How to calculate how many times the nuclear weapons humans currently have can destroy the earth?
I have heard the saying not only once that the nuclear weapons we humans currently have can destroy the earth for many times. One saying says 17 times, another more than 30 times (if my memory is right). I really want to the scientific basis of such a calculation.
Or the saying itself is a lie?
bearded clams: where did you get some information?
I mean “such information”.
August 17th, 2010 at 3:16 am
There’s probably no concrete evidence for these calculations but I suppose you could calculate such a statistic by knowing how much surface area of the planet one NUKE would destroy and multiplying that by the number of NUKES
August 17th, 2010 at 3:50 am
…all you really need to think about it is… “just once” !
(Just “1” SSBN “out there” on patrol could put the entire Planet to sleep and at any given moment, we’ve got “9” of them prowling the seas)
relax, have some Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream and rent a Movie… “On The Beach” would be a good one for you.
August 17th, 2010 at 3:54 am
They couldn’t, not even close. To actually destroy the earth – make it ‘not here’ anymore – you need 2×10^32 Joules of energy. The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated (Tsar Bomba detonated by the Soviet Union) had a yield of 100 megatons, or about 4.186×10^16 Joules. There are about 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and even assuming that every single one is as powerful as Tsar Bomba (they’re not even close, most are probably more than 100 times weaker) that’s still only 8.372×10^19 Joules if 20,000 Tsar Bomba’s were detonated. The difference is 10^(32-19) = 10^13, or a factor of 10,000,000,000,000. So even if all 20,000 nuclear weapons on earth were as powerful as Tsar Bomba, we would need to multiply the 20,000 we already have by 10,000,000,000,000 to get enough to ‘destroy the earth’.
Now if by ‘destroy the earth’ you mean ‘kill all humans’, we’ve got enough nuclear weapons to do that many times over. But remember that the earth will go on with or without us.
Here’s an awesome article about 10 ways to actually destroy the earth – http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp-1.html
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