SIO461: So You Want To Destroy the Earth...

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 461. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and got such a fun one today. Have you ever wondered what it might take to destroy the whole world? Entire, Well, neighborhood SIO astrophysicist Dr. Brian Gillis had a great idea for an episode, which is talking about different ways to try to do that. Like the moon fall out of the sky, or blowing up the entire Earth with nukes, or even a miniature black hole. Are these things possible? If so, how could they be done? Asking for a me. Me. No, not really, but it's such a fun topic and we'll learn a bit of physics along the way. Too crazy. Don't try this at home. Actually, you might be able to try it. We'll find out. Can you just try it? Anyway, I want to thank the supporters of the show so much. Their ranks at patreon .com slash series pod. Please consider pledging. If not, please consider writing a good review of any and all of my shows. Make sure it's five stars because we live in an inflated economy and anything less than that will just hurt the show so it's the harsh reality but uh thank you so much for considering doing that and after this break we'll get on over to dr brian gillis and hey we'll destroy the world together Hey, Brian, welcome back to the show. It's been way too long.

0:01:28 Bryan: Yes. Thank you, Thomas. A lot happening here. Actually, I've gotten married. I've got a new job, actually.

0:01:34 Thomas: What? What? Congratulations?

0:01:35 Bryan: Yep, Okay.

0:01:39 Thomas: What the hell? When are you going to tell all of us?

0:01:42 Bryan: Well, as soon as you had me back, I've been waiting for you to call. Okay. Yeah.

0:01:48 Thomas: That's so awesome. Congrats.

0:01:50 Bryan: So, I married my lovely spouse, Nora, this spring. We had just a small ceremony here and was waiting until things settled down with my job situation to think about a bigger ceremony. And finally got news on that just a week or two ago. I got offered a position as a senior research software engineer at the University of Southampton. Software engineer is kind of a new type of job. It's for people doing programming specifically to support scientists.

0:02:16 Thomas: That is awesome. I want to do that. In another life, I want to do that.

0:02:21 Bryan: And what I ended up doing at my last job. I was doing all the programming for everyone. So it should hopefully be a smooth transition into just making it my official job description.

0:02:32 Thomas: Yeah, exciting. Well, I then it's pure coincidence that you want to talk about the end of the world. Either that or, you know, the nuptials aren't going as well as you might have thought. No,

0:02:42 Bryan: This idea actually came back to me, I think it was like January, December. Was on a plane and, you know, browsing through the movies and thought that somehow a new Babylon 5 movie had gotten made. And it's one of my favorite TV series, so I decided to give it a try. And, it's called, like, The Road Home or something, and involves a lot of multiversal popping to different realities. And alien species, the Vorlons, is retreating in their war and doing the space equivalent of salting the ground behind them and destroying all planets that might be habitable as they retreat.

0:03:20 Bryan: And unfortunately for us, that includes Earth. And the characters talk about and say, yep, they're going to kill us all without firing a single shot. And then they look up into the sky and they see ever so slowly Earth's moon growing in the sky as it slowly falls towards us. And it occurred to me, for ways to destroy the world, that's actually pretty clever. The moon right there. And so I just started to think, what are all the other different interesting ways we could destroy the world and how practical are they? If things go wrong in the presidential election this November, how long would it take us to pull pull one of these off.

0:04:00 Thomas: Everybody force pull the moon at once. Are we going to do the moon one first? Like, how would that, is that doable?

0:04:05 Bryan: Yeah.

0:04:06 Thomas: How do you do that?

0:04:06 Bryan: Let's start off with that one. So yeah. You had the joke on opening arguments about whether Kirsten Sinema into the sun versus ejecting her from the solar system. I know someone corrected you that it's easier to eject her, but did they explain why that is?

0:04:09 Thomas: Asking for a friend. I'm sure it's just the angular momentum or something. I don't know.

0:04:27 Bryan: Basically that there's enough angular momentum around the Sun that you need to get rid of. And if you do the maths, you need add less to get out of the solar system than you need to take away to get in. And taking away laws of relativity and all that, you still need to expend energy to change the velocity of something. So this is basically what's going on with the Earth and Moon. It's the same boat, really. For any orbit it's easier to get out of orbit than it is to get into the center which

0:05:01 Thomas: Which was always so hard to fathom as a kid, because it's like when we interact with gravity, it's pretty direct. You know, it's not like, oh, it was just a moment. It's like, ow, fell directly into the earth. But then once you're out in space, it always felt just like, again, intuitively as a kids, It's like, why do the planets get to, and the moons, they just get to... They don't have to fall. They got to like, they get to just spin around and orbit around forever. It seems like you're cheating, you know?

0:05:11 Bryan: It

0:05:25 Thomas: No fair.

0:05:25 Bryan: Is it's one of those things it does pull directly it's just that at the same time it's pulling it's fighting against the significant enough velocity and the gravity just can't quite keep up. Like, imagine this at the extremes. Like imagine you still have the earth, but you have something in the sky zooming by at basically the speed of light. It's going to be nearby for almost no time and just get slightly bent in its direction.

0:05:54 Thomas: Well, and that's just the thing is like, I think a lot of it is we really can't just, just, again, on a day -to -day intuitive level, we can't fathom how fast these things are actually moving, right? I mean, like, it like the big old moon is just sitting there like a lazy ass, just just like, yeah, it's there, but like that thing is booking it. Right. I mean, it's really, really, if you put in some unit of measurement that an American can understand. So hot dogs per minute, like how fast is it going metric kilo, kilo hot dogs.

0:06:23 Bryan: So I have it in my notes in metric, but let's see if I convert it in my mind to U .S. it's It's going about 60 % of one mile every second.

0:06:35 Thomas: Wow. That's, I mean that's a lot. That'S very fast. So, I MEAN, that's really the key is like it, we can't, we think like, oh, it'S just out there. Why doesn'T it fall? But like that's zooming. That' S really fast. Yeah

0:06:45 Bryan: It zooming at the same time it's pulled in. And I'll also remind you space is big and a lot of people visualize the earth and moon as being pretty close together, probably because you see little solar system dioramas which shrink things down so they're both visible at the sametime.

0:07:03 Thomas: The marshmallow is really close to the right

0:07:06 Bryan: Yeah, you of mine from the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh would usually do these shows that say if the earth is a beach ball, the moon would be like 50 meters away or something, or yards, half a football field away or something ridiculous like that. I forget the exact numbers, but you need to slow it down enough to hit a target that away or a small relatively speaking. So you need to take away basically all of its velocity, which takes a lot of energy to do.

0:07:19 Thomas: Dang yeah yeah yeah there's no friction out there there's not there's wind resistance going on right

0:07:41 Bryan: None of that. I mean, there's like microscopic amounts of dust in space that will eventually slow it down. You know, over time, it will slow down. There are some forces that will play on it on their own. So forces is one of them. As the moon causes tides on Earth, the Newton's third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The moon causing tides means the tides have an effect on the moon and will very gradually slow it down. But that's going to take a lot of time. Who has time for that? We want the moon to fall today.

0:08:16 Thomas: Damn it I thank you I agree so how do we make it fall today or or in the conceivable like honestly it's not like you'd have to kill him today is it you'd Have to in this scenario it's like yeah he's a week I I don't know. How long do they need?

0:08:29 Bryan: So I think it's probably best to think of the terms of, let's say humanity really had to deal with it. What's the best tool we have at our disposal for injecting a lot of energy into the moon? And honestly, nuclear weapons is basically it today. Give an idea of the magnitude of the problem, I looked up, got some specific numbers on the world nuclear arsenal, which has actually declined a fair bit from its peak. One of the few things humanity has been doing right is disarming its nukes slowly. The peak was back in 1981, and I could throw out numbers, but it's meaningless scale. Let's just say it's all it's, yeah, Yeah. Okay. Megatons, it's about 16 ,000 megatons at the peak, which, yeah, that's compared to TNT. That's about a billion tons of TNT was all the nukes in the world at humanity's peak. Let's say we throw all of that at the moon and we wouldn't even notice a difference. We, yeah, we'd create a crater on the moon, but we wouldn't notice any difference in its velocity. And, I mean, we would have to get a magnifying glass to get down to a level where we could see a difference in Its velocity.

0:09:10 Thomas: How many firework explosions while you're eating a hot dog? No, like 70 gazillion Hiroshima's or something. Yeah.

0:09:56 Thomas: Really? Well, I guess it's hard to directly have the explosion affect the momentum. Is that part of it or what?

0:09:56 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Could could get like half of it in. That's not too hard. You'll have some efficiency loss, too. But the problem is that the moon is big and the moon is moving fast. And those two things together mean that it has a ton of energy. You might remember way back when we were doing the patron special on Armageddon, we we compared the size of the meteor there to the moon. And a good estimate for the sizeof the moonis the moon in length across about as big as Texas. Just a bit more spherical. Take all of that mass in a rock, and that's pretty damn heavy. Well,

0:10:26 Thomas: Or is I yes do yeah non

0:10:46 Bryan: We get to the point where I can't even express it realistically without using exponents. And that's the point where you really lose human intuition.

0:10:55 Thomas: -scientists are just like nope out gone yeah

0:10:58 Bryan: That's That's the problem is that in order to describe long numbers, we speak in terms of exponents or log scales, by which I mean that we make, like, for instance, just imagine you're writing numbers on a piece of paper. You can write down a 1 or a 1 followed by a 0 or a 2 followed by 2 0s. Now, the amount of space you take up on 1, 2, or 3 digits, but the value that represents is 1 10 or 100. So when we write out numbers even like that, we're taking basically linear space for exponential scale, that the value goes up much faster than the amount of paper we use to write it down. And so there's very little times that humans can really comprehend how absolutely massive these exponents are. And linguistically, it's tougher, like a million versus a billion. The words are the same length. You change one letter, one sound, you add a little bit of a pop to it, and all of a sudden it's a thousand times as big. Here are some of the ways I tried to make comprehensible, at least in some way. Just the factor of how many times more than the world nuclear arsenal we would need to stop the moon in its tracks. So,

0:12:18 Thomas: Before we get to that and that really the best option like there's no more efficient way than just explosion and like that's there's not like I don't know it just seems weird like if I was trying to move anything else I feel like there would be a lot of other options besides blow Blow something up near it.

0:12:35 Bryan: If you want easy, like least energy, there are definitely better ways. If you want fast, we don't have much. And most of the easier ways would involve doing something like siphoning off its energy by transferring it to other things that we put into orbits around it to do kind of slingshot maneuvers. It's called to steal away its energy.

0:12:44 Thomas: Fair. We could start eating some of the cheese that it's made out of. The way to go. Okay.

0:13:05 Bryan: And So we could transfer its energy to other things, but all of that is gonna require moving those other things, getting them into position, and there are probably some ways we can do that cheaply, but...

0:13:17 Thomas: Right now, we can't even get two astronauts home. They're stuck there.

0:13:22 Bryan: As it ends up, there are ways that you can work around the edges here. You could cut down the amount it takes by half or, you know, maybe even you get really clever, you can get it to a tenth, but we're off in exponential land where this doesn't matter. So a few ways to illustrate how tough it would be. So let's say that me saying all the nukes is that amount of time is the world's nuclear arsenal. If I needed enough energy to stop the moon in the tracks, I would need to say all the nucs for an amount of time that equals 10 times the current age of the universe.

0:13:59 Thomas: That seems like a lot.

0:14:00 Bryan: The universe is pretty old. It's 14 billion years old, which, remember, that B stands for 1 ,000, so 14 ,000 million. And, most of us, a year is a long time, and we're talking about, again, we get to the same problem. We've made it slightly closer to comprehensible.

0:14:19 Thomas: So nukes are not happening. That's just not... That's not... Even in a second Cold War scenario, we're probably not getting there.

0:14:28 Bryan: Yeah. Well, here's the best way I've found to make it almost comprehensible to the human mind. And it still requires a couple of steps. But imagine all the world's nukes are worth one cent in U .S. dollars. Then compare that cent to your classic stereotypical briefcase full of money, stacked plumb full of $100 bills. Total is going to be about $2 .4 million, according to the source of all knowledge, TVTropes .com.

0:14:58 Bryan: Then imagine that briefcase of money is only worth one cent. And then compare that to 10 briefcases of money, where each of those cents is worth the original briefcase. So,

0:14:58 Thomas: My gosh I've you've already lost me again how many breaking bads worth of money

0:15:15 Bryan: So so basically we've got 10 square briefcases full of money. It's also equivalent to 100 ,000 Elon Musks.

0:15:27 Thomas: And the one is already so bad that's already bad enough we don't need more so yeah that's not happening how are these how these aliens gonna do it then this is just not gonna happen it seems like so

0:15:36 Bryan: You need some sort of scientific revolution which would dwarf in scale scale all the advancements we've made between now and when we were burning uh firewood for warmth at night originally it's going to be a much bigger revolution than that

0:15:57 Thomas: Stupid are we trying to like go again like we okay I'm I'm imagining the marshmallow orbiting the, I don't know, orange or whatever it is. Are we trying to go against its orbital direction or are we trying to go toward the earth? And like, which is more efficient?

0:16:04 Bryan: It's most efficient to just go against its orbital direction and then let it fall down yeah

0:16:17 Thomas: Okay, cool. That's actually what I was thinking. Yeah. Awesome.

0:16:20 Bryan: If you turn it towards the earth you still have that angular momentum it's still going to be trying to fly around and you have to expend a lot more energy so that it'll go close enough to the earth that'll clip the side of it

0:16:36 Thomas: Right? So you're trying to like stop it and then it's like, Oh, and that does the road runner thing. And it's like, oh no. And then how long is that bad boy going to take to fall? That'll That'll take a while. Let's say, oh, do you have this calculation? What if we did stop it?

0:16:36 Bryan: Yeah yeah

0:16:49 Thomas: Darn. That'd be fun. Wouldn't be that hard.

0:16:45 Bryan: No I I'll have to go do do the maths on that come back to you.

0:16:53 Thomas: I say to the physicist, that's not that hard! That's just a thing, any thing, 260, 100 ,000, no, what is it? 180 ,000? I always forget. Something miles away. Somewhere in that order of magnitude. And then it's just an object. That's the basic gravity equation, right? Because the masses cancel out? Or

0:17:11 Bryan: Well, yeah, the problem is gravity changes depending on how far away you are. So you have to do some integration calculations. It'll take a bit to figure it out.

0:17:20 Thomas: Right well I'll get back to you I'll do the I'll do the math on that one yeah

0:17:23 Bryan: So let's it there. Making the moon fall is hard, but it's also probably one one of the easiest solutions we have for destroying the planet. Looked I around to see if there's some variant of this we can do to maybe take advantage. See, the problem with the moon is that it's got a lot of angular momentum relative to Earth, since it orbits Earth directly. So I thought a bit, what about other objects in the nearby solar system? Don't have as much directly relative But there's still the problem of getting into a different orbit relative to the sun. After a bunch of looking around, everything else has a greater velocity difference. But I did find one candidate, which if you look at the mass difference, it's a lot less massive than the moon, but will be able to get it coming at a much greater velocity. Velocity. And that candidate is in the asteroid belt. It's a dwarf planet called Ceres, which is about 1 the mass of the moon. But since it's a dwarfed planet, if you followed along with the whole Pluto fiasco, a dwarf planet is anything that is massive enough that it can compress press itself into a spherical shape, but hasn't cleared all of the other things out from its orbit. So it's

0:18:44 Bryan: In a similar orbit to the rest of the asteroid belt, but it's a moon of anything else, and it's spherical like a planet. If you were to knock that out of its orbit, or what do you do is just slow down its orbit enough so that it'll fall in enough to intersect with Earth's orbit it ends up taking about half as much energy as stopping the moon at the expense of you have to get everything out there in the first place so

0:19:12 Thomas: Kidding so there's some movie or something where it's like they're gonna go out and sling an asteroid at it oh that might be that might be what's a face um expanse yeah isn't that what don't they go out and try to sling a I of like the the welter terrorists go out to try to swing a sling out there toward the earth am I am I wrong I think they do do that oh

0:19:31 Bryan: Haven't watched that, but yeah, it's definitely got a... but there are asteroids of a lot of sizes. Ceres is just the biggest asteroid, and there are plenty of smaller ones, and

0:19:41 Thomas: I was gonna say like after so when we did uh the episode on um dinosaurs dying it feels like you could get quite a lot of destruction with a not a very large object if you start you and you're getting a lot of speed going right or even or even just the speed of the earth hitting it right yeah

0:19:58 Bryan: You don't even need that much speed initially, the amount it picks up. You just need something big enough to survive the friction of air as it falls through the atmosphere. And if you get something a or so across, that's going to be big enough to cause a lot of chaos, maybe an extinction level event. And yeah, if you want to wipe out humanity, it's not that hard.

0:20:22 Thomas: Easy.

0:20:22 Bryan: But if you wanna destroy the planet, you really gotta step up up there.

0:20:27 Thomas: So that's what we need to do is, oh, sorry, I should have cleared up our objective. We actually need to destroy it or just make it like uninhabitable.

0:20:33 Bryan: Want to fracture Earth's trust so that basically Earth is no longer identifiable as Earth. Because really, if things go wrong in November, would anything less satisfy you?

0:20:44 Thomas: Yeah. Well then just for fun, let's say we stopped the moon. Is that? So then, then the moon falls. Do you have any insight as to what that actually, like what happens? Does it really just crush? Like do they they just completely demolish each other.

0:20:57 Bryan: Much. It's going to essentially, over time, liquefy Earth. It'll add enough energy for it that over long enough time scale, it'll act more like a liquid than a solid. And this is actually hypothesized to be how the moon was originally created, was that there was a planet there, which I wouldn't even call Earth, a proto -Earth, that got hit by something in some large event, liquefied, and then the moon bubbled off and eventually coalesced into its own body. So something like that could happen again. We might end up with another moon, maybe more than one. Maybe they would all merge together into a new planet, something along those lines.

0:21:46 Thomas: But there's so much kinetic energy that it's turning into a molten like lava essentially.

0:21:50 Bryan: Yeah. At this point, it's like cracking the the Earth almost like an egg. Moon is big enough to do a lot of damage to the crust. Maybe not quite like an eg, but it would definitely disrupt the crust of the Earth, and there's a decent chance we'd end up with another moon out of the deal. I haven't done all the math on that, but yeah yeah crash one get one free yeah

0:22:10 Thomas: Two moons for the price of one. We can't afford not to do this, Brian. Right. So we're at our asteroid plan or it's like a dwarf planet kind of plan. And that's still, that seems even harder because yes, it's half the energy out there but you're saying we gotta tote all the stuff there and who wants to do that it's

0:22:31 Bryan: There are a few other possible ways around but there's always some sort of trade -off one um of the trade -offs is time that you get lucky and you find that okay our earth and the sun are making their way through the galaxy. And if you find that somewhere ahead of us, there's some rogue planet, just a planet that doesn't orbit any star, and it's reasonably close to the path we're taking through the solar system, if it's far enough ahead, you can redirect it just a little bit, and that change in velocity over time will add up enough that it'll come in and intersect with our solar system. That That relies on finding something. And going to take a while. So if you're willing to wait a while, it gets a lot easier. But you also have to be a lot more precise in your calculations. We can do that, we might also be able to figure out something clever with the asteroid belt. Long enough term, yeah, any more than two body problem is unstable and will eventually break apart in some way. So if you figure out the right mathematical solution, maybe you could use that to eject Ceres for a fraction of the energy, but it's going to take a while and take a lot of calculations.

0:23:16 Thomas: A long term plan so this all sounds like too much work and I don't want to do work

0:23:55 Bryan: You want the lazy solution, the absolute laziest. You want to destroy the Earth, but you don't want to spend a lot money.

0:23:57 Thomas: I don' t want to get yeah I'm gonna get my hands dirty you don't you know free

0:24:03 Bryan: Perfect. I've got one that will not get your hands dirty at all, because there is one death that is basically free. Earth were a living organism, it would die, disintegrate, you'd never see it anymore, and you don't have to lift a finger. All you have do is wait a few billion years until the sun dies. Yeah.

0:24:12 Thomas: Death you say uh yeah but that's I don't I also need to be alive for it that doesn't really count I want to be live when I die uh

0:24:32 Bryan: Accelerate it close to the speed of light so you can skip forward.

0:24:36 Thomas: Okay that sounds hard though you're

0:24:39 Bryan: That is probably easier than destroying the Earth. Just one spaceship close to speed of the light. That's significantly easier. Although getting enough acceleration that we don't squish you into Liquid Thomas might be difficult. Called.

0:24:53 Thomas: Can we put energy into the sun to make it blow up faster or

0:24:56 Bryan: That's one option. You'd want to put mass into, because yeah, that is one thing about how stars work, is the more massive they are, the faster they burn through their fuel, and the sooner they'll die, either expanding into a red giant like our sun will, or blowing up like like a more massive star will. And, you know, if you, you merge 10 or so suns together, you could bring the timeline forward down to a few hundred million years.

0:25:02 Thomas: Mass yeah sure we'll put the moon into the sun ah no that's a little hard well

0:25:31 Bryan: So if you've got nine spare suns floating around, I can I'll handle the rest of the plan.

0:25:38 Thomas: Well then shit are we just not going to be able to destroy the earth or what

0:25:42 Bryan: Be able to. There are a few, but we're going to have to get a bit more fantastical here. So to do this, I decided to go to the smartest group of people I know, which is the Facebook fan group for this show, as well as Where There's Woke, which if anybody listening is just hearing about this now, it's on Facebook. It's called Where There'S Woke. They're serious inquiries only. Ask them for their their favorite solution to destroying the planet, and got lots of ideas for it, which we can talk through, figure out what our favorite is, and then start putting things into motion. I should first ask you, Thomas, what's your favorite way to destroy the planet?

0:26:22 Thomas: I don't know that's why I came to you I don' know the moon thing's not going to work I mean climate change but that's not even gonna destroy the planet that's just gonna destroy a lot of us oh

0:26:29 Bryan: Let's go through some of the things we have and, yeah, through. So first of all, there are the homegrown solutions, things we could do just on Earth. And starting off with our kind of baseline, this is the one we actually could do, not exaggerating at all. It isn't as destruction -y as I would like, but gets us a good way there, which is nuclear Armageddon. Take all of our nuclear weapons and blanket the surface of Earth with them spreading out to maximize the destruction and kill basically every living thing on it.

0:27:10 Thomas: We changing our thing now but I thought we actually crunched the earth like an egg this is just gonna get us oh

0:27:14 Bryan: This is one of the things, if you can't meet the requirements, you change the requirements. And if you

0:27:19 Thomas: I didn't know okay so a whole different ballgame because it turns out I mean long story short on that first section it turns OUT it's just really hard to kill a big rock is that the that the message like a big giant giant giant rock is not that easy to yeah

0:27:34 Bryan: Essentially anything you want to do, which is really going to break the earth is going to be equivalently hard. If you just want to kill humanity, we can get that done. A sad state of humanity that we're at that point, but yeah, we Can Do It, and we probably will do it. We're having trouble stopping ourselves, honestly.

0:27:44 Thomas: All right do you have any idea or any calculations like how many nukes it would require and are we close to that or way over it

0:27:57 Bryan: I think for quite a while, we've been way over it. We've been going to excess, from my understanding, and especially if you take into account the the secondary effects of nuclear war, that even a decent amount of nuclear explosions is going to inject a lot of dust into the atmosphere, which will screw up the climate for everyone. And, you know, we've seen just, exactly. And even if, like, take Dr. Strangelove. They talk about nuclear war and it being triggered and that it'll hit the major population centers and military objectives, but then it'll knock a ton of dust into the air and a lot of that will be radioactive dust. So humanity would have to get into bunkers to survive and try to wait out a nuclear winter. And not likely humanity would get out of that. We can't even keep the planet habitable. Trying to survive through a nuclear war doesn't seem very likely to me, but yeah, humanity, honestly, that's a pretty achievable goal.

0:28:01 Thomas: That sounds right oh right that's why we might need a nuclear winter to offset the warming at some point well that's good nice to hear something positive for change okay

0:29:10 Bryan: So homegrown things. Now, this is another one that depends on the energy and where it would come from, and solution is probably one One of the most famous in cinematic history, the blow it up. Basically, find a Death Star that shoots a massive amount of energy into the planet to utterly blow it apart and break it into dust. Obviously, this isn't going to be easy. If we compare it to our stop the moon solution, it's about 10 ,000 times as hard.

0:29:41 Thomas: Then why are we doing it well

0:29:43 Bryan: You could drop the moon and, you know, liquefy Earth or you can blow it up so that there's not even anything there. On, if we're at the point where we need to destroy the planet, wouldn't you rather just get rid of it entirely?

0:29:58 Thomas: Think I would rather leave it for you know some future more advanced uh race of aliens but I we're already I mean the moon thing was impossible and now we're saying this is like a thousand times more impossible and impossible I don't even know how meaningful that is anymore wait what was this plan this is quote unquote find a death star what did I miss something okay

0:30:16 Bryan: Yes, basically. This is somehow create enough energy within Earth to blow it the off. So homegrown solution would be to, you set off bombs inside Earth, drill down to Earth's core, plant enough bombs to blow it apart, to overcome the force of all the gravity holding it together.

0:30:38 Thomas: So it's a journey to the center of the earth plus nukes that doable is that this seems possible wait

0:30:43 Bryan: To the amount of energy it would take for stopping the moon with nukes, we would need 10 ,000 times as much. So see the problem is um gravity holds it together really well um in order to calculate how much energy it takes to break something apart you use what's called the gravitational binding energy of it which is basically you look at it either way it's how much energy you would take to pull it apart or how much energie you would get out of everything collapsing together in the first place. And to think of this is gravity, everything attracts everything else. So imagine the earth is one big pile of marbles in space. You start out with one marble and then another marble falls in. It's being attracted by one marble. Then a third comes in, it's being attractive by two. A fourth comes in it's attracted by three. By the time you've got the millionth marble coming in. It's being attracted by almost a million there.

0:31:47 Bryan: So, the bigger it gets, the more energy you're adding with each additional chunk of mass. So, the gravitational binding energy ends up being proportional to the square of the mass. So, it's not just massive, like the Earth is ridiculously massive, it is massive times massive will give you the binding energy.

0:32:08 Thomas: I mean essentially it's it's why if If you get massive enough, you get like a black hole, right? I mean, if you get enough mass, it's like so much gravity that it's going to do that, right.

0:32:15 Bryan: Basically, mass will just things in enough and you just can't overcome it in any way. Also means that it takes a lot of energy to blow it apart, which means we might have to send some notes to George Lucas to rethink the physics of his Death Star idea. Wait, no, no. He sold it on to Disney. So he's laughing his way to the bank.

0:32:37 Thomas: Yeah. And they're not going to rethink it. It. They're They're just going to be like, oh, I don't know. They're not just going do the exact same thing, which they did. So there's, there's no rethinking required.

0:32:44 Bryan: Oh no, they didn't do the same thing. They blew up the sun. Yeah, they went one step up. They flew up entire solar systems. Yeah they stepped it up. Similar problem. Although if you want to blow up a star, it's a lot easier to just throw a a lot of extra mass into it to let it blow itself up. But yeah, you can get there, but we're going from, it's going from one level of apocalypse to another. Instead of just wiping out the planet, you want to wipe out the entire solar system, which, yeah, classic Hollywood, they've always got to one -up themselves. Let's bring it back down to Earth. Idea that was brought up is something that some people are actually a bit concerned about, and it is something that we should take seriously, at least in principle. So, Thomas, have you ever heard of the term grey goo?

0:32:51 Thomas: The star killer was, oh oh really? Uh, uh, in whatever this context is, I'm sure.

0:33:41 Bryan: Goo refers to the idea of what if you create a robot with the instruction, do whatever it takes to create copies of yourself. And then what if that robot is able to achieve that goal? And then you have multiple of that robot doing the same thing. Is often considered like nanobots, extremely tiny robots, where their only directive is to self -replicate. They don't need to be tiny for this to happen. But the theoretical endpoint is that these robots would keep taking whatever they they find near them on Earth and creating more copies of themselves and grow exponentially. And for how growing exponentially looks, just take your minds back to March of 2020 when the coronavirus was just breaking free. And growth is scary in that it doesn't seem like it's going that fast at first until suddenly it's going too fast for you to control and it's absolutely everywhere. If something like this got out of control with technology that just kept replicating itself, it could get out of Control and, in the Grey Goo scenario, convert the entire Earth into copies of whatever the original robot is.

0:35:03 Thomas: And why is it called gray goo?

0:35:05 Bryan: It's kind of liquidy, it's a bunch of robots, and robots a bunch of nanobots and robots are metal, so metal is gray. So gray goo. That's what it ended up being called. There's also sometimes considered equivalent if it's organic life that does it called green goo, which isn't brought up as much, but in smaller scale cases is much more realistic as we saw with the pandemic that you do occasionally see exponential growth of things dangerous to humans. So yeah, things that, no joking, no hyperbole, we do have to worry about this type of threat in some ways. And even if it's not a destroy the world thing, if you think about like computer viruses or something that are meant to self -replicate, if things go wrong, they can get out of control and cause a a lot of damage. And we do have to be wary of that.

0:35:08 Thomas: it'S a bunch of nanobots. Okay. Okay. So can you give us any insight into like how realistic this is if it's the self -replicating robot kind?

0:36:10 Bryan: The case of destroying the earth, converting the whole earth, there are some problems that would be faced as the types of materials that are useful for building computers or thinking machines are really a small number of elements, which are a very tiny fraction of everything that makes up earth. You know, We use a bunch of them in computers, like silicon is probably the most famous, but there are a ton of others as well, like lithium is for batteries, for instance. So you might have lithium as a power supply, but they're common enough that we can make use of. But on the proportion of making up Earth, Earth is, to a large extent, a bunch of inorganic things. There's a lot of carbon and there's a ton of iron. And iron is useful for structural purposes. It's not the best for specific circumstances. You might want something like titanium, which ends up being better, but it's good enough for structure. But for making computers, thinking machines, which you need a lot if you're going to have exponential growth, rope, you can't really do much with it.

0:37:27 Thomas: All right. I'm not worried about this at all.

0:37:30 Bryan: If this were to happened, you case scenario for thinking, let's say we create some sort of artificial intelligence, which does have human -like intelligence, and it wants to self -replicate, it could cause a lot of bad things to happen it could take over all of the mines we have for all the materials that it needs to replicate itself but it would cap out at a certain position as these resources are finite we're not talking destroy the world again unless there's some technological breakthrough or something that you can do a lot more with iron or go into other physics but it It would disrupt human society a lot, and this is honestly something we shouldn't discard as a realistic threat.

0:38:19 Thomas: I like that. Like if AI were to do this or something, even

0:38:23 Bryan: And AI, I don't mean the chat GPT stuff, which doesn't seem to be, it's hard to say whether it's really thinking. It's not thinking like humans do. It might be thinking in some abstract way, but have been experiments on some AIs in a box that are a bit concerning, it's something we should keep an eye on. We should be discussing AI safety pretty seriously, even if what we have now isn't actually a threat, even if it's capped out on how much it can do. It's something that somebody else might find another way to get at it, because we know intelligence can exist in human brains. There's no reason we can't create the same thing in a computer brain so it's something that we have to take seriously yeah

0:39:11 Thomas: They went after all, just all our crap, like if they forget, like having enough stuff to make, to take over the whole world with Grey Goo, even if They're like, Oh, Hey, the most efficient source of the things we need is everybody's computers and cell cell phones yeah yeah

0:39:23 Bryan: They just barge and steal our all our computers to repurpose into copies of themselves and again you've got exponential growth so what starts out as a yeah what starts as a small problem is suddenly everywhere so all the things here yeah there are only a few that we should actually honestly worry about. And war, honestly, is on there. We still do have the capability, even if we kind of not internalized it as much as we used to. Those weapons are still around. We should take that seriously. Should make sure that we don't have to worry about it. We should not take this seriously. Of the rest, yeah, that's the realm of science fiction. But it's still fun to talk about. We get into a section I've labeled exotic universe. This is where we kind of push at the bounds of science with things that we're pretty sure can happen or maybe stretch things a bit. So one option is to look at rare events happening elsewhere in the universe that could be redirected to destroy us and might happen naturally. And so one of the threats that could happen out of nowhere is us getting hit by what's called a gamma ray burst, which is a particularly energetic type of event that happens alongside things supernovae, where there's enough magnetism to focus things directly in one direction, which can be extremely energetic and could cause a lot of damage, even from a far enough distance. A supernova in general, as energetic as that is, a star exploding, unless it's our sun, we've got absolutely nothing to worry about. You maybe if it's a close star, we'll have something bright in the sky. There've been historical accounts of people seeing a new star hanging in the Sky for a couple of weeks. And so you'll get a new

0:39:26 Thomas: Wouldn't be great for us yeah sure

0:41:18 Bryan: Start that comes for a bit, goes away. Yeah, supernova are actually one of the few things in astrophysics that happens quickly. The lifetime of the supernova is about two weeks on average. And so if you look through the historical record, you'll have records of new stars appearing for a couple of weeks that we can use to identify historical supernova that were seen from Earth.

0:41:40 Thomas: Crazy and so that's the kind of thing if it were close enough wipes us out oh

0:41:44 Bryan: Yeah, it could, it depends exactly how close it is. Now, the gamma ray burst is where it gets extremely focused into the power of a supernova in a laser beam at us. And this is something that we know does happen and could end up being pointed at us and would essentially wipe us out. But this is the type of thing that it's ridiculously ridiculously unlikely. It would have to be aimed very directly at us. And there's no way to predict it. No way to avoid it.

0:41:56 Thomas: Wow how how does that happen though, that it actually gets focused to that extent, does it hit like a lens planet oh so

0:42:25 Bryan: Magnetism is basically in a lot of complicated physics. And not my expertise. I don't want to say much more than I know about this but yeah we'll just say magnets know, yeah, this is something that could happen but we shouldn't worry about it now I think that info is available I didn't look it up in research to this but there are stars that we think have a chance at going supernova and causing trouble for us. The last I looked into it, I just have vague memories. I think it might've been the star Betelgeuse. There was some discussion about if it might go supernova in the near future. And the scientific consensus was that on an astronomical timescale, it's near the end of its life, but it's still millions of years off and not something we need to worry about on a human timescale.

0:42:34 Thomas: Magnets we'll say magnets do have any like info on like the closest plausible next one of this that could happen sure phew okay thank god I

0:43:26 Bryan: An interesting one. Now instead of stars exploding, what about something happening with a neutron star or black hole? And in particular, let's talk about black holes because you might remember a few decades back when they were just starting up the Large Hadron Collider. There were people wondering, well, what if this somehow creates black holes and then those black black holes suck up the planet. If you check the historical record, you can confirm that this indeed did not happen. What if it did? You know, what if we figured out some way to create a black hole? Would we be able to suck up Earth into that?

0:44:04 Thomas: Mean it sounds like it's gonna take an awful lot of energy really

0:44:07 Bryan: That's the thing. From a physics perspective, you can have a black hole of any size. All that's necessary is you take some amount of mass and compress it enough such that the event horizon, the point at which not even light can escape, is outside where all of the mass is. And you have a black hole. Black holes do this interesting thing, although even light can escape. A general relativity perspective. Quantum mechanics gets in the way, and things are able to quantum tunnel outside. Is called Hawking radiation, named after Stephen Hawking, who proposed this. And although it's something we haven't confirmed, it's generally accepted among physicists that this happens. And the weird thing about Hawking radiation is it gets much stronger, the less massive the black hole is. So if you were to create very small black holes, they would have an extreme amount of Hawking radiation, and energy is conserved, so they would evaporate essentially extremely quickly.

0:45:16 Thomas: How fast are we talking so

0:45:18 Bryan: Instantaneously for anything that we might create in a lab. You wouldn't even notice it existed before it was gone.

0:45:27 Thomas: Black hole thing has always not made a whole lot of sense to me. Have any idea, like what size is this kind of a stable thing for any meaningful length of time?

0:45:34 Bryan: Did some maths on that. It's a bit tricky calculation. I had to make some assumptions, like saying that it's like buried underground a bit. You've got the pressure of all the rock around it pushing in on it. And I made the calculations here. And let's see, what did it come out with is about, oh, million pounds, honestly. So, yeah.

0:45:59 Thomas: That's not that much.

0:46:01 Bryan: A mass perspective, it's not that much. But if we're creating this in a lab, it basically has to be created from energy. And to get energy from mass, you have to multiply it by the speed of light squared. So yeah, multiplying it by a huge number to figure out how much energy we'd have to put it. So comparing it to the other things, this actually ends up being a bit less than stopping the moon. If energy is all you care about, creating a black hole that would be able to be stable enough to suck in all of Earth, it's about 10 % the energy necessary to stop the moon in its tracks. So if we figure out a way to get enough energy and a way to create a black hole, this is our most efficient option.

0:46:54 Thomas: So you're creating the black hole, you have to get what, like all that mass into the space of like a tiny thing, or how does that even work?

0:47:03 Bryan: Part because, like, matter does this thing where most of it doesn't like being in the same place. There are some types of matter which are just okay with it. Like, for instance, photons, the little pieces of light, are perfectly fine being in the same place as other photons. There are two different types of matter when it comes to this, bosons and fermions. Bosons are the ones that are like photons. They're fine being in the same place as each other. Fermions are like the things we mostly deal with, things that make up atoms and stuff and don't like being in the same place and will press back. So you can't get two atoms in the same place normally. You have to apply a lot of force to overcome this pressure and eventually you'll break down the atoms into neutrons and get the matter that makes up a neutron star, and then press a lot more to overcome what's called degeneracy pressure, which is the force caused by the dislike of the fundamental building blocks, these neutrons or the quarks that make them up, that their fundamental dislike of being in the same place as each other. Eventually, you can apply enough force to overcome that and squish things together and gravity will win out. That basically can only happen in the core of a massive star going supernova. That's we know of that's able to apply enough force for that.

0:48:37 Thomas: So then these ones that are potentially, oh, this could have created it. Those are the tiny, tiny kinds that would just evaporate like instantly.

0:48:46 Bryan: And it's kind of looking at things from the other perspective. And I think a lot of these worries were from people who didn't fully understand the science behind it and scientists kind of humoring them, because there isn't really a plausible mechanism we know to make these microscopic black holes. Individual particle, its own size, quote-unquote, these aren't infinitely small. Due to quantum mechanics, there's the uncertainty in its size, which in some way acts like its size. But for any individual particle, it's already larger than it would need to be to be a black hole. So you really have to have massive forces to take a lot of mass, which doesn't want to be together, and push it together. Was some of that happening in the Large Hadron Collider. I mean, you're colliding things, but even then you're colliding, you a few particles with each other. Have, you few particles like they don't just sit one particle up and try to nail it like a billiard ball. They have tons of them in there that they do, but even these tons aren't going to add up to the 75 million pounds we need to create a stable black hole.

0:50:08 Bryan: Even did somehow create a black hole, then it just evaporates. So we've honestly got nothing to to worry about there unless we were to put this ridiculous amount of energy into it yeah

0:50:07 Thomas: And I Yeah yeah. So one thing I've always wondered though is that with that tiny black hole theory, like let's say there is no Hawking radiation and let's say you create a black hole and it is stable, if it's a tiny tiny one, what does it do, can that actually damage, what I don't understand, does it actually oh

0:50:40 Bryan: So theoretically it could, you as it contacts things, it's event horizon, anything that passes through that would be sucked in, in this imaginary model, permanently, we're basically shutting off the door that otherwise allows things to get out, and so just imagine it kind of floating through the earth. Anything it touches becomes part of it. And, well, it's like the video game Katamari Damacy, where you've got one ball that everything it touches adds to it, and it just gets bigger and bigger until everything is eventually sucked in.

0:51:13 Thomas: So as long as you have that kind of thing going, it inevitably then, it sounds like, just would suck in everything around it no matter how small it starts, that's crazy right

0:51:22 Bryan: But again, again, that's not how we believe things really do work.

0:51:27 Thomas: But still only for reasons that are kind of weird, only for the Hawking radiation reasons, not for the fact that like oh but what doesn't the massive inertia of other like way bigger, you mass, that doesn't that, that because it's because you've created a little singularity event horizon okay all

0:51:44 Bryan: Well, it is not the singularity, it's the event horizon in particular. The event horizon basically means that the escape philosophy of anything is the speed of light. In order to get out of it, you'd have to be traveling faster than the speedoflight.

0:51:56 Thomas: So how could something be that small and create that much force oh

0:52:03 Bryan: Because that much force would be happening very, very close to it. So the farther away you are, the less gravity, and then it goes the other way too. You get close enough, gravity goes more and more, and the singularity is like where it spikes off to infinity. And at some point really close to that singularity, is the point where, okay, the escape velocity here is the speed of light.

0:52:06 Thomas: So it's yeah right this is really interesting to me, so but no example in nature that we know of where it's created in this really weird way, right, isn't it, I thought it's usually just like you get so much mass that it eventually crunches in because it like overcomes the other, like the other force nuclear forces or whatever it is that keeps stuff together. Right.

0:52:45 Bryan: So, it's basically, it happens either in a supernova, which has some amount of force pushing in, or maybe it happens that you get some big enough neutron stars colliding with other big enough neutron stars, and together they go over the critical mass and collapse into a black hole. That type of thing happens. So the only times that we know it happens are with massive amounts of mass. For amounts, this doesn't really happen because quantum mechanics gets in the way and that the uncertainty of where the particle is is much greater than the distance for its event horizon yeah

0:53:23 Thomas: Right. So that's kind of what I was like intuitively trying to think of, is like in order for it to create this amount of force with a small amount of mass, relatively speaking, don't you run into some like literal spatial limit of like how much you could condense stuff to get it to have that kind of gravitational force?

0:53:41 Bryan: And um, where you get into, there's first of all what we call degeneracy pressure, that's the tendency of matter to not want to be in the same place as other matter, so we're talking like atoms, that goes to neutrons which don't like to be in the place as neutrons, but you can force them, you can calculate how much the degeneracy pressure is and overcome it. With other things like bosons, it's easier, but bosons are a lot harder to work with. You have photons, which are traveling around at the speed of light, or a lot of other more exotic particles, which don't last very long out in the wild. They decay very quickly so these massive stars neutrons neutron stars colliding or the insides of supernova are the only way you can balance the the force equation to overcome this on any sort of smaller scale you just can't get enough force, yeah

0:54:35 Thomas: Gotcha. OK. So that makes me feel a bit that eases my mind a little. Well, we're over time. Are you that you want a lightning round or what?

0:54:48 Bryan: Yeah let's just go to lightning round for other things that have been proposed, okay, one, instead of creating a black hole, create a wormhole that splits earth in two, uh, this was famously in the sci-fi series Farscape, there was a lot of talk of wormhole weapons, problem is creating wormholes is likely even more impossible than creating black holes, as far as we know you need to find some matter which has negative mass to make that work, so I think we can move that off the list. In the realm of physically possible, but energetically even more ridiculous than anything else we've had before by a factor of a billion, is create a copy of Earth made entirely out of antimatter, where antimatter is like regular matter, except opposite in other properties. And when antimatter collides with regular matter they cancel out, leaving only energy behind. So you take this copy of Earth, slam the two together, and they basically explode in a huge burst of energy. Next is strange stars, which is basically maybe upon a maybe upon maybe, which basically says, okay, maybe in the core of neutron stars, the pressure is high enough that the laws of physics change and particles made up of strange quarks become stable. And maybe when those are stable, they'll be infectious. And when other things see them, they want to be like them. And then maybe sometimes the crusts of these stars will split apart. They'll spit out these pockets of strange matter. And then maybe one of those will hit us. And then everything on Earth will see that and want to be like it. And all of a sudden, we're all strange matter. A lot of maybes, but it's not completely ruled out by physics. So

0:54:50 Thomas: Lightning round.

0:56:30 Bryan: A fun one, travel back in time and prevent earth from ever forming in the first place, yeah, need time travel that changes the past, um, but you solve that maybe you could do it yeah

0:56:40 Thomas: If we have that, I feel like we can just fix whatever's making us want to kill the earth. Like, we can probably patch that up.

0:56:46 Bryan: That probably uh and here's another one that kind of falls into the same parameters. Turn off the simulation.

0:56:54 Thomas: Yeah, control alt delete. A giant control alt elite.

0:56:58 Bryan: We're all living inside a simulation and we just unplug it. And there, there we are, done.

0:57:03 Thomas: Support! Oh, man, I was just thinking about that movie the other day. That's a fantastic movie. Vanilla Sky, or Abre los ojos, I think is the original, great movie, um

0:57:12 Bryan: Yeah. Final one. And this is the one that could actually happen. It's a weird particle physics thing that says that maybe what we think of as the ground state of the laws of physics isn't the ground state, and some other point in the universe will figure out a better way to do physics. And when it does, it will tell the universe around it about this. That will spread out at the speed of light and essentially wipe out everything it touches in the Universe into some new weird way of doing physics. This is called vacuum decay or false vacuum decay. There were also people thinking maybe this could be triggered at the Large Hadron Collider. And if the theory is right, it might happen sometime in the universe. It's actually a bit more likely this is right than strange stars. It has fewer assumptions baked into it. It's another of these things that even it's right, it's ridiculously unlikely to happen. But it might and it'll just wipe out the entire universe verse and we won't notice it coming or be around to care that it's gone. So yeah, not worth worrying about.

0:58:20 Thomas: I'm a lot less worried than I would have been otherwise, I'm glad it's not so fragile, but I feel like really the tried and true method is just you flood social media with a bunch of bots, you know, and just reinforce incredibly harmful politics and xenophobia that eventually leads to conflict and prevents us from solving problems. Like, yeah, yeah, well, that's called MAGA. Yeah, we did start creating them.

0:58:40 Bryan: Creating their own bots that's when we've got a problem. Yeah

0:58:49 Thomas: So it really does sound like, I was going to make the joke, but like the best way is just sit around and wait till climate change gets us. Because like, we're already doing it. We're already halfway there. It's like, you know, already come this far. Might as well just do that. Let it finish us off.

0:59:02 Bryan: We go.

0:59:03 Thomas: Right. Well, this was a lot of fun. Yeah, you know, I have mixed feelings, I kind of wish there was some cool way for the earth to be destroyed that's at all feasible, but also obviously probably good, good that there's not.

0:59:12 Bryan: It's probably a good idea that it isn't or somebody might try to do it, who was it that made a joke like if they put a big switch with, in big red letters, do not pull this switch, we'll destroy the universe, it would be pulled even before the paint was dry yeah

0:59:25 Thomas: I think that's probably true. Right. Well, Dr. Brian Gillis, always a pleasure, so much fun. Hey, anything you want to plug, any place you want to send people? Oh yeah.

0:59:34 Bryan: I just like to send people again to the Facebook group for this show, that's hey I post there occasionally, like for, um, asking people their favorite way to destroy the world, so you might see me around there, it's called, uh, Where There's Woke, There's Serious Inquiries Only, so you'll likely find me there, yeah no

0:59:50 Thomas: How nice you're plugging a thing for this show. Wow. What a guy I appreciate it. All right. Take care, Brian. And until next time, hopefully don't go creating any black holes.

0:59:56 Bryan: Problem you just promise not to check my garage

1:00:22 Thomas: Not like, oh, it was just a moment. It's like, ow, fell directly into the earth. But and