Project Orion

Everything Everywhere Daily

Gary Arndt

History, Education

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, several of the scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project had an explosive idea. They wondered if we could harness the incredible power of atomic bombs and put them to use for peaceful purposes. In particular, what if we could use atomic bombs to literally blast ships into space? This idea went far further than you probably think it did. Learn more about Project Orion and the quite serious idea of blasting ships into space on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Newspapers.com Newspapers.com is like a time machine. Dive into their extensive online archives to explore history as it happened. With over 800 million digitized newspaper pages spanning three centuries, Newspapers.com provides an unparalleled gateway to the past, with papers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and beyond. Use the code “EverythingEverywhere” at checkout to get 20% off a publisher extra subscription at newspapers.com. Noom Noom is not just another diet or fitness app. It’s a comprehensive lifestyle program designed to empower you to make lasting changes and achieve your health goals. With Noom, you’ll embark on a personalized journey that considers your unique needs, preferences, and challenges. Their innovative approach combines cutting-edge technology with the support of a dedicated team of experts, including registered dietitians, nutritionists, and behavior change specialists. Noom’s changing how the world thinks about weight loss. Go to noom.com to sign up for your trial today! Rocket Money Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills—all in one place. It will quickly and easily find your subscriptions for you –and for any you don’t want to pay for anymore, just hit “cancel,” and Rocket Money will cancel it for you. It’s that easy. Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions – and manage your expenses the easy way – by going to RocketMoney.com/daily Subscribe to the podcast! https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War,
0:03.0	several of the scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project had an explosive idea.
0:08.0	They wondered if we could harness the incredible power of atomic bombs and put them to use for peaceful purposes. In particular, what if we could
0:16.0	use atomic bombs to literally blast ships into space? This idea went further than you probably think it did.
0:24.0	Learn more about Project Orion and the quite serious idea of blasting ships into space
0:29.0	on this episode of Everything everywhere daily. There are plausible crazy ideas and implausible crazy ideas.
0:54.3	In a previous episode I talked about a project which was conceived called
0:57.3	Atlantropa, which proposed damning the entire Mediterranean Sea in two different places as well as flooding much of
1:04.6	Central Africa to create an inland system of waterways.
1:08.0	Atlanta Europa is what I would call an implausible crazy idea.
1:12.0	Assuming it could be accomplished would require an enormous
1:15.0	amount of the world's productive capacity and upon completion it would have destroyed enormous ecosystems
1:20.0	on both land and sea.
1:22.0	Atlantisropa was nothing more than an idea hatched by someone who never really sat down
1:26.2	and did the math to see how it would work.
1:28.9	The topic of this episode is not quite the same as the Atlantaropa episode.
1:33.0	Project Orion was, by all accounts, a crazy idea.
1:37.0	However, unlike Atlanta Europa, some very smart people sat down and did the math and came to the conclusion that it could actually
1:45.1	work.
1:46.5	Whether or not it would have been a good idea is a completely different story.
1:50.9	The story starts in the aftermath of World War II and the Manhattan Project, which created the world's first atomic bomb.
1:57.0	Many of the scientists who had worked on the bomb were horrified at the destructive potential of the device that they had created and were looking for peaceful uses for it.
	...

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