Technology has been moving forward at dazzling speeds in the last few decades. It wasn’t a full century ago that industrial production really started to become the norm, and most people alive today were born when things like cellphones and the internet seemed like bad science fiction. It’s hard to imagine what the world looked like a few generations ago, since technology has all but taken over our entire lives. But it’s not just in personal applications where technology has started to shine. We’ve been building machines that are more complex and powerful than ever before to help us understand and manipulate more of this world.
Let’s take a look at some of the most insane machines we’ve built over the years and why we built them in the first place. Strap up, science nerds!
Z Machine
The Z Machine is capable of replicating plasma that’s found within white dwarf stars. That’s about the equivalent of a thousand lightning bolts all at once, converging at a tiny point. The machine was initially built to simulate the fusion reaction created by thermonuclear bombs without having to actually blow up a nuclear bomb. If you want to be even more impressed by it, though, it’s basically something that generates more energy than is put into it, which could help us a lot in creating sustainable energy. Or Iron Man suits. I’m honestly happy with either.
James Webb Space Telescope
If you’re going to create a complex and technically impressive machine, you might as well send it into space. While the Hubble Space Telescope that came before it was already impressive, the James Webb version is about 100 times as good. The biggest engineering challenge came when they had to make this huge telescope function of the freezing temperatures in space, but at this point, we can pretty much confirm that it works.
