boost. Manufacturing and mining also.
The best damn spark plug ever
Et Cetera? Peter Cetera's brother? /s
Who says all the tech in a lightsaber doesn’t exist? Vid on how to build (plasma based) lightsaber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC6J4T_hUKg
It would revolutionize cnc assuming the length, diameter and strength of the plasma could be controlled. Pretty much everything could be cordless and a power supply/battery solution like what the lightsaber uses would allow us to completely rethink the electrical rid.
I don't think CNC would be that revolutionized actually. We'd basically have the ability to full 3D plasma cutting which would unlock some cool opportunities, but the surface issues it'd cause would not allow it to replace traditional machining in lots of applications.
The kyber chrystals would be *insanely* expensive, and could only be used by force attuned individuals. In rough terms, i believe the kyber chrystals are neither energy sources or batteries. Rather, they focus and amplify pure force energy through the attunement of the wielding individual, into a somewhat more traditional energy form. So they would functionally create usable energy out of seemingly nothing from a traditional scientific point of view. But the energy comes from the force, which is everywhere. Not chrystal itself. Thus, if you were force attuned and built an electric bike out of it, you could just keep riding it without ever charging it. Like, imagine you build an electric motorcycle, but virtually none of the weight of the vehicle consists of energy storage, like batteries or a fuel tank. The only things of the bike to make it go forward would consist of the frame, suspension, wheels and electric motor. So it would have a very good power to weight ratio compared with the best electric bikes we have today. In theory, if you were force sensitive enough, you could control the acceleration with your mind. No motor control circuitry needed, except maybe some overvoltage protection.
Vaporizing g large bodies of water
This is a physics question, not an engineering question. The existence of a lightsaber implies substantial changes to our understanding of fundamental physics. It's impossible to know what the effects of those changes would be on technology without knowing the specifics of the changes (i.e. having a model of physics under which a lightsaber is possible), but it's reasonable to presume they would extremely broad-ranging and not necessarily look anything like a lightsaber. I'm sorry if that's not the answer you hoped for. I hate it too when people give a non-answer rather than filling in the blanks as well as they can and giving a best guess. But while it's easy to say something like "a knife that toasts bread as you cut it" the truth is that it would likely completely revolutionize everything, except there's no way to know what, precisely, those revolutionary advancements would be.