Name: What If We Could Build a Replica of the Sun on Earth?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T08:21:24.000Z
Duration: 3 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

to have miniature version of our Sun right here on Earth.

if we built a replica of the Sun on Earth.

The Sun is an enormous nuclear fusion generator.

Every second, it fuses 620 million tons of hydrogen

into 606 million tons of helium in its core,

releasing a vast amount of energy in the process.

we'd just need to squeeze atoms of hydrogen hard enough to make them fuse.

Well, this fusion is only possible at extreme temperatures.

Even the Sun's coldest part, its surface,

burns at an incredible 5,500 °C (9,900°F).

Not even a space suit can protect you from that kind of heat.

But we could engineer a high-temperature superconductor

What would it take to bring this brighter future into reality?

would provide us with almost limitless amounts of energy.

Of course, it would be much smaller than the Sun.

Our replica could fit inside a machine the size of 60 football fields

and would have the weight of three Eiffel Towers.

To make it work, we'd need two specific hydrogen isotopes.

One of them, called deuterium, we'd extract from water.

The other one, tritium, we'd brew from lithium during the fusion reaction itself.

We'd give the mini-sun its own magnetic field

with the help of huge magnets, at least a thousand times more powerful

This field would keep the artificial sun in place

while we're heating it up to 150 million °C (270 million °F).

Few materials could handle the scorching plasma of our sun.

We'd have to create a robust "blanket" for it,

one that wouldn't melt during this scorching fusion.

Once we had all the engineering issues figured out,

the artificial sun would completely change the way our energy system works.

And there would be no hazardous radioactive waste left

With this clean and safe source of energy, we'd stop adding fuel to climate change.

And maybe give our planet a second chance.

Next, we'd build fusion engines for our spacecraft

and go on to explore space faster than we ever imagined.

it would take us just 30 days to get to Mars.

Huge progress compared to a nine-month trip with our current technology.

What if I told you physicists around the world

have been working on re-creating a miniature star for decades?

We already have reactors capable of producing sunlike fusion.

But so far, none of them have produced more energy

than they needed to consume to make this reaction happen in the first place.

Everything could change with a new class of high-temperature superconductors.

That would bring nuclear fusion from an expensive science experiment

to a viable source of energy, available to everyone.

we may have moved off Earth and onto the nearest planet.