SCI FI Wire: In the latest Star Trek movie, a series of planets collapse when a black hole is created inside the planet's interior. Scientist and science fiction writer Wil McCarthy calculates how tricky would it be to completely destroy a planet. As McCarthy says:
"Destroying a planet takes time. They're big, dense objects, and destroying one is not like popping a balloon or even vaporizing a city with nukes... Even if you drop a bomb or fire a death ray powerful enough to reduce a whole planet to rubble, you still have the problem of gravity; that rubble is going to stay where it is, or at worst, fly apart and then fall back together again.
The resulting planet would be loose rather than solid—picture a pile of sand or a dump truck full of gravel—but it would still be round, it would still have gravity, and you could still orbit your spaceship around it.
In the case of an explosion, the energies involved are colossal. The Earth (for example) weighs 6 billion quadrillion tons, and even if we ignore the force required to break it into small pieces, we still need to accelerate every scrap of it to escape velocity—over 10,000 meters per second—in every possible direction, to overcome their collective gravity and keep them from falling back together again. That means almost a quadrillion quadrillion gigajoules of kinetic energy. That's the equivalent ... of the total heat output of the sun for three full decades."According to McCarthy because of the small size of the black hole created in the movie, objects such as rubble "would be banging and grinding against one another for years" before they reached the black hole's event horizon. Hence the destruction of a planet in Star Trek, which takes up only a few minutes of screen time, would be unrealistic in the 'real' universe.
It is interesting to consider the possibility that the Earth's oceans might be locally heated to the extent that they would undergo nuclear fusion in a fusion wave front chain reaction that could spread throughout the entire oceans in a second or less.
The fact that traditional nuclear weapons detonated under ocean water have not is most likely the result of their more limited mass specific yield and more importantly, their more limited peak exploding temperatures and pressures in comparison to pure fusion devices and/or shaped charge nuclear devices which may be able, according to some sources, concentrate the nuclear bomb explosion energy flux densities by several orders of magnitude beyond that which is possible with current spherically detonating nuclear weapon designs.
Assuming a self propagating fusion chain reaction could be started within the ocean water, the amount of pure fusion fuel in the form of hydrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen would be about 10 EXP 18 metric tons which would equal 10 EXP 26 metric tons of TNT in yield which is within the mass range of an entire Red Dwarf Star. This is about 50,000 times the energy required to vaporize the matter in an Earth massed planet that is frozen through its core. Put is another way, this amount of energy is the equivalent of the kinetic energy of an Earth massed planet traveling at about 700 kilometers per second.
If such a reaction could be started, I think the Earth would be complete history in a matter of seconds.
Now the Earth has a crust, mantel, and core that contains heavy metals along with mid density metals such as iron, nickel, aluminum and silicon and the like. It might be the case that if the planet was detonated by the above process, the explosive heat flux, and the transmuting effects of the ocean water fusion products might be locally amplified in terms of eddy currents, density fluctuations and the like to the point where such energy concentrations might react or interact with the heavier material composition of the sub-oceanic components of the Earth to produce strange matter or matter that is composed at least in part of strange quarks.
Some theories suggest that certain forms of strange matter might be stable and worse yet might be capable of transforming normal baryonic matter it comes into contact with into strange matter.
The result might not only be the complete destruction of Earth, but also the outward spread of strange matter particles and bulk pieces of material that could spread gradually throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and perhaps ultimately throughout the universe to endanger any extraterrestrial civilizations if not all of them.
The fact that supernova appear not to produce such strange matter might be due to the low mass constituency, isotopic make up and percentage-wise isotopic mass composition of the pre-supernova stars.
One can also speculate as to whether bottomomium matter or matter made at least in part of bottom quarks might have a similar drastic effect as any forms of reactive strange matter.
The fact that we have not observed stable strange matter based or bottom matter based baryons within our particle accelerators might simply be due to the fact that not enough collisions have occurred, only collisions of non-optimal energies for the formation of such stable forms have occurred, and/or the colliding particles where not of the right species.
I wonder if someone could write a movie script about the devastating effects or threats of such reactions regarding the notion of dangerous strange matter or bottom matter particles being dispersed throughout the universe and converting every planet and star they come in contact with into strange matter or bottom matter.
As a son of a retired career navy man who worked under the leadership of the late Admiral Rickover for the U.S. Navy's Naval Reactors division and then under his successor as a D.O.D./D.O.E. civilian employee, I by association of being one of his sons, although I have never served in the military, have been indoctrinated in the usefulness and effectiveness of our nuclear deterrence capability.
Although, I believe in a strong defense and believe that in today's world of terrorism, unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament would be foolish and unwise not only for our national security, but also for that of the Global community as a whole, perhaps we need to take a second look at what we cook up or might inadvertently cook up in our nuclear weapons research and development facilities.
As someone who has always liked to play with fire crackers as a young typical grade school boy, I now say that; yes, fire crackers are fun, but lets be careful of how big we make them and only make the types that are needed for our national defense.