As you may or may not know, a planet — like Earth or an unsuspecting Alderaan — is actually really hard to destroy. It’s really easy to kill all the life on the surface of the planet, or make it so the surface of the planet would be completely useless for billions of years, but it’s actually really hard to destroy the planet itself.

“Death Star” Table of Contents

Part I: Destroying the Planet
Part II: How to Power The Death Star
Part III: Easier Ways
Part IV: How to Move a Planet

The Sith

For the Sith, just killing everyone on the surface of the planet isn’t good enough. Darth Vader can probably do that with the Force in his sleep. The Sith need a weapon that will destroy any inhabited planet into a pile of space rubble, and preferably quickly. Unfortunately for them and the Death Star, planets have a large variety of physics that prevent them from being destroyed by just anyone’s galactic weapon of mass death.

The first problem is that you can’t take shortcuts, like vaporizing the surface. This would make the planet uninhabitable and destroy all life, but the planet itself would just turn into a gas planet, held together by that stupid gravity we keep hearing about. Then, over millions of years, all the gas would cool and the planet could start all over again. There might even be a chance for life, which means a chance for intelligent life, which means a chance for future Jedis.

So we’re going to need to drill the laser into the planet and destroy the whole thing. This brings us to the problems with gravity again. Even if you were to build a giant laser capable of slicing a planet in half and then you used that aforementioned laser on an unsuspecting Alderaan, stupid Alderaan gravity would slam the planet back together again. Sure, the resulting force will obviously kill all life on the surface of the planet, but… you know… not good enough.

Ultimately, you’re going to have to use your laser to provide such a large force that all the resulting chunks are each fast enough to escape the gravity of the planet, or — in advanced words — have enough acceleration to achieve escape velocity. Seeing as we don’t have this data for Alderaan, we’re going to change our target to Earth.

We’ve learned from Wikipedia Physics class that the escape velocity for Earth is 11.186 kilometers per second. Knowing that the magic equation KE = .5mv², or kinetic energy (in joules) = .5(mass of object in kg)(velocity of object in meters/second)², we can tell how much kinetic energy will be needed to accelerate the earth (or rather, all of its soon to be pieces) to it’s own escape velocity.

We just plug into the equation, and presto! We get that KE = .5(5.9736×10²⁴)(11,186m/s)², which equates to a kinetic energy of 3.737×10³² joules.

Of course, it must be noted that as the surface of the planet is lasered apart, the lower parts will have less escape velocity (because the mass gets increasingly smaller), so the kinetic energy is a bit more than you’d actually need to destroy Earth. However, the explosion seen in the Star Wars movie also happened absurdly fast with a large amount of force, which indicates that each piece is being thrown apart with a lot more than just escape velocity.

Now, sadly, this doesn’t answer the problem of “Can the Death Star Really Destroy a Planet?” Of course, the answer is “yes”, as the Death Star is fictional, and it did destroy a planet. However, 3.737×10³²J is a lot of energy. Imagine an area the size of Iraq (438,317km²). Fill that entire area with strings of lightbulbs as dense as possible. With that amount of energy, you could power all those lightbulbs for roughly 22 trillion years.

3.737×10³²J is also:

• The energy in 249 sextillion lightning bolts.
• The energy released by 893 trillion combined atomic bombs.
• Enough energy to power the world for 471 times the current age of the universe.
• Equal to the sustained energy output of the sun for 11.2 days.
• 1,384 trillion times the energy output of a photon torpedo. (Using data from the TNG Technical Manual)

Now imagine a 249 sextillion of these.

 

So you’re going to have to find some way to store that large amount of energy. Since it’s the future, we don’t need to get into the technicalities of just how to do that, but given that it’s the size of a planet itself, we can assume that a large amount of it is devoted to energy storage.

Next Page, Part II

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