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Humanity might get wiped but the world will stay where it is. What amount of energy is necessary to actually destroy the world?
by towelguy 11y ago
Humanity might get wiped but the world will stay where it is. What amount of energy is necessary to actually destroy the world?
- saiya-jin 11y agoIf by world you mean earth, and by destroying you mean something like splitting planet open, then I presume way more than current arsenal of usable nukes. Destruction of mankind would be relatively easy, we've become frail and our society severely depends on easily disruptible things like electricity. If you mean destruction of life itself, anything short of black hole/sun going supernova is not enough.
- mikeash 11y agoThe gravitational binding energy (what it would take to turn the Earth into a collection of floating, unbound gravel) is equivalent to about a week's worth of the Sun's total output. (Not a week of what the Earth receives, but a week of the entire output. Quite a lot.) The energy required merely to sterilize the crust of all life is vastly lower, of course. But still many orders of magnitude greater than the world's nuclear arsenals. Even destroying mankind would be pretty tough. Destroying modern civilization is probably doable, but people would endure. Lots of people get by with subsistence farming now, and their lives wouldn't change so much.