If, after calculation, [Compton] said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in one million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less -- and the project continued." Reignition in the 1970s Over the last decade, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, and it seems like each new discovery is a little bit stranger than the last. Take TrEs-2b, it's a planet made of a substance that's darker than coal. Then there's Gliese 436 b (otherwise known as GJ 436 b). This alien world is located approximately 30 light-years from Earth towards the constellation of Leo. And it is made of excruciatingly hot ice. Wait. What? And therein lies the second mystery — carbon monoxide should not be present to this degree, as it becomes scarce when temperatures soar above a certain threshold.

Exactly," Compton said, and with that gravity! "It would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!"

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In August 2022, this planet and its host star were included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project. [12] The approved names, proposed by a team from the United States, were announced in June 2023. Gliese 436 b is named Awohali and its host star is named Noquisi, after the Cherokee words for "eagle" and "star". [2] Discovery [ edit ] Gliese 436 b was discovered in August 2004 by R.Paul Butler and Geoffrey Marcy of the Carnegie Institute of Washington and University of California, Berkeley, respectively, using the radial velocity method. Together with 55 Cancrie, it was the first of a new class of planets with a minimum mass (Msin i) similar to Neptune. [1] Capitalism would create a desert and call it profit." Halfway through Planet on Fire, Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton drop this devastating judgement—but they don’t stop at doom. Instead they offer blueprints, rally-points for energies, and chronicles of useful pasts for a decarbonized future. In the end, the climate crisis, they remind us, is not about individual morality or scientific authority but power and politics. This is a handbook for the fights to come. Quinn Slobodian

However, since Dr. Dudley chose in his rebuttal to give new emphasis to the possibility of a hydrogen plus hydrogen reaction in the ocean, Dr. Bethe would be fully justified in wishing to respond to this, thereby setting off a chain reaction which we could probably not contain.

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In response to the multitude of criticisms, Dudley published another short letter in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While accepting some of the criticisms, he raised additional what-if scenarios speculating that a runaway reaction may still be possible. Bernard Felt, editor in chief of the Bulletin at that time, wrote a wry conclusion to the debate between Dudley and Bethe: A practical starting point for reworking power structures that are dependent on extraction and initiating the new, society-oriented systems ... essential reading. Martha Dillon, It's Freezing in LA! The idea was again brought into the spotlight in 1975 when Horace C. Dudley, a professor of radiation physics at the University of Illinois Medical Center, published a letter of concern titled “ The ultimate catastrophe” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The letter outlined a doomsday scenario where an unintentional chain reaction would destroy the entire planet, igniting all the nitrogen in the atmosphere and all the hydrogen in the oceans and melting our planet all the way to its core. As Astronaut reports, "Carbon, when it is cold, likes to hold onto hydrogen, but if it is hotter it likes to throw off the the hydrogen and steal oxygen from, say, water molecules, to make carbon monoxide." We now face an environmental crisis that has to be confronted. This book sets out the scale of the emergency as well as marks out the route to a better society. This is an essential read. John McDonnell, MP

And this strange ice substance can remain solid despite blisteringly hot temperatures — we're talking so hot, it could literally melt your face off ... if you somehow managed to catch a drop of it in your mouth (if you're wondering, human skin melts in water when it reaches 100°C/212°F).

The letter invited a rebuttal from Bethe. In a letter titled " Ultimate Catastrophe?" published in the same journal, Bethe wrote: Gliese 436 b / ˈ ɡ l iː z ə/ (sometimes called GJ 436 b, [7] formally named Awohali [2]) is a Neptune-sized exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 436. [1] It was the first hot Neptune discovered with certainty (in 2007) and was among the smallest-known transiting planets in mass and radius, until the much smaller Kepler exoplanet discoveries began circa 2010. As the Dudley letter gained the attention of the public and appeared to possibly affect future nuclear policy and research in the U.S., it began to invite more scrutiny from other experts. In a classified letter sent to the U.S. Department of Energy, Roger Batzel, the then-director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, responded to the request to reassess the risk outlined by Dudley by saying: And if hydrogen, what about hydrogen in sea water? Might not the explosion of the atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself? Nor was this all that Oppenheimer feared. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might not it, too, be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?"

In June 2015, scientists reported that the atmosphere of Gliese 436 b was evaporating, [26] resulting in a giant cloud around the planet and, due to radiation from the host star, a long trailing tail 14 × 10 There was never any possibility of causing a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere. There was never "a probability of slightly less than three parts in a million," as Dudley claimed. Ignition is not a matter of probabilities; it is simply impossible." He also noted that while he shares Dudley's opposition to nuclear war, "it is totally unnecessary to add to the many good reasons against nuclear war one which simply is not true." Artist rendering of Gliese 436 b (otherwise known as GJ 436 b) (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCF)This clear and incisive book starts from the immensely important insight that we cannot understand climate breakdown outside of the capitalist social relations that produced it. Planet on Fire reminds us that climate breakdown is intimately linked to all the overlapping crises humanity faces - from the rise of the far right, to growing socioeconomic inequality, to the COVID-19 pandemic - and that ecosocialism is the only route to an equal and sustainable world. Grace Blakeley It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions. Gliese 436 b is a Neptune-sized planet that orbits a red dwarf known as Gliese 436, a star that is cooler, smaller, and less luminous than the Sun. The planet completes one full orbit around its parent star in just a little over 2 days. This short orbital period indicates that the planet is located remarkably close to its star, perhaps orbiting Gliese 436 from one-hirteenth of the distance between Mercury (the innermost planet in our solar system) and the Sun. I will not comment directly on the several pejorative comments made about nuclear energy production and weapons research. Nor will I attempt to clear up Professor Dudley's confusion over variable half-lives, the availability of "aether energy," the earth's gravitational field, or the reproducibility of large-scale physical phenomena." The largest bomb ever detonated was the Soviet Union’s 1961 behemoth Tsar Bomba. It was powerful enough to shatter windows more than 500 miles away, farther than Washington, D.C. is from Detroit. It was 1,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Its glowing fireball looked like a miniature sun rising above the horizon.