Death Star Science: The Physics Of Destroying An Earth-Sized Planet 173
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.
Obligatory (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't a normal laser, it is a gravity laser. The gravity laser compresses all of the matter in the way to the point where fusion occurs between all elements. This lets you poke a whole through the planet since the beam can get past the matter it has already compressed. While the beam is still on it will be pulling more and more of the planet into it. When you get enough captured in the beam, turn it off and left the compressed matter explodes via nuclear fusion.
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"poke a whole" what? A whole *what* you illiterate clod?
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A typo on an internet forum! Thank god you were here to make sure all of us were aware of this author's most grievous of sins. Clearly the author wasn't taking seriously the grave responsibility that comes with posting in an internet forum! Oh when will the Slashdot editors take resposible action and delete this post as we all know the most insignificant of errors that can easily be read around completely invalidates a point.
Or in other words, go post in another forum and let the adults talk here.
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Well i'm glad you've made such a bold contribution to the conversation.
Re: Obligatory (Score:1)
SoylentNews! Fuck beta! Are we still mad at slashdot?
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If this is a hand held weapon, I hope you wear gloves...
Destroy a planet (Score:1)
I could!
It was plan B (Score:2)
Re:It was plan B (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it would work as well as TFA suggests. Even if you could instantly insert a 5-7 tera-ton anti-matter asteroid into earth's core, it would not just instantly detonate. Only the surface, that was in contact with matter, would explode, sending a compression wave both inward and outward, pushing the matter and anti-matter apart. Plasma would occupy the space in between, but it would be too tenuous to provide enough energy to instantly blow the planet apart in just a few seconds. Sure, all life would be wiped out, and the planet would be blown apart, but I am not sure it would happen in just a "few seconds" like in the movie.
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And electrical panels on FTL starships don't explode in sparks every time somebody rams into the hull. And cars don't blow up in huge fireballs every time they roll over in slow motion. And Micheal Bay's special effects budget is bigger than NASA's entire operation.
Geez guy, have some empathy. It's the movies.
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Well, of course he rested. He was spinning off into space in his TIE Advanced. He couldn't do much else but rest.
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Greg Bear wrote a story using anti matter to destroy the Earth. It was two projectiles one made of neutronum and one made of anti-neutronium. and yes they blew up in the core along with some large fusion bombs planted along the plate boundaries.
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Darth Vader toooootaly wanted to do that, but when he popped down to the antimatter asteroid shop, they were closed.
"I'm sure that in 1985, anti-matter is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by."
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Generating the power ... is impossible?!?! (Score:1)
So is space flight [rfcafe.com] according to the NY Times - in 1920.
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Yes, it's as impossible as flying to the Moon by flapping your arms. Some things just *are* impossible.
Your type of reversed logic is insane because it can be used to justify anything, because there's no logical connection between the two things you're trying to "compare".
And as for your "Space flight" example, except for a handful of people who went to the Moon nearly HALF A CENTURY ago, no one else has gone. And the Moon is "spaceflight" like jumping in the air is a 747.
Worst. Science. Writer. Ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop, Ethan. You make me want to amputate my brain.
Re:Worst. Science. Writer. Ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop, Ethan. You make me want to amputate my brain.
Then you too can be a Slashdot editor!
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I think he's a pretty good science writer, or at least I enjoy reading his writing.
Writing about obliterating the earth might be kind of frivolous but i'm not sure it makes him a bad science writer.
Maybe you could give us your learned opinion as to what makes his writing so bad.
Or was it just this article in particular ?
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I just love how this is modded insightful instead of funny. It actually shows there is a very real problem with how people think the way slashdot is managed.
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I don't even have a brain. Can I take it? :)
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Why use antimatter? I would prefer to use antematter, you know, the stuff that was here before matter existed.
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Maybe, but I -always- get uncomfortable about a scientist (or any other person) telling me that something is impossible.
It's clear that the way to destroy a planet is to build a beam that will suppress the gluon binding force.
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Please stop, Ethan. You make me want to amputate my brain.
Amputations are boring; you should excise it with a "superlaser".
Easier solutions (Score:2)
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 comp
Re:Easier solutions (Score:4, Funny)
Ethan 'Bubblegum' Tate: We need some kind of Doomsday device to create an implosion like that.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Doomsday device? Aha! Now the ball's in Farnsworth's court.
[pulls on a lever; a platform appears with several Doomsday devices]
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I suppose I can part with one and still be feared.
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Practicality doesnt enter into this. The Death Star was a terror weapon and with its ability to blow up planets, about as good as they come. They even spell this out for the viewer in Episode IV: A New Hope when one of the senior imperials goes on at length about fear of the space station keeping systems in line.
summar and article provably wrong (Score:2)
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
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I think the general idea was that you need to get the antimatter to interact directly with the matter at the centre of a planet. You could posit that the death star was sending an immense stream of contained antimatter bound within some sort of energy beam which also worked to clear away regular matter in the upper crust.
Re:summar and article provably wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to transport the antimatter through the crust and mantle. You can just send it directly into the core via hyperspace.
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you don't need antimatter at all. The Death Star's volume is sufficient to house energy store that could impart enough to a laser or any other kind of particle beam to vaporize a whole planet. the premise is false.
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Han Solo: Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it.
There are a number of scientific inaccuracies in Star Wars, and this is one of them. If you plot a trajectory between two stars, the chance of that path passing directly through another star is infinitesimal. The chance of passing near a supernova (which occur rarely, and flare and fade out within weeks or months) is essentially zero.
Han was just being dramatic. Traveling through hyperspace isn't near as risky as he implies. A quick jump of a few dozen parsecs is no big deal.
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as a plot device, some popular sci-fi stories at the time (e.g. Ringworld series) held that a hyperspace trajectory that passed within say light-year of star was "dangerous", kind of like going inside the event horizon of a black hole.
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I guess you agree that hyperspace can't traverse matter
When traveling through hyperspace, you don't "traverse" normal 3D space. It just doesn't work that way. It is like jumping from one location on a sheet of paper to another by folding or rolling the paper, and moving through the extra dimension. You can move from inside an enclosed polygon, to outside, without traversing the boundary.
Han was not a tech. He knew how to use a hyperdrive, but he clearly didn't understand the technology that made it work.
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The hyperspace in Star Wars is more like the hyperspace in Niven's Known Space or a Star Trek warp drive than like a jump drive. You don't take a shortcut, rather, you can travel faster than c in hyperspace. That type of hyperdrive has limitations around masses in most science fiction.
Presumably Han Solo needs to at least know something about the limitations of a hyperdrive if he's going to pilot a hyperdrive ship. Since he's always fixing it, he probably knows something about the principles behind it as
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... the only downside to hyperspacing through an object is you'd die real good... which isn't really a concern here.
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No need, I've proven a Death Star can house sufficient energy store to power a laser that could disassemble a planet. The summary is just wrong.
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Why? If you used the antimatter and matter in a reactor to generate energy for a super laser, the laser beam would transport the energy to the planet. The energy transfer from the laser to the planet is much less problematic than from a ball of antimatter. If you tossed an antimatter asteroid at Earth it might not even hit the surface before it bounced off.
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Why is it impossible? (Score:1)
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.
next up on slashdot (Score:2)
"Star Wars is impossible because we can't travel faster than light."
Then ... "giant worms don't exist in asteroids"
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Simple weapons ... (Score:1)
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fission / fusion (Score:2)
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
Iron is the core for a reason (Score:2)
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You're stating the obvious.
The iron is mostly in the core. The mantle consists largely of magnesium, silicon, and oxygen, all elements that can undergo fusion (and do in nature). In addition, there are enough heavy elements that some form of catalyzed fission may also take place. A "Death Star" might also only work on so
Hmm (Score:3)
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?
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More practically you would need to simply propel it somehow, with shielding in front to deflect normal matter from its path. Propulsion would have to be non-contact (or made entirely of anti-matter itself, kinda impractical).
What does it take to destroy a planet? (Score:2)
I need to know by friday...
Over-engineered/overpowered (Score:1)
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.
Already been done (Score:4, Informative)
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Protip: don't attempt this from an equatorial orbit.
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Why bother ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Intel Pentium 133MHz Can't Do The Job... (Score:2)
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I don't think we want to know what he did once he got the computer on its virtual knees.
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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.
I'm pretty sure thats a myth. You can only do that once per fight with one 'Doom Star' and it ends the fight.
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I'm pretty sure thats a myth. You can only do that once per fight with one 'Doom Star' and it ends the fight.
My roommate was disabled and spent years playing MOO2 (his favorite game). One Doom Star was enough to kill a planet. But he was good enough with his resources to build Doom Stars on a regular basis to use 32 Doom Stars per planetary kill for maximum overkill.
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I'm pretty sure thats a myth. You can only do that once per fight with one 'Doom Star' and it ends the fight.
My roommate was disabled and spent years playing MOO2 (his favorite game). One Doom Star was enough to kill a planet. But he was good enough with his resources to build Doom Stars on a regular basis to use 32 Doom Stars per planetary kill for maximum overkill.
I'm pretty sure the game mechanic was that if you have one stellar converter in the fleet you get an option when your fleet engages that you use the stellar converter to destroy the planet and theres no battle. Once the fleet has engaged theres no option to then use the stellar converter on each ship; you'd have to retreat and wait till next turn to attack and use the stellar converter.
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After reading the MOO2 wikis, perhaps it was 32 Doom Stars against the enemy fleet that brought the computer to its virtual knees. Once the enemy fleets were annihilated, my roommate annihilated the planets one by one. Since I haven't played the game in years, my recollection might be faulty.
For the record, I only got a Doom Star once or twice when I played MOO2 in my misbegotten youth.
Yeah... (Score:2)
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...
Not the most efficient (Score:2)
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
Overkill? (Score:3)
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.
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Looking at the on-screen explosion it doesn't seem like there is nearly enough mass ejected to account for a sphere of that size anyway. Either much of the matter was annihilated, or the Death Star was mostly hollow on the inside anyway. At the end of Jedi we see that there is at least one huge open chasm inside.
All you need is .... (Score:2)
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
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Don't worry, the whole premise is false. Assuming usual 3 percent conversion efficiency, the volume of even fusion fuel sufficient to disassemble a planet is sixty six (66) of those 5-7 mile diameter asteroids. That would fit into the volume of the Death Star's 150 km diameter. If that energy could be imparted entirely to a laser beam, it would be sufficient to vaporize an earth sized planet. No reason to put something in the core.
Hellooo... (Score:2)
Red matter??? Amateurs.
Things of Interest (Score:3)
The site "Things of Interest" (qntm.org) has a pair of better articles:
Antimatter (Score:2)
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?
How to destroy the earth (Score:2)
http://qntm.org/destroy [qntm.org]
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pfft.
Red matter for the win.
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You just download the file and 3D print it? Luddite.
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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.
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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!
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Or you could just blow up the moon and wait for the Hard Rain [amazon.com]
Re: Silly premise. (Score:1)
Or you could just buy a hummer.
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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
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Contradictory Premise (Score:2)
...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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] by Greg Bear.
So clearly the premise is wrong - you can
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Slow down. I'm trying to write all this down...for a friend.
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Originally it was. Now it's just vapour.
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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?
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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.
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Wait! What!? Usenet is dead?
Did Netcraft confirm it?
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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.
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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."
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The point of the death star was to be flashy. It was blatantly described as a terror weapon.
IIRC from the books, sterilizing planets was something that happened occasionally, using more conventional means.