On the Destruction of Our Neighboring Planets

December 24, 2005 2:42 AM

Given our current state of technology and the world's nuclear armaments, I ask the question that the world needs an answer to: Could we destroy Mars?

How about Mercury? Could we even take down a gas giant or is that going too far? Which local planetary bodies could we possible annihilate? I am also curious about the repercussions of such actions. (Bonus: What about the astrological effects?)

Take your time, I seek accuracy bordering on technical pedantry!

posted by TwelveTwo to science & nature (41 comments total)

Awgh, need sleep. I meant to add the most vital aspect of the question, "HOW?" If we can destroy Mars (Or Mercury), how do we go about doing it?
posted by TwelveTwo at 2:48 AM on December 24, 2005

uhhh... maybe i'm completely wrong, but destroying a planet in our solar system would Not Be The Smart Thing To Do. The lack of a planet would mean less stability to the system (talking of gravity), and also, higher possibility of asteroids hitting us instead of smacking into some uninhabited rock.

But if you REALLY want to get rid of a planet, well... gather up all the nucular bombs and send them on their merry ways?
posted by slater at 3:35 AM on December 24, 2005

And as for the astrological effects, well, it might just mean the downfall of mankind as we know it.
posted by slater at 3:36 AM on December 24, 2005

It's a fun conceit to nurse, but no, not all the nuclear bombs on Earth can vapourize a planet... not even close. We are not yet gods, I fear.
posted by Firas at 3:52 AM on December 24, 2005

How to destroy the Earth.
posted by Firas at 3:54 AM on December 24, 2005

Nuclear bombs only seemed to explode sideways that I could tell. I mean, was there any giant gaping hole that we saw @ Bikini Toll or Nagasaki/Hiroshima, or just widespread flatland? They didn't seem to actually do any "digging" type damage, the kind I'd think you'd want to actually get inside a planet to blow it up from inside.
posted by vanoakenfold at 3:55 AM on December 24, 2005

I think the closest we are to any sort of celestial-body annihilation is smacking something into something else. But even inflicting a wee bit of damage to (say) our moon is a hell of an enterprise.
posted by Firas at 4:05 AM on December 24, 2005

Unless we can change the orbit of the moon and make it collide with the target..?
posted by vanoakenfold at 5:30 AM on December 24, 2005

vanoakenfold: The bombs at Nagasaki/Hiroshima were detonated 600m above ground (instead of at impact) as to maximize surface damage. Perhaps this has to do anything with the lack of 'digging' destruction..?
posted by provolot at 6:51 AM on December 24, 2005

The lack of a planet would mean less stability to the system (talking of gravity), and also, higher possibility of asteroids hitting us instead of smacking into some uninhabited rock.

Which points out--it depends on what one means by 'destroyed'. You could end up with a big rubble pile, clumped together, more-or-less orbiting in the same place.
posted by gimonca at 6:58 AM on December 24, 2005

Mars has two moons, Phobos (11.2km) and Deimos (6.1km). If we can somehow alter their orbits to collide with Mars, that'll sure take a chunk out of it. Mars won't be gone, but there will be some considerable damage.

If you really want something to disappear and turn into energy, antimatter is the way to go.
posted by Anamith at 7:03 AM on December 24, 2005

Mr. Show has an all-time great sketch called "America Blows Up The Moon" all about, well, America blowing up the moon. In the end, the plan is nearly scratched when the monkey sent to arm the nukes asks "Why?". People get pretty excited about it in the meantime
posted by GilloD at 7:27 AM on December 24, 2005

No. That is a completely serious answer. The energy released by a simultaneous explosion of the entire world arsenal of nuclear weapon is still a piddling tiny little thing in, um, geological terms. It's so far from "blowing up a planet" that it's absurd.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:44 AM on December 24, 2005

If you want to see it done, read _The Forge of God_ by Greg Bear. Aliens destroy the Earth, as in blow it into chunks that are moving fast enough to have escape velocity so they don't just re-form into a new planet.

Anyways, doing this takes lots and lots and lots of nukes -- as in millions of fusion bombs. And *those* are just to weaken the boundaries of the plates. The real destruction is mostly carried out by very large masses of neutronium and antineutronium that collide at the core.

If you set off all the nukes in the world all at once, you'd have something like 20GT or less, or the equivalent of a (very) large volcanic eruption, but with radiation. Completely no fun to live through and bad for you to be near, but nothing earth-shattering, as it were.

Mars would be easier, being a good bit smaller than Earth, but still: no fuckin' way.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:05 AM on December 24, 2005

Are you kidding? We couldn't even come close. It would be like trying to destroy a mountan with one of those 4th of july sparkelers.
posted by Paris Hilton at 9:35 AM on December 24, 2005

And no you can't just 'change the orbit of a moon' either.
posted by Paris Hilton at 9:42 AM on December 24, 2005

If we can't even vapourize California with the world's existing nuclear arsenal, it's very unlikely we'll make a dent in Mars or Mercury without some added (extraterrestrial?) help.
posted by chrominance at 10:53 AM on December 24, 2005

Oh, and as for the destruction-by-lunar-collision idea: A Mars-sized object once collided with Earth and we're still here. We even got a moon out of the deal!
posted by chrominance at 10:58 AM on December 24, 2005

In case you'd like to also address the "why"... Nuke the Moon: A Realistic Plan for World Peace by Frank J.
posted by Tubes at 11:21 AM on December 24, 2005

I bet you could pull this off using very, very large mass drivers. You've got a ton of ammo just sitting around in the asteroid belt, and I bet if you could hurl enough of them with enough velocity (you'd probably have to cart them out of the solar system, and launch from much further back), you'd knock Mars out of orbit. Of course, you better be living somewhere far away, because Earth's orbit would adjust accordingly.

So, who's with me?
posted by mkultra at 11:27 AM on December 24, 2005

How big a nuke could be built? Is there a theoretical limit? Assume limitless plutonium, uranium .... Could one be made with a chunk of plutonium the size of a whale with a Lake Titicaca of hydrogen surrounding it? or would the chain reaction fail in such a large core?

It does seem that using existing big nukes to nudge a large near hit asteroid into a near miss would be the best way to leverage your bang capital, but the circumstances would have to be just right. Our moon has taken a humungous hit and survived, while the crater on Mimas would be the size of Canada were it proportional to the Earth. It seems that planets can take a burning and keep on turning.

And even if we succeeded, the debris would come back to haunt us, for sure.
posted by Rumple at 12:40 PM on December 24, 2005

I don't think nukes are as powerful as we assume they are. When it comes to pushing around big things a 500kt bomb is nothing compared to the mass of Mars: 6.4185×1023 kg. The bombs will vaporize a small part of the surface. Big deal.

This pretty much the same question as "Can we blow up a giant asteriod headed for the Earth?" No, we can't, but we can push it, albiet very very slowly.

mkultra's suggestion is probably the most feasible. You could even push a small moon around if you were patient enough. Imagine a few billion mass drivers on Phobos running for a few million years. That -might- do it.

Think of the solution as less of an interplanetary 4th of July and more like an interplantery game of pool.
posted by skallas at 12:53 PM on December 24, 2005

mukultra: Of course the question asked about our existing nuclear arsinal. If we could extract the energy in those nukes (presumably by taking out the plutonium/whatever and using it a more advance system) and use it exactly as we desired, I still don't think we could do it.

Remember, you need to impart enough energy into mars in order to give it enough escape velocity from the sun.

Mars weighs 6.4185×10²³ kg. And we'd need to accelerate it (or all it's peices) to 34.1kilometers per second. As you know, kinetic energy = 1/2 m*v², so we're talking about about 3.73174799 * 10³³ Joules of energy. A kiloton of TNT (how nuke energy is measured) is about 4.18*10¹². A megaton then would be 4.184*10¹⁵. And 1,000 1 megaton bombs would be 4.184*10¹⁸. I think the current supply of nukes is less then this, but even multiplying by another 1,000 giving us an estimated equivalent of a million 1mt nukes, we'd still only have 4.184*10²¹ joules of energy. We'd still be 10¹² short.



Coincidentally, that's the same magnitude of a very small (1kt nuke). Try to imagine an actual kiloton of TNT. The density of TNT is 1.654 g/ml, so a kiloton kiloton of it would take a cube of pure TNT 8.18 meters (26 feet). Try to imagine a cube of pure TNT that large.

Now try to imagine one calorie of energy. Not a food Calorie (which is one thousand metric calories) A snickers bar contains 280,000 metric calories.

So you're basically talking about the difference in energy between burning like 1/10th of a grain of rice and blowing up that huge cube of pure TNT (or a small nuke).

That's the difference between all of the worlds nuclear weapons times a thousand, and the energy it would require to nock mars out of it's orbit.
posted by delmoi at 1:12 PM on December 24, 2005

Science ruins yet another New Years.
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:13 PM on December 24, 2005

Unless there are more creative methods than anyone has posted? Anyone? The New Years bash may be saved after all!
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:19 PM on December 24, 2005

Well, there are the various science-fictional narratives of artifical singularities and other examples of space-time deformation that get out of control.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:39 PM on December 24, 2005

Why not induce the Martians to destroy it themselves, by orbiting around them huge speakers blaring an Ashlee Simpson-Peter Framptom vocoder mashup of "Who Let the Dogs Out?"
posted by Rumple at 1:50 PM on December 24, 2005

Unless there are more creative methods than anyone has posted?

Drop nano-dinguses onto Mars that slowly convert it into a gigantic cloud of FiestaWare lazily orbiting itself.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:01 PM on December 24, 2005

ROU_Xenophobe That idea is most appealing, please elucidate.
posted by TwelveTwo at 2:17 PM on December 24, 2005

A planet-sized magnifying glass? (OK, Fresnel rings). Focus sunlight on your target planet, boil the surface and knock it out of orbit that way.
posted by Leon at 2:46 PM on December 24, 2005

Well, first you'd design nano-dinguses that aggregate together to form a gray goo that eats Mars and poops FiestaWare. This is, I admit, the hard part. I myself have only gotten as far as nanobots that poop poor-quality Melmac saucers.

Then you'd put them on Mars.

Then you'd sit back and watch Mars disappear and FiestaWare appear. If you are some manner of gnome, this is the point at which you would PROFIT!!.

If you want the cloud to stay a cloud, and not convert back to a planet of solid compressed FiestaWare, you'd have to convert some of Mars to energy and use mass drivers or summat to put all of the FiestaWare in orbit around its common center of mass.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:27 PM on December 24, 2005

Intriguing.
posted by TwelveTwo at 4:32 PM on December 24, 2005

Science ruins yet another New Years.

Tangentially related: What happened to Endor after the Deathstar blew up?
posted by PurplePorpoise at 7:07 PM on December 24, 2005

Nuclear bombs only seemed to explode sideways that I could tell ... They didn't seem to actually do any "digging" type damage, the kind I'd think you'd want to actually get inside a planet to blow it up from inside.

Operation Plowshare
posted by intermod at 9:03 PM on December 24, 2005

This thread is awesome, except for one major flaw.

Not only does Mars need women, but Martians crave nuclear explosions like Deadheads crave balloons full of laughing gas.

Haven't you ever seen Mars Attacks? What, are you trying to throw some kind of mega rave massive for them?

Anyways, to be more serious for a moment:

You'd need a lot of energy. More than nuclear weapons.

Sure, nuclear and thermonuclear fission and fusion weapons are fearsome things. To us. We're made of soft, sugary meats and proteins that char easily - meat that self-replicates with radiologically sensitive coding molecules. Also, our homes and buildings are tinderboxes and flimsy Erector-set constructions that collapse at the slightest stiff breeze, or ignite simply at the thought of a small cosmological amount of warmth.

Antimatter would be one way to actually destroy a planet. Of course, we can barely identify antimatter in high energy, tightly focused particle beam experiments, much less contain and deliver large quantities of it.

Generating a small black hole would be another good way to destroy a planet. However, closing a black hole is problematic, if not impossible. You'll have to kiss the solar system goodbye as well, and eventually a huge chunk of the local area of our galaxy. Eventually this black hole would merge with the supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy, and our galaxy would eventually re-form around the black hole - just with a few gadzillion fewer stars than it had before.

The best way to knock out Mars while (marginally) protecting the rest of the solar system would probably be gathering a bunch of large (say, planetoid sized) iron-stone objects out of the Kuiper belt, (marginally) accelerating them with our stockpile of atomic bombs or building a more sophisticated fusion-explosion drive.

As said above, the rest is billiards.

But double check your math. It's going to take a lot of kinetic energy to actually knock Mars and the resultant debris field out of the solar gravity well. Anything less and suddenly we've got a large, erratic and elliptically orbiting planet whose orbit intersects the average solar plane. Like Pluto, but much closer in and much more dangerous.

Also, I argue that the presented nano-dingus solution is a non-solution. The planet is still there, just as an aggregate of nano-dinguses and FiestaWare. I doubt Mars would really notice the difference, considering all the Martians are undoubtably completely thwacked from huffing nuclear explosions all the time anyway.

Now, if those nano-dinguses were actually pico-dinguses and capable of subatomic assembly, well, you could get them to build a really large nuclear bomb out of Mars for you. And then you'd be really cooking.
posted by loquacious at 9:07 PM on December 24, 2005

This is good.

Let me clarify my question, since we cannot easily destroy Mars, or even change it into an aggregate of nano-dignuses and FiestaWare without a huge research and development budget, what COULD we take out?

Phobos? Deimos? Maybe one of Saturn's Moons, we all know it can spare more than a few. I was sort of hoping we could take down Mars, but I'll settle on some moon.
posted by TwelveTwo at 11:40 PM on December 24, 2005

TwelveTwo, what did I tell you? Never leave a paper trail.
posted by dhartung at 11:40 PM on December 24, 2005

Agh! Just don't tell the others, this is supposed to be a surprise for Mr. Bilderberg!
posted by TwelveTwo at 11:51 PM on December 24, 2005

Let's just keep making bad movies about Mars. Out of shame, it might leave on it's own.
posted by bargex at 12:07 AM on December 25, 2005

RE: The Forge Of God....

As I recall (and it's been a long time) didn't the aliens have essentially two masses of some nasty stuff (antimatter?) rotating around each other at the earth's core? Which collided when they slowed down? And blew us all into tiny bits?

Just a thought.
posted by TeamBilly at 8:22 AM on December 25, 2005

Yeah. A lump of neutronium and a lump of antineutronium. One of them was the Tunguska blast, IIRC.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:21 PM on December 25, 2005