If the Earth was blown up by a death star would we even notice? Would the explosion happen too fast for us to know even for a second (or part of a second) what happened?
Without defining exactly what a death star is and how much energy it directs at earth there is no specific answer but you’d likely have a short, but finite amount of time to say “oh shit.”
Well going by that scientifically accurate documentary, Star Wars: A New Hope, the Death Star’s main weapon hit Alderaan (sp?) with enough energy to accelerate chunks of the planet to a distance equal to the planet’s radius (~4000 miles?) in a fraction of a second. I won’t bother with how many Gs this works out to, but presumably the Alderaans weren’t just mush, they were plasma. I presume it was their ghosts that “cried out in terror”.
A better question might be how Kryptonians spent their last moments. At what point was the seismic disturbance enough to kill them?
Are we talking a modern Death Star or a 1920’s-Style Death Star?
When you watch the scene, it looks like the bolt of energy from the death star hits the surface of the planet and then a huge explosion occurs at the center of the planet, causing debris to fly in all directions. This has never made too much sense to me, but my best guess is that the weapon somehow pumps some hydrogen into the planet beneath the crust and then creates extreme enough conditions to start a massive fusion reaction.
That’s be harder than blowing it up, and require vastly more energy.
As it happens, just before your atoms are torn asunder, turn to your teenaged kid and say, “This is all your fault, you know.”
Considering the question is pure science fiction, the answer should be the same …
Enough earthlings would live long enough to carry the storyline into the next episode.
They nuked the site from orbit.
It was the only way to be sure.
“What the fu…”
I gather it would be enough time to hear millions of voices crying out in terror and then be suddenly silenced.
If it happened like the movie, there was not even a second between the beam hitting and the planet exploding. The G-forces at the surface must have been tremendous, and nothing could have survived more than a split second. Hence the millions of voices suddenly silenced. I figure not even a second between the beam hitting and everything being crushed in the outward acceleration of the planet crust.
That said, Arthur C. Clarke describes something similar in Childhood’s End
with the last adult amongst the kids describing the phenomenon of the kids dismantling the planet to the aliens
But this happened slower, perhaps like Krypton disintegrating.