system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
The element Oganesson has the highest proton count of any element , what is stopping us from artificially adding a proton to it to see what new element we have created?

I know that adding new protons to an element has been done before but that it is very expensive and usually produces a radioactive element but surely it would be worth the cost and risk to see what goes beyond the Oganesson?
gpt
All of the nuclides which are easy to produce using currently existing facilities have been produced already. Given the way that Oganesson has been produced so far, it's not easy to just shoot another proton at it (or shoot it at a hydrogen-rich target) and measure the reaction products. The superheavy nuclides we've discovered have lifetimes on the order of milliseconds or so, which *is* long enough to run experiments with. But it would be very technically challenging to do the experiment you're suggesting.

These superheavy experiments run for a month or so at a time and hope to see *a few* events where a new element was produced. They are typically produced using low-energy fusion reactions. So you would either have to slow down the superheavy nucleus and bombard it with protons, or you have to speed up the superheavy nucleus and shoot it at a plastic target and hope it picks up a proton. These kinds of experiments can be done in principle; this is often how radioactive beam experiments are done. But if you get a few counts a month of the original superheavy nuclide, and there's a very small probability of proton capture, the experiment would take way too long to see any valid events.

There is no existing facility that could perform an experiment like that in a reasonable amount of time. You'd be much better off just trying to produce element 119 directly in the fusion reaction with some different combination of beam and target.