Comments on: Guest Post: Blowing Up Planets

By: Fantasy Literature's Fantasy Book and Audiobook Reviews

Fantasy Literature's Fantasy Book and Audiobook Reviews — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:02:05 +0000

[...] How to blow up a planet: Handy information in case you ever wish to explode our planet, or someone [...]

By: Phoenix Living » leftover weekend links > Reesa Brown's homepage

Phoenix Living » leftover weekend links > Reesa Brown's homepage — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:41:14 +0000

[...] Rocket Scientists are funny: how much would it really take to blow up a planet? [...]

By: Rez

Rez — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:24:48 +0000

So how much energy do I need to make a glowing crater the size of, say, Denver??

By: Gareth Owens

Gareth Owens — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:46:37 +0000

Planets get blowed up in SF all the time. I can think of four off the top of my head: Alderan in Star Wars – both Loki VI and Kilra in Wing-commander 3 (Mark Hamil getting a taste for blowing stuff up there) and there was that planet of the casino hive in the original Battlestar Galactica.
That, for me, is sort of the point. SF isn’t about what scientists can do – I know you can’t blow up a planet…boring! – but SF is about what the imagination can do – but wouldn’t it look cool if you could.
If you limit your literary imagination to the merely possible then there would be no Star Trek – (Warp drive, do you know how much energy that needs, then there’s that whole inconvenience of relativity, and as for the data storage needed for transporter systems, and the quantum implications of matter transmission as a whole…)
Reality is such a downer but SF doesn’t have to be, it merely has to be plausible within the context and duration of the narration.
Don’t fetter Icarus.

By: James Davis Nicoll

James Davis Nicoll — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 05:01:47 +0000

One of these orbiting a sun-like star can do the job but it will take at least a week to evaporate the Earth and probably more.

By: Jeff WIlson

Jeff WIlson — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 03:28:44 +0000

I believe it’s correct to discount the Van Der Waals forces for another reason, in that it would scale based on the newly exposed surface area of the pieces to which the earth was reduced. This could be as little as two halves if some sort of finely bounded field of body forces were involved, but the square-cube law makes it a tiny consideration compared to the the volume-scaling mass’s gravitation.

However, you might want to apply additional kinetic energy to accelerate the pieces to solar escape velocity @ 1 AU, lest the ring of fragments left in earth’s former orbit eventually reassemble into one or more successor bodies.

By: ToddVandemark

ToddVandemark — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:25:13 +0000

Thank you, Ana. The tag has been fixed.

By: Ana Steuart

Ana Steuart — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:45:02 +0000

Hi there. I’m a textbook editor, and in reading your article, I realized you’re missing some formatting. 2.24 x 1032 should be listed as 2.24 x 10^32 to shot that 32 is an exponent of 10 in Scientific Notation. Or you could be fancy and use the [sup] tag to properly express 2.24 x 1032.