How Powerful are Phineas and Ferb

I watch kids shows, too many, I fully admit it.

On the show Phineas and Ferb, there is an episode, "Escape from Phineas Tower"  (Episode 315a) where the titular characters create a machine that within less than a day is able to enclose the entire galaxy.  This opens up an interesting question, how powerful of a civilization are Phineas and Ferb according to the Kardashev scale?  (I don't know who asks these questions really, but it is a good chance to do some math)  A quick explanation of the Kardashev scale, it serves as a means of scientists to roughly gauge how advanced a civilization is according to how much energy they can manipulate.  The scale is named after a soviet astronomer by the name of Nikolai Kardashev.  According to the current scale there are 3 types, a Type 1 can manipulate the total energy of a planet roughly the size of planet Earth (10^16 to 10^17 watts), a Type 2 civilization the power output of a local star (4*10^26 watts), and finally Type 3 where the civilization can capture the power output of their entire galaxy (4*10^37 watts), basically a boat load of power.

These values get us to a starting point of how to calculate how powerful Phineas and Ferb are, we know how much energy a given civilization type produces, and we know Phineas and Ferb's creation creates a barrier that encompasses the galaxy.  What we don't know exactly how quickly the barrier encompasses the galaxy and how thick the barrier is.  Both of these values are incredibly significant to our calculations, the thicker the more total energy required, the faster the more power production.

For me the first thing I want to calculate is the overall surface area of the barrier, for sake of convenience I am assuming a completely smooth surface and that the barrier is spherical, this makes the calculations a tad easier.  Much like the edge of the atmosphere the edge of our galaxy is not an instant transition from something to nothing, the density of stars tapers off, for convenience I will say this edge is at 50,000 lightyears from the center of the galaxy.

For the kind of math I would like to do, it is necessary to convert from light years to meters.

Using the above calculations we know that 1 ly or light-year is 9.461E+15 meters, or in terms that normal people use, 9.461 trillion kilometers, that's a big value.

Now that we know how many meters are in a single light year, we can multiply by 50,000 to get the number of meters for the radius of the galaxy.



From the above calculations we find our answer spells out to four hundred seventy three quintillion meters (4.73037E+20 m).  Honestly I am having a hard time properly coming up with a reference for how big that number is.

We now know our radius, with that knowledge calculating the surface area of our sphere is a pretty easy equation from high-school geometry, seen below.




The initial estimation will assume that the barrier is a massive sheet of graphene,  The choice of graphene is relatively arbitrary, but has the advantage of being a known material with an estimated surface area for a given mass (specific area), 2630 square meters per gram.  It is a relatively easy process of dividing the area of the sphere by the specific area to get the mass of the barrier.*



After this plug and chug we find that the graphene barrier has a mass of 1.069E+39 grams, to put that in perspective the Earth, has a mass of "only" 5.972E+27 grams.

Great, we know a lot of numbers, but how do we calculate the Kardashev civilization class of Phineas and Ferb.  We use one of the most famous equations in physics e=mc^2, using this equation we can calculate how much energy it would take to create the mass of the barrier**

The final answer is getting tantalizingly close, we now know the energy required to produce the mass of the barrier is 9.61E+55 Joules, a boat load of energy.  All that is left is to estimate the wattage of the system and from there we can guesstimate what Kardeshev civilizaiton class we have going on.  Calculating wattage is generally relatively straightforward, you divide the number of joules by the number of seconds it takes to release that energy.  First I will calculate how long it would take a Type 3 civilization to build this barrier.  This simply requires we divide the energy of the barrier by the power output of a Type 3 civilization
(9.61E+55 J)/(4E+37 W)=2.4E+18 seconds
That is the equivalent of 76 billion years, that means a civilization capable of capturing all of the energy of their galaxy would take over 6 5*** times longer than the universe has been in existence, to create that barrier.
On the show this takes less than a minute, but making life easier, it will be assumed that the barrier was built in 100 seconds.
(9.61E+55 J)/(100 s) =  9.61E+53 Watts  according to the wikipedia entry on the Kardashev scale, the entire visible universe only has around 10^45 Watts of power available, this would lead us to assume that Phineas and Ferb are the avatars of godlike beings whose rule encompasses a range of universes.

*For the general case we would arbitrarily designate a thickness for the barrier and the material the barrier is comprised of.  So long as the assumed thickness of the barrier is less than 500 light years there is no real need to do a complicated volume calculation, as the second radius is less than 1% greater than the original radius.  If you are so inclined to make your calculations overly accurate or make the barrier incredibly thick, calculate the volume of the larger sphere, and subtract the volume of a 50,000 light year sphere.  With the barrier's volume calculated, divide the volume of the barrier by a selected material's density.  Now you can rejoin the math above.
**  I am making the assumption that all of the barriers mass was created through some kind of matter synthesizer, this is because the episode doesn't show the barrier requiring any mass feed-stocks, that and it makes my life easier.  If some one wants to go crazier on details, please feel free.  Also I acknowledge this calculation ignores the chemical energy of the bonds in the graphene, if memory serves that additional potential energy should be negligible to the system's overall value, please correct me if I am wrong.

*** edited 12/14/2015 I forgot that the universe is currently estimated to be 13.82 billion years old, for some reason I was thinking 12 billion years, amateur hour malarkey I know

Schematics for Displaying your Lego Creation

Properly displaying one's Lego creations is an incredibly important aspect of any true Lego fan's efforts.  To that end I have sketched out a stand system that can be made using 1/8 inch acrylic, a laser cutter or CNC machine, and a decently high resolution 3-D printer, or if you are willing to destroy some bricks you can skip the laser cutter3-D printer.

 The image below is a full render of what the base should roughly look like. 

The grid pattern you see at the base of the display stand is to allow for the user to position the supports as needed.  The grid pattern repeats every 8 mm, which is the standard spacing for the studs on Lego bricks.  

The curved pieces have two lower contacts to help keep them in place.  The top element is intended to mesh with the custom printed Lego Brick, that being said, someone could cut off that top contact point from the design and directly glue on a pre-existing brick.  For the cost conscious this would be the wiser choice, seeing as the cost of 3-D printing at Lego brick resolutions runs you something like $5/ brick.  

I would like to thank the author of robertcailiau.eu for their page on Lego Brick dimensions, the explanations on tolerancing rationals used by Lego corps was very helpful, and much faster to read than going through patents.

I will try to put up some engineering files later today.  Please note that I will not have curf corrections in the drawings as I cannot account for machining variances.

Flat packing the critical parts of a home

Providing sustainable living arrangements for a burgeoning global population is a tough proposition. Engineers around the world are asking themselves how do you bring the most benefit to the world without draining its resources?  Housing has an amazing potential to impact the overall level of sustainability of a region, the more efficient a community is at using its local resources the lower their ecological footprint.  One way to make homes more efficient is to provide home makers with an efficient starting point for construction, to that end designers could work to create construction elements to serve as that starting point.  It is my opinion that these starting points should be the kitchen and/or the bathroom.  The rational for these rooms serving as the starting point stems from the additional mechanical complexity required for rooms that have plumbing.  If someone building a home had a wall that contained all of the necessary elements for moving water, electricity and if needed natural gas, the cost of building the home should be drastically reduced.  At this point I have an under constrained design space, which can be rather overwhelming as you start to consider so many different possibilities.

Possibility 1)  A really bare bones system with connection points for water (hot and cold), electricity, and drainage.  This provides a strong starting point that you could attach either a kitchen sink or elements from a bathroom.  Possibly the cheapest of the concepts.

Possibility 2) A total of 3 wall segments folded into a single flat packed element that allows for power and water distribution between the 3 walls, this would allow for builders to have a very easy starting point, that so long as it was unfolded along specified configurations, would also be rather stable, even before the rest of the house was completed.

Possibility 3)  Go more high tech and integrate electrical storage into the wall elements, helping to smooth the home's energy demands, varying tiers could be designed for different budgets,   The intro model ships with a 200 watt solar array and embedded into the walls enough energy storage capacity for 1 kilowatt hour of electricity.  Not a large amount of energy, but it would allow for the lights to stay on during power outages.  Higher tiers could store more electricity and provide for larger electrical draws.

Possibility 3 b)  Integrate additional lighting fixtures, considering modern LEDs are expected to have life expediencies of around almost 20 years, with some clever design work you could make a home where the lights wouldn't need to be changed for generations.  (there are some trade offs that may make this a terrible idea, but hey, we're talking theoreticals now)

The rational behind designing individual wall elements with all of this integrated equipment as opposed to creating a flat pack home stems from the belief that this technology should be used to empower local communities, not mitigate the benefits of local labor and resources.  With these panels, home designers could choose to make something akin to an Earthship, a more traditional American Cape-Cod, or a home design whose name I don't know.  Ideally such designs should be open source or at the very least, like shipping containers, there should be standardized dimensions and design constraints to ensure safety.  Examples could include making sure the wiring and socket elements can accommodate the various AC standards found around the world.

Shared thought processes part.. Uhhh. I should really number said posts

Recently the website FastCompany did an article about ground based robot delivery systems.  A very similar idea to my post "Let Us Segue the Conversation to the Segway", although Dispatch Robotics, the company who are making this delivery robot, opted to use 4 wheels instead of two.  So it is very cool to seeing real businesses coming up with a similar idea. and actually following through (kind of critical that bit)

Ambulance Escorts

It happens, traffic has slowed to a crawl, cars seem so close you can reach out and touch them, and out of nowhere an ambulance starts to blare its sirens.  Drivers have no way of knowing where to move to, the road is full, they know they should pull over, but where should they pull over to.  In previous years, the ambulance drivers and general public would simply have to hope they made the right decision.  Now things can change, technologies exist that would allow emergency personal to very clearly communicate what path they need cleared.  Small and smart aircraft equipped with projectors could race ahead of emergency vehicles, informing bystanders what path they should leave clear.  This increased awareness could shave critical moments off of a journey.


This idea was inspired by conversations with Natasha Scolnik while dealing with Cambridge traffic.

OK hyperbole aside, I do like this idea, it sounds so cool and futuristic, the real question, something I don't really have a clear enough sense of is this, would augmenting emergency vehicles with expensive drones really provide enough of a benefit to lives saved to warrant the additional costs, probably in the millions of dollars, and to that I have no solid answer.

Particle Accelerator Engines

This post will be on the shorter end of the spectrum as it is more a personal unanswered question than anything else.

One of the many ways to power spacecraft and satellites is the use of ion engines.

Over the past several years physicists and engineers have been working on making particle accelerators smaller and more energy efficient.  These shoebox sized particle accelerators might serve as a means to augment the capacity of a propulsion system, individual particles, super accelerated could have a very high specific impulse.  Who knows what the ramifications would be for space exploration?

Follow Up 12/2/15:  I wanted to note, part of the challenge of a particle accelerator being used as a means of space craft propulsion is the question of power required per unit of thrust.  There are articles about a seemingly magical drive that some researchers claim can provide something along the lines of a Newton of thrust for a few kilowatts, from a youtube video, which I will need to hunt down, the presenter notes that if a ratio of a few newtons of thrust can be gained by each kilowatt of power put into the engine system, it would revolutionize our ability to explore the solar system.  Under its current design the shoe box accelerator is far from optimized to shooting out a large volume of high speed particles, so first engineers would need to investigate the viability of such a modification from a cost benefits stand point.  If a micro-accelerator can improve the fuel efficiency of space craft the impact could be tremendous, here's hoping we keep solving problems.

Turning the World Right Side Up.... IN SPACE!!!!

One of the many challenges astronauts face while aboard the International Space Station is disorientation.  Basically humans don't really do well when they see things that don't make sense, this includes people working away at a position 90 degrees offset from what they consider the "correct" orientation.  This sense of disorientation has led to crew aboard the space station to temporarily become lost.  There have been several proposals to promote a more consistent sense of direction, this could, at least partially, be handled by painting a consistent up/down color scheme, up is blue, down is brown, something similar to the horizons here on Earth. (honestly I wrote brown without thinking the rhyming was fun, but unintended).  This is a starting point, but assumes that the space craft is built as a borderline plainer structure, something that the ISS is not.  Future space stations are also unlikely to be built in a roughly 2 dimensional configuration, so let us expand this design rational into the 3rd dimension (if you could read this with a dramatic voice that would be awesome).  Future space-craft could use a design reference system that would provide an absolute sense of direction, similar to how naval vessels use the terms, port, starboard, fore, and aft (honestly you really just need more authoritative sounding terms for up and down).  Each direction would have a corresponding color and physical texture.  Seeing as port and starboard already have red and green, respectively, it might as well be worth keeping them as is.  The other colors and textures, I will leave to others to decide, personally I would suggest "up" be a lighter color, "down" to a darker one.  To aid in astronaut's sense of orientation, the inside of buildings here on Earth could also be treated with this coloring and texturing.  Major players  NASA, ESA, JAXA, SpaceX, etc... would need to agree on this design scheme, but in the end, every perspective explorer of the stars could have a shared sense of direction.

Quick note, I can't find the article I read that first talked about using color schemes for orientation, I will try to provide the link at a later time.