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Underground > Laboratory >

Is it possible to blow up Earth?

00:23 / 24.10.02

Are there enough explosives, nukes and whatnot, lying around to physically destroy the planet? Not just destroy all life on the planet, but actually blowing up the planet where there are only the tiniest of fragments left? And if so, how would that effect the solar system?

00:30 / 24.10.02

I would imagine that the Cold War arsenal of nukes, if placed deep enough at strategically located faultlines and volcanoes, would do a good job of wreaking havoc. However, I don't know how one would estimate the amount of force necessary to cleave a planet...

11:51 / 24.10.02

I think faultlines only exist on the crust - which is only a fraction of the thickness of the Earth. So all you'd really succeed in doing would be to rip apart the Earth's crust.

If placed deeper, providing the heat/pressure difficulties could be overcome it would seem to me that all that would happen would be that you would create lots of spherical holes in the denser matter that makes up the mantle/outer core etc.

The mass of the Earth is approx 6x10 to the 12 BILLION tons - It would take a helluva lot more bang than the combined nuclear arsenal to dent that.

If it were all exploded in one place you may produce enough force to knock the earth ever so slightly into a different orbit, or affect it's tilt toward/away from the Sun etc. but the effect would only be noticable after a significant period of time.

Of course this is all supposition on my part...

12:08 / 24.10.02

Can we prove that this hasn't already happened to the asteroid belt?

Man, I love unsupportable speculations.

15:49 / 24.10.02

Nope. The asteroid that may have killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, was at least a thousand times as powerful as all the warheads in the world, and it barely dented the crust. "Dented" in the sense of leaving a 120-mile-wide impact crater on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

15:53 / 24.10.02

The asteroids are most likely leftover sloar system bits and stuff captured by the sun and major planets. There are a couple of good novels by James P. Hogan using the blown-up fourth planet premise.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

16:50 / 24.10.02

Maybe if you put enough nukes on say Mars, or even the moon, to knock it out of orbit and into Earth. Might leave a pretty big dent.

Interplanetary snooker anyone?

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

17:03 / 24.10.02

Oh yeah, and there's always the death star
:-)

18:01 / 24.10.02

[threadrot]
No. Topic. Abstract. Again.
[/threadrot]

So what we're essentially saying is that probably aren't enough explosives - of any kind - to destroy the earth to the extent to which has been suggested, but that there are more than enough explosives to set some chain of events in motion (whether said chain be seismic, atmospheric, or whatever).

The effect of 'planetary snooker' mentioned by Karika is interesting when you consider the near-apocalyptic events which occurred - according to Velikovsky - following the movement of Venus from its Jupiter orbit to a solar one. If we can expect that level of chaos to ensue from a planet passing close by, then I imagine the Moon striking us would be fairly devastating...

22:09 / 24.10.02

Tesla said he could rip the planet apart using resonant vibrations - just send a repeated, regular pulse into the Earth at the right frequency, and the rocks would all start "humming" at the same frequency, and shake themselves apart.
I don't understand how this would work exactly, given that the planet is made out of lots of different kinds of material (unlike, say, the glass that shatters when the soprano hits its frequency), but maybe something along those lines could do what the one-time combined nuclear firework couldn't.

16:25 / 25.10.02

Grant: I could've sworn I posted something in this thread before but either it didn't go through or maybe I cancelled my post.

Anyways, it works with things made out of different compounds.

Hold on, lemme get my physics book...

If I remember this correctly, you can derive the frequency of an object by finding out its wavelength. This is achieved by mixing up a few formulas.

Wavelength = Planck's constant divided by momentum.
Momentum is mass times velocity.
Frequency is velocity divided by wavelength.

So basicaly you get the frequency of an object by taking it's velocity, dividing it by (planck's constant divided by (mass times velocity.))

So basically it's not important what the object it made out of. Only its mass and speed matter.

And that's overtly complicated...

Simply stated an object composed of many compounds can have one frequency. Or so I think. I'm seeing flaws of logic in my arguement.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

18:24 / 25.10.02

But the earth is made almost entirely of iron. You wouldn't need to bother working out for the bits of silicon and carbon that lie around on the crust. The important stuff is below the surface, in the core.

I can't think of a good way to transmit these vibrations to the earth though. There's no substance to move it through, and nothign like a hammer to hit it with.

I also don't see how resonance necessarily means destruction - if I hit a bell or a steel sphere (ie. the earth) and it resonates, it doesn't necessarily shake itself apart.

Artificial structures (like bridges) which are made of different materials of different lengths and resonant frequencies do tend to be destroyed by resonance. If a part resonates at a different frequency to the one it is joined to, they pull apart. Snap.

The earth, like I said before, is mostly a big iron ball. The crust might resonate at a different frequency and be ripped off, by the inner mantle and core would most likely sit tight.

18:29 / 25.10.02

The crust might resonate at a different frequency and be ripped off, by the inner mantle and core would most likely sit tight

Which wouldn't result in the utter destruction of the Earth...?

16:00 / 26.10.02

not as a planet. It'd still qualify as a (somewhat smaller) planet.

16:50 / 26.10.02

Regardless, and as I uderstand it, resonance doesn't violate conservation of energy. It provides a mechanism that might avoid major dissapation.

Which is to say, resonance or no, you are still going to need a hell of a big punch to rip the crust off the earth.

15:57 / 27.10.02

Maybe if we burn loads of stuff like there's no tomorrow and fill the sky with smoke for longer than the heat lasts, we can chill down the surface temperature long enough for the sea to freeze. Without all that water sloshing around in tides, the moon's orbit would change slightly, perhaps causing Earth's itself to decay. Would take a while, but I guess sooner or later we'd bump into something really big. But of course, polluting the atmosphere like that is purely theoretical ...

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

17:40 / 27.10.02

*/puts on mathematicians hat/*

The earth has a mass of 5.9742 * 10^24 kg.
0.02 percent of this is surface water.

If, in the most extreme case possible, we managed to freeze the entirety of the world's water on one side of the earth, it would move the centre of gravity of the earth by (I think) 0.02 % to the side.

The radius of the earth is 6378140 m. The diameter is therefore 1275620. Presuming that the water was evenly distributed across the diameter at all points (which it wasn't), you could move the center of gravity 25 km sideways in space. This does not take into account the height of the frozen water, which I have presumed remains at sea level.

But shifting the gravity 25 m sideways, you would have an effect of a 25/6378140*100 = 0.0004 % shift in the position of earth's center of gravity. The distance from the center of gravity of the moon to the earth is 356410km at it's lowest point. A 0.0004 % shift in this is only 142 km. Not enough for a collision.

*/Takes of mathematician's hat/*

Note: My mathematician's hat is a bit crap. Please tell me if I'm wrong.

20:23 / 27.10.02

What I was trying to do was to bugger up the Earth/Moon dynamic we currently have going, even just a little. In itself, no big deal, but probably with much bigger consequences over time. A small spanner in the works rather than a hammer attack.

20:53 / 27.10.02

So, would 142 km would be enough to (eventually) change the dynamics of the solar system?

22:47 / 27.10.02

(puts on jerk hat)

It would be enough to immediatly change the dynamics. By at least 150 km (roughly).

(takes off jerk hat)

hmm...

(frowns, puts the hat back on and drinks a glass of lactosefull milk)

23:04 / 27.10.02

OK :-)

I was thinking more of our relationship with Mars and Venus ...

22:01 / 29.10.02

Re: resonance

isn't earth mostly liquid?
wouldn't resonating liquid be a lot less destructive than resonating a solid?

note: i am ignorant.

03:00 / 30.10.02

No. Most of the earth's surface is liquid.

yawn - thing's buddy

10:13 / 11.11.02

this may be of interest:

Title: Moonseed
Author: Stephen Baxter

Amazon Review:
Stephen Baxter, the much-lauded author of Voyage and Titan, has been
praised as
a sci-fi writer who gets the science right. This rigor and research are
clearly
evident in Moonseed, a tale with high-energy physics and space-travel
technology in starring roles. It's Baxter's boyish enthusiasm for
science--especially space travel--that makes Moonseed so involving.

A world-class disaster epic worthy of any Saturday matinee, Moonseed
opens with
the spectacular, explosive death of Venus, an event requiring energy a
thousand
billion times the world's nuclear arsenal. As the radioactive blast
from the
late Venus reaches Earth, scientists scramble to attribute a cause,
with
massless black holes and elementary particles the size of bacteria
pointing
towards some sort of superstring as the smoking gun. The pace quickens
when the
substance that may have caused the demise of Venus is accidentally
introduced
to Earth. This substance, dubbed moonseed, acts as a geological
lubricant:
processes that normally take millions of years occur in mere months
with
moonseed in the picture. Once Scotland and the state of Washington get
gobbled
up by this rock-eating, 10th-dimensional nano-lifeform, all hell breaks
loose
and the search turns towards finding safe refuge for humanity on the
Moon. The
book's second half is a seat-of-your-pants, what-if exploration of
space travel
and terraforming.

An over-the-top doomsday yarn by some measures, Moonseed keeps your
feet on the
ground with good science, good characters, and a good story.

10:19 / 11.11.02

No. Most of the earth's surface is liquid

What about all that magma then? It might be rock, but it's liquid rock... But resonating the liquid would undoubtedly have a severe effect on the solid crust (see also: earthquakes).