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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!
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; }
So is space flight according to the NY Times - in 1920.
Please stop, Ethan. You make me want to amputate my brain.
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.
You just download the file and 3D print it? Luddite.
You're on to something. This earth is not unlike an egg. Get the right angle to stress its plates across each other, and it comes apart.
There's also that handy moon thing nearby; cause its orbit to go a-kilter and let the fun ensue.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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
The 10 year old boy inside of me wants to blow up a friggin planet, all right? Have some appreciation for a typical Forbes reader.
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.
You're on to something. This earth is not unlike an egg. Get the right angle to stress its plates across each other, and it comes apart.
Like putting too much air in a balloon!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Star Wars is impossible because we can't travel faster than light."
Then ... "giant worms don't exist in asteroids"
Originally it was. Now it's just vapour.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Or you could just blow up the moon and wait for the Hard Rain
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
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?
You couldn't be more wrong. For one, protons are made of THREE quarks you utter dipshit. You could have looked that up but that takes 30 seconds of your precious time, which you chose to use to be wrong...
" correct ratio of electrons and protons would cancel out. So why don't they?"
Wow. I mean, wow, as in, how does your brain manage to keep your heart beating?
Wait! What!? Usenet is dead? I was just using it. AOL, on the other hand ....
There may be an object lesson here. When the Earth is destroyed, by whatever means, the media congomerates will be responsible.
Have gnu, will travel.
We're not destroying the earth.......in the worst case, we're making it uninhabitable for humans, and many other species at the same time, but life will go on, and the earth doesn't care if it's inhabited by humans or giant cockroach descendants.
Of course, making the earth uninhabitable for humans is probably not a wise decision for us, but the earth will still be here long after we are gone.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That sounds like a waste too. You'd be better off jumping a larger hollow planet around it, then extracting all of the useful elements and compressing what's left to around the size of a basketball. You can keep the compressed planet in a trophy room, and balance the gravitational forces with others. They should make a Doctor Who episode. Douglas Adams can write it using an alias.
Or you could just buy a hummer.
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.
Probably true and it even is as disgusting and slow motion as other weapons of biological mass destruction. OC in the movies you can even make virus that works in seconds (world war z for instance) so maybe the speed is not an issue but disgusting it still is.
not if we get this planet blowing device to work.
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.
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
Earth doesn't need humans to survive. Just ask the dinosaurs. Earth will continue on for another four-billion-years until the sun expand into a red giant and makes Jupiter the new Mercury. The Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy will start merging together at that time.
...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?
If you smash it with enough speed like those damned asteroids that wipe up dominating species every 65my there will be terrible kaboom still. I would even suspect that it would be fast enough for most of the short attention span moviegoers of today to watch the planet vanish in real time.
Actually no, it was not. From all destruction like events that are known for us today or that we suspect they happened the creation of the moon by collision with Theia which is what your link says. If that happened then still earth was not destroyed but changed. The change was significant and would most likely remove all existing life (if any) on the surface but it was not destruction or else we would not be walking more or less happily on earth's surface doing silly things.
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.
Speaking of which, I want this to be a movie.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Red matter??? Amateurs.
The site "Things of Interest" (qntm.org) has a pair of better articles:
No, no he can't. :( He can't even write it with an alias.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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
The earth isn't going to "come apart" because of any stress on its plates. Even if you did stress them to ridiculous amounts, you'd wipe out everything on the surface, but the planet will stay together simply because of its gravity.
As for the Moon, that would require a ridiculous amount of energy to move as well.
The simplest, most energy-efficient way of exterminating beings on a world is to simply wreck the surface somehow, making the planet uninhabitable. It would require orders of magnitude less energy than these other fantastical ideas. Some wouldn't take much energy at all, such as dumping engineered microbes or toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to basically poison the inhabitants.
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.
That is almost as easy as making Unobtainium.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
On a geologic time scale we're irrelevant. We've added a few hundred parts per billion of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If you want to see some short sighted biology create a moderately interesting geological incident, look up "great oxygenation event."
Wait! What!? Usenet is dead?
Did Netcraft confirm it?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork