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Death Star Science: The Physics Of Destroying An Earth-Sized Planet
StartsWithABang writes: The ability to destroy an Alderaan-like (or, ahem, Earth-like) planet has long been the dream of slashdotters everywhere. But generating the power necessary to unbind a planet — some 2.24 x 10^32 Joules — is simply impossible on board an object only the size of a small moon. But if, instead, you could house a 1-2 trillion ton asteroid (about 5-7 km across) made of antimatter and deliver it to the planet's core, Einstein's E=mc^2 ensures that the planet will be destroyed in seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I could!
Greg bear did a pretty good job of describing the process... provided we can make neutronium & antineutronium... :)
There's a much more eco-friendly way to do this.
Just fire a Genesis Torpedo at the planet and recolonize when it stabilizes.
STAR TREK RULES!!
You don't need to unbind the planet, you only need to melt the top 2-3 km of the crust. Anything more than that is a waste. Doing this would wreck the atmosphere and even anyone who tried to go deep underground would be trapped there indefinitely.
Darth Vader toooootaly wanted to do that, but when he popped down to the antimatter asteroid shop, they were closed.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This isn't some new speculation, I read this book "war in 2080" from the 1970s. I remember that it would take more energy to stop Earth's orbital motion than to overcome its self-attraction.
It's a great book to read since it will also put to rest any delusions you might have about our "species leaving this rock", or whatever religious overtones you have about space...
Use red matter. Crossing star wars with star trek just makes things strange.
Where do you propose to create a 7 KM diameter ball of antimatter?
So is space flight according to the NY Times - in 1920.
Please stop, Ethan. You make me want to amputate my brain.
You might want to check out antimatter before busting out the 'i' word... with an energy density of 1.8e17 joules per kilogram, it wouldn't even take that much.
The problem isn't how to destroy a planet once you make an asteroid of antimatter, the problem is how to make an asteroid of antimatter faster than the planet will die of natural causes. Or, simply, this is crap for nerds, not even remotely interesting.
Supposedly CERN can create a black hole that will destroy the earth. SO why not emulate cern?
So you're saying the Death Star is vaporware?
Anti-cows?
Idiots, can't even reach other solar systems, can't even fix our environment problems, can't even get over killing each other for money or religion, and discussing how to blowup a planet...
This was all covered on usenet:alt.destroy.the.earth in the 1990s.
With the death of usenet, the project was abandoned and the earth was spared. Blame AOL.
https://jult.net/adte.htm
Given most matter is composed of quarks in the current model which mostly exist in quarks+anti-quark pairs in the current model, you already have all that anti-matter there already.
Indeed, if the only difference is charge, then even the correct ratio of electrons and protons would cancel out. So why don't they?
A sufficient number of nuclear warheads would be just as effective. You might have a few people surviving in hardened underground installations, but this is something we could accomplish with today's technology.
There are probably several score of chemical or biological weapons that could also wipe out a planet or better yet wipe out just a targeted species on it while leaving much or most of the planet and its ecology intact.
Unless we've already got so many habitable planets that we can afford to completely destroy one, it's probably better to leave the planet intact and ideally habitable after killing everything on it as presumably the people doing the killing would also want to use it at some point.
A death star, 150 km in diameter, can house a 5-7 km ball of antimatter and the matter necessary to bind with it. Therefore a death star could have the means in its volume to have sufficient energy to unbind a planet. QED
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis just push an asteroid out of the asteroid belt
Why would this incredibly huge number of 2.24 x 10^32 Joules be impossible to generate from a civilization capable of traveling at the speed of light in most small ships? Wikipedia says to accelerate to one tenth the speed of light requires 4.5 ×10^17 Joules. That is for a 1 ton mass. 2.24x10^32 / 4.5x10^17 = ~498 Trillion of those generators. That should fit in a "small moon" sized ship.
"Star Wars is impossible because we can't travel faster than light."
Then ... "giant worms don't exist in asteroids"
The antimatter/matter reaction only occurs at the interface between the two, so it is also wrong to say it would only require seconds. It is like trying to light a bunch of motor oil without aerosolizing it first. You only get a bang when the surface area between the two reactants is very large in proportion to the total volume.
Humans. We are already destroying the Earth.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Is there a time limit, or does it have to be near-instantaneous to qualify? We're already destroying the Earth nearly instantaneously; on a geologic time scale a couple hundred years is nearly instantaneous.
An easier way to ensure the complete destruction of an Earth-sized planet is to seed it with (possibly semi-intelligent) life and wait.
Before long one species will emerge that joyfully poisons the planet's environment, consumes natural resources far beyond what is necessary for it's simple survival and, if you're lucky, fill the planet's immediate orbit with enough junk to make it a hazard for interplanetary navigation.
And best of all, it's cheap!!!
Requirements: Adam + Eve + Time
Presumably, you wouldn't pump all the energy to destroy a planet in from the outside. Instead, you'd probably fire some kind of catalyst into the planet that causes fusion or fission throughout the planet. Keep in mind that most of a planet is already under very high temperatures and pressures. Potentially, even a strong muon beam or similarly heavy charged particles might start to induce fusion. There may also be many other mechanisms for inducing fusion or fission in solid matter that we simply don't know about.
A 5-7km size asteroid? How would you house it in a space ship efficiently? You would need some sort of spherical spaceship. It might look like a moon from a distance, but what would aliens think as they got close to it?
I need to know by friday...
I know it simplifies the calculations, but there's absolutely no reason to need to separate every atom from every other atom in the planet. All you have to do (hah) is break it into about a few million roughly equal-sized pieces, which takes several orders of magnitude less energy, and would be just as spectacular and useful.
Greg Bear's The Forge of God destroyed the Earth in this manner many years ago. An attacking civilization flung two large pieces of neutronium and antineutronium at opposite sides of the Earth, where they descended to the core and orbited each other for several weeks, until they spiraled in together and made bad things happen.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Have gnu, will travel.
I used to have a roommate who played Master of Orion 2 on his PC with an Intel Pentium 133MHz processor. His style of game play was to keep the A.I. at bay, gather significant resources, and build 32 Death Stars to systematically eliminate every planet. Every time 32 Death Stars fired upon a planet, the computer is brought to its virtual knees.
A 2 trillion ton chunk of a theoretical material.
It's really easy to mind-fuck about that kind of stuff and avoid dealing with the human power mechanisms destroying ecosystems on the so far lucky ball we creatures live. Dream on...
Personally, I'd suspect that it would be far simpler, and likely more thorough, and even perhaps more efficient energywise to simply steer (or create) a small black hole to hit the earth. Even a small one would likely accumulate mass faster than it would evaporate, and would eventually, almost certainly, destroy the earth.
A big asteroid of antimatter is ridiculously dangerous, ridiculously hard to move, and has the problem of fratricide: that is, blowing chunks of earth far enough away from the antimatter that they're reasonably safe.
A black hole would ostensibly get every single atom. You could even say it 'cleans up' when it's done.
If you're simply looking for enough destruction to wreck (ie not annihilate) earth, hell, that's easy-mode. You wouldn't even need too big of an asteroid, just something you could accelerate to near-c velocities over decades from the oort cloud and put on a collision course. Earth's on a nice, perfectly-predictable path for the next several-thousand years. It's not even that much of a trick shot.
-Styopa
...generating the power necessary to unbind a planet ... is simply impossible on board an object only the size of a small moon.
and yet later the same person says:
But if, instead, you could house a 1-2 trillion ton asteroid (about 5-7 km across) made of antimatter and deliver it to the planet's core,...
Last I checked that was the size of a small moon so you can indeed shatter a planet with a small moon but it is a one shot device. However if you can make and store anti-neutronium this would would shrink the radius to ~0.5-0.7m (10,000 times less) and solve the problem of how to get it to the core. In fact this has already been the premise of a novel by Greg Bear.
So clearly the premise is wrong - you can store a device on a small moon which can destroy a plane and, what's worse, the author actually told us this later in the same article! Why does slashdot continue to post stories from this guy?
The assumption in the article appears to be that the planet was blown apart with such force that it never reformed, who says that is the case? Just blowing the planet up to the point where it temporary ejected most of its mass and then eventually reformed into a lifeless rock should require significantly less energy.
So, instead of the Death Star being a moon-sized platform for a laser, it becomes a kind of delivery truck for antimatter mini-moons with a self-unloader (the laser.)
Cool
But these antimatter mini-moons take a tremendous amount of energy to produce. Given that the calculated power to blast apart an earth-like world is the output of a Sun-like star for several weeks - and even assuming that the efficiency of the production of antimatter from energy is likely to better than CERN's billion to one ratio of energy in to anti-matter out, we're still looking at ratios likely to be in the order of millions to thousands. That means the entire output of a sun-like star from 19 to 58,000 years or so for one weapon. And that's with an enormous amount of waste heat.
And that doesn't consider the size of the Galactic Federation or "The Rim" and whether the purpose of the Death Star is solely internal or if it is appropriate for use against external enemies as well. Which suggests that a "SWATting-like" strategy should be used against the Death Star as there can't be more than one or two of these anti-matter weapons available at any one time. It also suggests attacking the systems for producing these weapons might be a more appropriate Rebel strategy.
Iron is the element with the lowest potential nuclear energy - it's the end point of fusion as a result Therefore there is no prospect of using the iron for such a process; the best you could hope for is some of the other elements in the planet. However getting them to react at the nuclear level would be very ambitious - and the iron would keep on getting in the way.
Red matter??? Amateurs.
The site "Things of Interest" (qntm.org) has a pair of better articles:
why does anyone want to blow up a planet? seriously, its the stupidest idea imaginable. are we all the crew of Dark Star, blowing unstable stars, whatever that means? Ill say this one more time: any civilization that can get to the point of interplanetary travel should seriously no longer be worried about destroying rival civilizations. the travel cost to get to other systems is too great to contemplate conquering other planets, let alone blowing them up. also, you destabilize the gravity well if you do that. if we blew up ceres, so that the pieces didnt even collect again, what the heck would it do to perturbate various asteroids? if you really HAD to wipe out a hostile civ, if you have greater space capacity than them, use your advantage of being at the top of a gravity well and just drop stuff on them.
As long as we're talking about things that are impossible to do, why not make 0=1 and destroy the mathematical foundation of the whole universe? One-line change.
" is simply impossible on board an object only the size of a small moon." -- Says the guy who has never built a Death Star.
Obviously you don't understand the physics of a Midi-chlorians particle beam.
Antimatter is not a common beast, the odds to find an asteroid of antimatter seems scarce.
On the other hand, a big asteroid made of plain matter can keep the planet intact while removing any life on it. Who needs more?
http://qntm.org/destroy
Just launch a few cast iron skillets into the sun (sol) and wait. That will take out a few planets.
I don't believe it is necessary to completely destroy a planet (unless you need to be flashy). You only need to make it uninhabitable (i.e. destroy the ecosystem). While human beings are very good at doing this, I suppose you are in a hurry. A surprisingly few 100 megaton cobalt bombs should do the trick. Besides, if you have the tech to create a trillion tons of antimatter you should have the tech to build a gravity wave generator capable of causing the sun to nova.
The Death Star didn't use antimatter. It used its huge transmission dish (the thing that looks like a crater) to broadcast all episodes of Friends simultaneously to the planet. This is what caused the explosion.
So why weren't there ever Anti-matter weapons on Star Trek? You'd think they could shoot one stream of AM at those pesky Borg and be done with them already.