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The Guide to WMDs
Topic Started: Apr 29 2014, 02:15 AM (154 Views)
Kingborough
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The Monarchist
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The Guide to WMDs

Today, lets talk about explosions. Sounds fun right?

Deathstars, Antimatter, Vorgon Highways, Red Matter, Osterhagen; sci-fi is full of planets exploding in fireworks, disintegrating or generally being rendered uninhabitable. For some reason, people like the idea of something as big as a planet blowing up. Or if that isn't bad enough, they quite often like to blow up stars as well. And don't even get me started on galaxies.

Now, I'm afraid it is not quite that simple to blow' something as massive as a planet up. The earth for example weighs 6,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. Honestly, if you tried hard enough you may work out a way to blow it up, but I don't suggest it.

In fact, it would take around 2.2 x 1032 joules of energy to blow up Alderaan as the Deathstar did. That is the output of the sun for a week; simply put there is no known way you could harness that amount of energy. [1]

Now, according to LiveScience's Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth, to make a big enough explosion to destroy earth it would require 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter, the most explosive substance known to man. Oh and thats if conversion was 100% efficient, which is unlikely. You could alternatively work out how to send Venus flying towards Earth at 11km/s. But again, uneconomical. Giant lasers and spaceships fall in the same category.

Now, how about we talk about what you can do to destroy a planet? Well, there are some options, but most won't actually physically obliterate the planet - just make it uninhabitable.

- NUKES. Believe it or not, we're quite capable of destroying our planet today. The world's present arsenal of about 20,000 nukes would be plenty enough to cause a nuclear winter, which is when enough dust kicked up by explosions gets into the atmosphere and blocks the sun - effectively freezing the planet's inhabitants. To add to this, the massive radiation fallout would also help kill off the human race. Only downside is missile shields.

- ANTIMATTER. Now, you don't need 2,500,000,000,000 tons if you only want to kill off life. Just do what we did with nukes, and cause a nuclear (antimatter) winter. You'd require less anti-matter than nukes, because its quite a bit more damaging, but it's also expensive to make and hard to contain. Downside? Like nukes, people have missile shields.

- ASTEROIDS. Actually one of the most efficient ways to kill a planet is to throw an asteroid at it. Now, you have two options here;
a) Strap some very big rockets to a medium sized asteroid and let it go on its way. It'll probably blow up a large chunk of the surface where it impacts, and then kill most life within a few months as the resulting super-heated dust cloud sets fire to the world's flora and chokes to death anything that requires oxygen.
b) Get a bigger asteroid, aim it precisely, and fire. If you get it at the right angle, you can theoretically push a planet into an orbit where it'll eventually (after about a year) crash into its sun. Meanwhile, most life on the planet would die for the same reasons as above. The downside is meteorite shields are a thing, though they'd not be able to avoid all damage even if they stopped the end of the world.

- NANOBOTS. Scary things are nanobots, and probably the cheapest way to kill a planet. Just smuggle a few self-replicating nanobots into a planet, and let them have their merry way. They'll consume everything in site to make more of themselves, until you have a planet sized cloud of hungry robots. The downside? Well, did you read what I just said? First off, sometime during the early stages of the infection interstellar travel is quite likely to spread the infection to anywhere in the galaxy, bots hidden in peoples blood streams - just like how diseases and plagues spread in the real world. Not to mention after they finish having lunch with your enemy, you have released a giant space travelling monstrosity that will come and eat your planets next.

- SUPERVIRUS. Honestly, a supervirus is just as bad an idea as nanobots. Create a super powerful virus (somehow), and release it on the target planet. Now, good thing to note here is you could probably easily design it to only attack a certain species. The bad news? Viruses mutate. Alot. It's quite likely it'll cross over to other species who are similar in biology, and kill the universe, or at least more people than you planned.
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/02/04/the-physics-of-the-death-star/
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