Direct continuation of Death Star Part II: How to Power The Thing

Now we’re going to investigate methods that are far easier than destroying the Sun with a concentrated beam of energy. Of course, this is a good time to remind everyone that while it takes very little energy in comparison to destroy everything on the surface of the planet (we could do it with the nuclear arsenal we have today), that’s not good enough for the Sith. We need to destroy the Earth such that it’s reduced to an asteroid belt (or even less).

Additionally, when destroying the Earth we are not limited by any means of current technology, just what we know can happen based on our current knowledge of Physics.

Antimatter

Considering that you’re already generating 4,152,222,222,222,222kg of antimatter to power the beam of the Death Star, perhaps you could use that to generate an antimatter Earth and send it on a collision course with the real Earth, which would result in a direct explosion.

The minimum amount of energy required to destroy the Earth is equal to the Earth’s gravitational binding energy, which requires 2.2405 × 10³² joules. Assuming the conversion is lossless, you’d need 2.4928×10¹⁵ kg of matter-antimatter, which would require 1.2464×10¹⁵ kg of antimatter. Considering this is only 30% of the amount of antimatter needed to power the Death Star’s laser, we have a good start.

Black Holes

Another “easy” way to completely destroy a planet is to annihilate it with a small Black Hole. You’d need a black hole with a large mass or it will evaporate due to Hawking Radiation. Given that there are no equations for Hawking Radiation that I can sufficiently pretend to understand, let’s just say you’ll need to make it the size of a small town. The black hole will fall into the core based on its immense weight and absorb the entire planet. The black hole will then continue to orbit the sun as normal.

There’s just one cute setback. International Astronomical Union defines a planet to be anything that:

• is in orbit around the Sun
• has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and
• has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit

…Which is unfortunate because the resulting black hole mass will still qualify.

Near Lightspeed Impact

First take an asteroid of sufficient mass and then accelerate it to a sufficient speed and ram it into the Earth. The amount of speed you need changes based on the amount of mass you have and vice versa, but you still need to achieve the 2.2405 × 10³² joules. We know that, as explained in Part 1, KE = .5mv².

Considering that we have a clear upper limit on speed — the speed of light, but we don’t have a clear upper limit on mass, we can find the minimum necessary mass by plugging in:
2.2405×10³²J = .5m(299,792,458m/s)²
4.481×10³² = m(89,875,517,873,681,764)
4,985,784,901,176,264.2kg = m

The moon has a mass of 7.3477×10²²kg, which is definitely a lot of punch. Plugging it into the equation:
2.2405×10³²J = .5(7.3477×10²²)v²
4.481×10³² = (7.3477×10²²)v²
6098507015.8 = v²
78092.9m/s = v

So you can either find a 4,985,784,901,176,264.2kg and hurl it at the Earth at lightspeed, or take the Moon and hurl it at 78092.9m/s, or do something in between.

Engulf it in a Supernova

In order to make a sun explode in a supernova, it needs to have a large amount of mass that it can no longer convert mass in its ongoing fusion. This would cause the Sun to halt all its nuclear fusion reactions and collapse, then explode. While I don’t have any equations to prove it, I’m told that dropping a lump of pure non-fusable iron the size of Venus into the Sun should work.

To figure out how much you’d have to harvest, consider that Venus has a mass of 4.8685×10²⁴kg. That’s how much iron you would need. If you took extracted every single trace of iron from the Earth, you’d still be short about 4.658 × 10²⁴kg. So this won’t be easy either.

Maybe you should just wait for Andromeda to come. Or we could work on somehow hurling the Earth into the Sun, which we’ll look at next week. The ability to mass move astronomical bodies is actually needed in a few of the above ideas anyway (such as moving the pure iron, or mass driving the moon into the Earth), so hurling the Earth seems to be the easiest.

Continued by: Death Star Part IV: How to Move a Celestial Body

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