3 ms·

EDIT - Thanks to bonzini for catching a mistake, I'd typod 47 as 74 on the first line and drastically inflated everything after that. It's still huge though. W

EDIT - Thanks to bonzini for catching a mistake, I'd typod 47 as 74 on the first line and drastically inflated everything after that. It's still huge though. Wolfram Alpha gives a solar mass as 1.988435×10^30 kg. Multiply that by (299,292,458 m/s)^2, you get ~1.78×10^47 Joules. The most powerful manmade explosion in history was Tsar Bomba, a Soviet hydrogen bomb with 210 Petajoule (210×10^15 J) yeild. Amount of energy released by the black holes merging is 8.48×10^29 times greater, so you'd need to set off that many Tsar Bombas to get equal total yeild. The universe is 4.3×10^17 seconds old, meaning if you set off a Tsar Bomba every second since the beginning of time, you'd still be off by a factor of 1.953×10^12. You need about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 Tsar Bombas every second since the big bang to match it. The mind boggles.

wlesieutre 9y ago
EDIT - originally compared the last factor to number of grains of sand on Earth squared, but after catching the error above that's much too large. So how big is the remaining 2x10^12 bombs per seconds? Wikipedia has some other suggestions: ~10^12 stars in the Andromeda galaxy 1.98x10^12 links on Wikipedia 3.04×10^12 trees on Earth in 2015 3.5×10^12 estimated fish in the ocean So take every link on Wikipedia (or two thirds of the trees on Earth), turn each one into the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated, and blow them all up every second since the beginning of the universe, and that's how much energy we're talking about. Thanks again to bonzini for spotting the rather large error!
- rcthompson 9y ago
  Funnily enough, the past two XKCD comics are both relevant here: https://xkcd.com/1894/ https://xkcd.com/1894/ https://xkcd.com/1895/ https://xkcd.com/1895/
- bas 9y ago
  Nicely (back of) napkinned!
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Originally typo'd pretty hard and had numbers much too high! It's still a larger amount of energy than I can even imagine. That's what I get for trying to do math in a <textarea> instead of on paper.
bonzini 9y ago
That 10^74 should have been 10^47, shouldn't it? So it's "only" a million billions (10^15) tsar bombas (10^15) every second (10^17, 15+15+17=47).
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Good catch, can't believe I flipped that! Certainly changes things, one second while I revise.
virtualwhys 9y ago
> The mind boggles This may help[1] [1] https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
KGIII 9y ago
For comparison, they estimate the observable universe contains 10^78 to 10^82 atoms. Though comparison is a bad term. The human brain can't meaningfully picture numbers that large.

wlesieutre 9y ago

EDIT - originally compared the last factor to number of grains of sand on Earth squared, but after catching the error above that's much too large. So how big is the remaining 2x10^12 bombs per seconds? Wikipedia has some other suggestions: ~10^12 stars in the Andromeda galaxy 1.98x10^12 links on Wikipedia 3.04×10^12 trees on Earth in 2015 3.5×10^12 estimated fish in the ocean So take every link on Wikipedia (or two thirds of the trees on Earth), turn each one into the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated, and blow them all up every second since the beginning of the universe, and that's how much energy we're talking about. Thanks again to bonzini for spotting the rather large error!

rcthompson 9y ago
Funnily enough, the past two XKCD comics are both relevant here: https://xkcd.com/1894/ https://xkcd.com/1894/ https://xkcd.com/1895/ https://xkcd.com/1895/
bas 9y ago
Nicely (back of) napkinned!
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Originally typo'd pretty hard and had numbers much too high! It's still a larger amount of energy than I can even imagine. That's what I get for trying to do math in a <textarea> instead of on paper.

bonzini 9y ago

That 10^74 should have been 10^47, shouldn't it? So it's "only" a million billions (10^15) tsar bombas (10^15) every second (10^17, 15+15+17=47).

wlesieutre 9y ago
Good catch, can't believe I flipped that! Certainly changes things, one second while I revise.

virtualwhys 9y ago

> The mind boggles This may help[1] [1] https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

KGIII 9y ago

For comparison, they estimate the observable universe contains 10^78 to 10^82 atoms. Though comparison is a bad term. The human brain can't meaningfully picture numbers that large.