this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
107 points (89.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
35958 readers
1299 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think you're overestimating how easy explosive material is to get.
That strongly depends on where you live, how much you need, and how good of a home chemist your are. Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places. Enough to kill a bunch of people in a crowd? Quite easy.
It's a case by case thing of course but incendiaries are also an option sometimes and these are laughably easy to make. Strategically placed near fire exits the results could be devastating.
Fireworks sales are legal in Ohio. Setting them off is illegal.
However buying them and harvesting the gun powder seems pretty easy.
nitric acid and cellulose or most organics. I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds. Air is mostly nitrogen. Two air conditioner compressors can work in series to with the second running ethylene glycol IIRC to get low enough to liquefy air for nitrogen. It probably only takes something like hydrochloric acid and a few steps to get somewhere useful. Probably written in a high school chemistry textbook.
These days we do have the means to do it, though I don't know how achievable they are to the home-gamer
But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem
I'm not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don't fully understand
But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N~2~ molecule. That's what the nitrogen in the air is, that's what liquid nitrogen is.
And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn't like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.
However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.
But for us to do that through chemical processes isn't easy. We can't just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.
Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn't turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world's population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they're allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.
Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you've eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.
And it's still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world's energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.
If you've got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there's probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.
There is Ostwald and Birkeland–Eyde
Birkeland–Eyde, yes, but that's even more inefficient than the Haber process.
Ostwald is something else though, that's basically the next step after the Haber process to turn the ammonia into nitric acid.
Birkeland–Eyde seems quite scalable and accessible. Like just lightning in a bottle. A few solar panels and an old automotive ignition coil, CRT TV transformer etc.
Far easier ways to make/acquire gun powder, and far better explosives available. Fireworks make a lot of noise and light, but they aren't particularly strong explosives.
But the ensuing video will be so pretty!
And yet we've had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.
We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.
Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a "success" for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.
Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.
It's very difficult to get explosives and it's very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.
You need compact explosives to effectively deliver by drone. The attacks you mentioned will typically use the homemade stuff that use fertiliser and is less compact (which is easier to deliver by van, as shown by Breivik and the guy that did the Oklahoma bombing).
Fair
I think you're underestimating how easy it is to make.
No, I think you're underestimating how hard it is to make small explosives.
If you can point out where in history a small explosive that could be delivered via drone has been used by the public that would be fantastic.
Isn't that the whole point of those past? That it hasn't yet, but plastic based explosives are easy enough to make at a quantity that could kill several people and could be delivered with a drone to do so. This would be a new form of terrorism (new in the sense that it is available to the public and not just state actors) that would be similar to 9/11 if perpetrated at scale.
I think you're overestimating how difficult it is to make your own.
I make my own black powder for shooting.
2 KNO3 + S + 3 C
Stump remover, sulfur, charcoal. Few bucks to make a kilo.
Consumer drones can't carry that much weight, the explosives would have to be very, very powerful.
Fair enough! I was going to edit and say that black powder isn't technically explosive, just burns real fast.