Back in college (New Mexico Tech) we’d have these “think tank” discussions in the dorm that were kind of like an improv jazz jam session. Discordant, random, and one student’s tune was picked up by another student and then another student and then another student that over the length of hours built to a semblance of a decipherable song.

We agreed with each other our weekly jam session goal was to solve all the world’s problems right then and there. The truth is the jam sessions were one of many ways to stave off the penetrating sadness that the male to female student ratio was 10:1 (ten dudes to one dudette) our freshman year. Tech was a place for nerds to come together to breed but that was only true for a rarified subset of XYs.

Let me give an example of the “flow of tuneage” from our jam sessions that is based upon the memories of an actual jam session. There’s the caveat it’s been decades since this discussion and I’m taking some liberty of adding and removing echelons for logic and brevity, as well as to mask any current gaps in memory and cognition that might explain away finding the TV remote in the medicine cabinet last weekend. Again.

Let me also give a representative list of our declared majors, so you understand why many of us remained a member of the Haventtouchedatitty Tribe until well into senior year.

  • Geology/Geochemistry (me)
  • Computer Science
  • Physics
  • Geophysics
  • Astrophysics
  • Chemistry
  • Biochemistry
  • Chemical Engineering
  • Biological Engineering (calmly now, conspiracy buffs, this is much different than the stuff that monster Fauci does)
  • Materials Engineering
  • Petroleum Engineering
  • Environmental Engineering (calmly now, conspiracy buffs, this is about cleaning up the water table and Superfund sites)
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Geoengineering (short for “geological engineering” – we laid claim to the term long before conspiracy buffs sullied it)
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Mining Engineering
  • Hydrology
  • Mathematics

Now that the stage is set, let’s wind it up and watch it go. Based on a true story.

  • The pigeons are annoying in the morning, especially after pulling a midterms all nighter.
  • Agreed.
  • How do we quiet the pigeons?
  • Distinction: Do the pigeons need to remain alive?
  • Let’s start with live pigeons.
  • Doping them with qualudes in their food supply.
  • Too expensive and too undependable.
  • More gluttonous pigeons will overdose and die. Disqualified.
  • Directed ultrasound.
  • What frequency?
  • Are pigeons affected by hyperaudible frequencies?
  • Over what distance? Ultrasonic is difficult to contain.
  • Agreed.
  • Can a more contained beam be useful?
  • Like what?
  • The Cu K-alpha tube off the x-ray diffractometer.
  • The argon laser ablation unit off the mass spectrometer has greater range.
  • I didn’t think so. Let me crunch digits.
  • Definitely argon. My mistake.
  • Ablating a pigeon kills the pigeon.
  • Did I tell you I put a cockroach from under Jones Hall in the mass spect? (I did this)
  • Cool! What did you get?
  • Typical stuff. The weird one is strontium 90! (Sr90 is a radioactive daughter element of uranium and plutonium fission – the only place to get Sr90 is from a uranium fission reaction – Sr90 indicates nuclear weapon plutonium production)
  • Whoa. Do you think there’s a breeder reactor in Jones Hall?
  • We were in the steam tunnels. Could’ve been an MSEC lab.
  • And it could just be LANL (Los Alamos National Lab, Oppenheimer’s playground) samples used in biotagging. My advisor does that.
  • Still, weird Sr90 is in a cockroach.
  • Yeah.
  • Where could you hide a breeder reactor on campus?
  • It would have to be shielded. Gamma is easy to register.
  • And how small would it have to be? What’s the smallest volume we’d need? Could it fit in a Jones Hall lab? (Physics and math dudes discuss)
  • We might be able to build one in the dorm laundry room.
  • Yeah, but where would we get sufficient uranium? (Eyes turn to me)
  • No problem. It’s minable locally.
  • And how to enrich U235? (Eyes turn to physics dudes)
  • And where do we get something like a cetrifuge? (Eyes turn to bioengineering dude because we know the bio department has one that would work)
  • Safety! Do we have hazard equipment?
  • Quiet, you greenie.
  • Okay. We could build a breeder reactor with materials we have access to.
  • Agreed.
  • Wait! We need REEs (rare earth elements)! Is that minable locally? (Eyes turn to me)
  • Maybe. Definitely there’s bastnaesite nearby. But not sufficiently enough.
  • We could get a bunch of smoke detectors.
  • What? Why?
  • There’s a small strip in the sensor mechanism that has REEs we can harvest.
  • How many detectors would we need?
  • I don’t know, maybe a couple thousand.
  • Where would we get those?
  • My department works with Honeywell. We can write them, ask if they have non-marketable units they can donate to us.
  • So we get a breeder reactor going. We can actually produce plutonium.
  • Agreed.
  • But can we produce enough plutonium for critical mass?
  • Maybe . . .
  • You mean make a “gadget” (nuclear weapon)?
  • Yes.
  • Guys, we could definitely make enough if we get enough uranium (Eyes turn to me).
  • Yes, but not from local extraction. Here’s how to do it legally with no checks . . . (redacted).
  • It’d be best if we built at least three reactors. Otherwise we’ll graduate before we have enough plutonium.
  • I can design an imploding trigger. It’s easy geometry published everywhere by now.
  • Cool. So what applications are there for a “gadget.”
  • Pigeons.
  • What a waste. No, really, what could we do with a “gadget”?
  • Practical uses. Not a weapon.
  • Agreed.
  • Open pit uranium mining, like the Jackpile mine. The site is already naturally radioactive.
  • Inefficient. We’d use more uranium in the “gadget” than what we’d extract.
  • Agreed.
  • Avalanche prevention.
  • Grow up.
  • You don’t ski. You don’t know.
  • Space travel. Propulsion.
  • Like a nuclear sub? We’re talking end product plutonium, not a reactor itself.
  • No, different. We use chemical propulsion to clear the ship out of the atmosphere …
  • We can construct the vehicle in space.
  • … and at one end of the vehicle is a macro parabolic dish …
  • I see where you’re going. We can use depleted uranium.
  • … and with a delivery portal we can detonate tactical size nukes to generate acceleration and velocity.
  • But how do we slow down?
  • Parabolic dishes, mirrored on either end.
  • Or graviation drag. Let a planet suck off the momentum.
  • That doesn’t sound maneuverable.
  • Chemical retro rockets are allowed.
  • We couldn’t launch from anywhere near the orbital path of the ISS (International Space Station). That launches in ’98. And that’s not a static orbit.
  • So we launch from a much higher orbit.
  • Or the moon. We can construct the vehicle there. Using local mineral resources. (Eyes turn to me).
  • Dude, I don’t know what’s available in the moon. It’s mostly covered in regolith so remote sensing is rough. You really think we can mine and smelt ore on the moon?
  • Yes.
  • That sounds expensive.
  • We’ll use federal grants. (Read: Taxpayer dollars)
  • I’d love to go to space after grad school. Looking down on the planet, everything you can see.
  • We’ve got satellites. We get images.
  • Not the same thing.
  • Yeah. And even the best weather satellites have lousy resolution.
  • The resolution will improve immensely. But it won’t be for weather. It’ll be for intelligence gathering.
  • Did you guys see the hurricane is now category 4? I’m worried for my parents. They’re in the path of the eye tracking.
  • Hey! How about using the “gadget” to dissipate a hurricane over the ocean before it can make landfall?
  • Let me do digits. How does a hurricane work?

Our jam sessions produced innovation by pooling the knowledge of many disciplines, and the thing about innovation is it’s discordant and random, like improv jazz, and innovative ideas sound insane and ludicrous the first time proposed. And most often these ideas are infeasible for any number of reasons and thus abandoned. But to scoff at innovation because it sounds stupid means lacking intellectual imagination and being satisfied with the status quo state of existence. We’d all still live in a cave and wear a budgie smuggler made of itchy woven wooly mammoth fur if left to unimaginative limited devices. The fur probably has mammoth-sized Ice Age lice, too. Nibble your pubes right off for a smooth Ken doll sheen.

Nuking a hurricane is a reasonable solution to consider. A group of incel (I just found out that means “involuntarily celibate”) freshman in a college dorm room toyed around with this idea decades back, so when President Trump floated the idea during his first term a few of us emailed each other and considered sending him our determination.

Yes, nukes can dissipate a hurricane. However, it would take more than one nuke and the radioactive aftermath would produce more long-term fatalities than a typical hurricane season’s fatalities.

And, I’m confident our jam session wasn’t the first time the idea of nuking a hurricane was floated. Here in New Mexico the brightest minds of the century got together to build a nuclear weapon to end World War II. Without question these minds of the Manhattan Project also considered practical uses for an explosive nuclear device decades before my friends and I were even potential zygotes.

To wit, I bet Manhattan Project lead J. Robert Oppenheimer himself mulled this over, the practicality of nuking a hurricane. Did you know he was an avid mineral collector (like me) and as a young teen he was invited to speak at the Rochester Mineral Symposium based upon an abstract he mailed in? How surprised everyone was when this skinny kid showed up at the symposium. They were expecting a research fellow or university professor.

Obviously, Oppenheimer wasn’t an intellectual fool. I don’t feel my friends and I are intellectual fools. And for certain laughing at President Trump for proposing to nuke a hurricane is the intellectual foolishness of scoffers and not his. Trump lit upon nuking a hurricane independent of a dorm room brain trust. That’s naturally innovative, and innovation requires imagination and someone clever and brave enough to say an untested unique idea out loud without fear of reprisal and ridicule.

A person like that is not a fool. A person that singularly innovative inspires others to achieve. An innovative person like that is a natural leader. President Trump is that kind of leader.

Addendum: Okay, to answer what should be obvious, with a barometer, a pair of eyes, and the tiniest dollop of logic, a hurricane can be staved off long before it has a chance to become a hurricane.

Do I really have to post this? It’s a leftist mindset, I get it, wait until the problem is so huge it’s too late to do anything about it and everything gets destroyed. But the logical centrists and conservative right have been figuratively nuking rapidly evolving low pressure (and low intelligence) systems well before they can go full on Category 5 for years now.

I really can’t believe I have to explain this. At least we have a clearer understanding of why this election itself is nuking a hurricane. Thanks for cluing me in, Derek.