Earth explosion

[URSExelcior]

Montezuma smiles.

"Once I've destroyed everyone on this planet, it's true that I will eventually need to be able to leave it"

Alien meets him for the first time - Montezuma:

"we have enough on our hands right now"

For about 10000 years. When he can finally launch the ship, off goes the trumpet!



The aliens will not know what to do with 5.2 billion knights.

 

[Bostock]

You need a lot more than synchronized explosions to destroy a planet. You need to accelerate the planet's entire mass to escape velocity.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar.html

Your source has maths and logic. But mine has fanaticism and thoroughness.

http://qntm.org/?destroy

I win!

 

[digitCruncher]

A TV set is destroyed when it no longer functions - planets don't function in the first place, so your comparison is absurd.

Planets don't function?? Dang... obviously I was wrong.

But I am CERTAIN that I live on this planet... And surely if I am living on the planet, then they are functioning as intended...

Obviously not *Disappears into space*

But the nuke destroying the earth thing is a stupid idea IMO... it just requires two half-decent AI's to go at each other... and then everyone loses...

 

[cornerback24]

The aliens will not know what to do with 5.2 billion knights.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Could explosions be powerful enough to give a little nudge to the planet, so that it veers off its orbit and will accelerate towards its star, thereby vapourizing the whole thing? You still need tons of energy, but now you just don't have to generate it all yourself.

 

[digitCruncher]

Unless you fire the nukes at well timed, and well located periods, it isn't.

And the minimum amount of energy required to do this (to send it spiralling ALL the way to the sun) is immense. Remember, you would need to reduce the Kinetic energy of the Earth by a huge amount.

Spoiler For long, boring physics :

The mass of the Earth is: 6.0 * 10^24 kg (Here)

We now use the formula from Here along with the definition of the Semi-Major Axis.

The Semi-major axis in this case, is 1 AU = 1.496×10^11 m.

Thus E<Mech> = -G * M * m / 2a = (-6.67300 × 10^-11 * 1.9891 ×10^30 * 6.0 * 10^24) / (2 * 1.496×10^11)
= 26.62 * 10 ^ 32J

And finally, The total energy = U + K
= 2E/(1-e) - (E(1+e)/(1-e))
= (2E - E - eE)/(1-e)
= E(2 - 1 - e)/(1-e)
= E(1-e)/(1-e)
= E

This makes the total energy in the orbit of Earth 26.62 * 10 ^ 32 J

So, assuming that all the nukes occur on places at midnight, then the amount of energy needed to make the Earth go into the sun is 2,662,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules.

A 1 kiloton nuclear warhead produces 4.19x10^12 joules of energy (Here) This means that you would need a 6.35 * 10^20 KiloTon Nuclear weapon to do this... Americas largest nuclear weapon is the MK-41 Nuclear Weapon, with a payload of 25 MT (25 * 10^3 Kiloton), meaning you would need 25,400,000,000,000,000 of these nukes)

Now... assume you PLAN to send the Earth into the Sun... thus you could launch a nuke or two every year, at the same time, at midnight, and make the Earth go into a crazy eliptical orbit.

The only requirement NOW is that the orbit is an ellipse, where the distance from one focus, to a point is 1 AU, and the distance from the same focus, to the other side of the ellipse is 1 * 10^9 m (IE: The radius of the sun)

We now use the formula from Here along with the definition of the Semi-Major Axis.

The Semi-major axis in this case, is (1 AU + 1 * 10^9) / 2 = (1.496×10^11 + 1 * 10^9) / 2 = 1.506 * 10^11 / 2 = 7.53 * 10^10 m.

Thus E<Mech> = -G * M * m / 2a = (-6.67300 × 10^-11 * 1.9891 ×10^30 * 6.0 * 10^24) / (2 * 7.53 * 10^10)
= 5.29 * 10^33

And finally, The total energy = U + K
= 2E/(1-e) - (E(1+e)/(1-e))
= (2E - E - eE)/(1-e)
= E(2 - 1 - e)/(1-e)
= E(1-e)/(1-e)
= E

So the energy we need to get down to is just 5.29 * 10^33J

Since we started at 26.62 * 10 ^ 32, this means we just need to lose 21.37 * 10^32 J. Using the same logic, that reduces the number of nukes by 5.1 QUADRILLION to 20,300,000,000,000,000

So to summerise that very long piece of information. To fufill your dream of nuking your planet into the sun, by utilising the orbit of the earth to send it into the sun, you saved 5.1 quadrillion (thats 5.1 thousand, million, million) of Americas largest nuclear weapons. Thats the good news.

The bad news is that you still need to find 20.3 quadrillion nukes...

Even Monty would have trouble with THAT. But good luck anyway!! As you can see, potential energy SUCKS, as you need to take out a fair whack of it to make it 'veer into the sun'

 

[Harbourboy]

Wow! So much useful Civ IV strategy in this thread. I'm a better player already!

 

[aelf]

Have you forgotten the wisdom of Earthgod?! Blasphemy!

 

[fjordan]

I 've blown up the planet plenty of times in Civ IV. When I have 60% of the land some guy sticks a flag in the ground and BOOM! it goes. A little disappointing after all that hard work but at least it saves some quadramillion nukes.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Could explosions be powerful enough to give a little nudge to the planet, so that it veers off its orbit and will accelerate towards its star, thereby vapourizing the whole thing? You still need tons of energy, but now you just don't have to generate it all yourself.

That would mess up its orbit if powerful enough, but it still likely wouldn't fall into the sun. Of course, with a more elliptical orbit the earth could get very close to the sun (or far away) and the temperature would kill everything, but that wouldn't destroy the earth itself. Maybe though, if you could get the earth to slam into venus or mars, that would do it.

There are LOTS of ways to render the early totally useless. Hundreds of large nuclear warheads would certainly do it, not by destroying the earth but by destroying most life on the surface as we know it. Similar things could be done with a comet or something, although a few humans would likely survive in either scenario.

Completely destroying it would be quite difficult, as would cracking the world in half like happens in the mod (it would pull back together very quickly, and in fact I think a lot of people would survive that as I don't think we'd lose the atmosphere so easily even).

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Maybe though, if you could get the earth to slam into venus or mars, that would do it.

That's an interesting idea I've not read up in the net anywhere. It's many times easier to do that than to drive the Earth into the Sun. The collision won't crack the planets, but the structural damage will be strong enough to be considered "destroyed".

 

[TheMeInTeam]

That's an interesting idea I've not read up in the net anywhere. It's many times easier to do that than to drive the Earth into the Sun. The collision won't crack the planets, but the structural damage will be strong enough to be considered "destroyed".

The problem is that they're moving in the same direction in terms of orbit. Nevertheless, 2 PLANETS hitting each other would have very dramatic effects - at least a part of both would not be attached at the end most likely. Would it shatter them to pieces? Of course not. The mass would probably accrue to an extent, but parts of it would fly everywhere too. Whatever would be left, it wouldn't be distinguishable as the original planets.

It would be a lot more spectacular if they collided head on, but I don't know how one would accomplish that (or any of this, really :/).

 

[JesusOnEez]

This amusing article may be of some interest to you:

http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp-1.html

I'm no mathematician, but my gut tells me you couldn't destroy (as in annihilate) the plantet with nukes alone, no matter how carefully you placed them and timed them to go off. Plainly, nukes could kill everything, I'm sure nobody doubts that. My thoughts on the nearest nukes could get to destroying the planet are as follows...it'd take a fair bit of cash.

Fill up every single fault line, deep ocean trench etc on the planet with squillions of nukes. Set them all off at the same time. Although I have no doubt that the main body of the planet would remain intact, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of the earth's crust would be launched into at least low earth orbit for a good number of years before gravity pulled it back down again. I believe the crust, or at least some of it may even achieve escape velocity...perhaps not full on, send it out of the solar system escape velocity, but certainly so it ends up in a retreating orbit (like the Moon...it's slowly getting further and further away from Earth).

If that happens, what happens next? The new top layer of the Earth would eventually cool, and life would likely start from scratch given whatever circumstances started it in the first place (comets, aliens, God, whatever's yer poison).

My two cents of cack.

Edit: Perhaps not...just found this:

The gravitational binding energy of a planet of mass M and radius R is - if you do the lengthy calculations - given by the formula E=(3/5)GM^2/R. For Earth, that works out to roughly 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. The Sun takes nearly a WEEK to output that much energy. Think about THAT.

 

[JesusOnEez]

The problem is that they're moving in the same direction in terms of orbit. Nevertheless, 2 PLANETS hitting each other would have very dramatic effects - at least a part of both would not be attached at the end most likely. Would it shatter them to pieces? Of course not. The mass would probably accrue to an extent, but parts of it would fly everywhere too. Whatever would be left, it wouldn't be distinguishable as the original planets.

Isn't that the current theory of how the Moon formed? Basically a planet smacked into the Earth in its early history (perhaps even before it solidified and was mostly molten on top), and a huge blob of Earth ended up as the Moon. Eventually, gravity takes effect and shapes everything nice and spherical again.

I'm sure there are video models of that on the internet somewhere, but I can't be bothered to find them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Isn't that the current theory of how the Moon formed? Basically a planet smacked into the Earth in its early history (perhaps even before it solidified and was mostly molten on top), and a huge blob of Earth ended up as the Moon. Eventually, gravity takes effect and shapes everything nice and spherical again.

I'm sure there are video models of that on the internet somewhere, but I can't be bothered to find them.

When I learned about it back in grade school, that was a popular theory but I don't recall if they were absolutely certain of it yet. Maybe. I really don't remember as the last time I learned about this stuff was probably middle school or elementary school and while I cared about it at the time it hasn't been a true priority since TBH .

The physics of such an occurrence would depend on a lot of factors IE head on vs angled, rotation of both bodies, and composition of both bodies. A lot of things can happen. Even then, my physics training was before I switched from engineering to accounting in undergrad, so that was actually more than 4 years ago for me now too...my memory is pretty good but it isn't perfect sadly and that was kind of a rough time for me outside of school...I'm almost certain it's possible though. Is that how the moon was formed?

 

[r_rolo1]

The theory that the moon came from a impact from a Mars-sized object on Earth has been recently putted in stake by sprectrometrical analiys of some rocks bringed in by the Apollo missions ( They have too much water and other volatile compounds for that scenario ).......

Resuming: as usual, nobody knows how the moon has been formed