You could recruit millions of your population to buy and use all sorts of greenhouse gas causing products and cause worldwide weather disasters killing millions…
Dr. Strangelove On a Train
Of course. For one thing, if you make it too big, it collapses into a black hole.
Practical limits will usually apply before that, though.
Hitting some spot on Earth with an asteroid-sized object sounds pretty terrible, as we all remember the bad hair day of the dinosaurs. However, “dropping” a large object from a near-Earth orbit wouldn’t achieve the velocity of a comet or asteroid coming from outer space, and a high velocity multiplies the effective force by a whopping big number.
How much? Darn, my slide rule is in storage and I just can’t get the hang of these newfangled calculators, so I don’t know, but it’s a lot.
Ok, if we’re going there, I proffer the two most plausible ways to destroy the entire universe.
(1) Nucleate vacuum decay, destroying both this universe and any possibility of joy.
[QUOTE=Coleman & de Luccia]
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. [Under our model the new universe within the bubble undergoes catastrophic gravitational collapse within microsends, so…] This possibility has now been eliminated.
[/QUOTE]
(2) If this universe is a simulation, do something that will lead to termination of the simulation. Possibilities might include the discovery and exploitation of a bug in the simulation to mess it up; or guessing the purpose of the simulation and initiating events that render the continuation of the simulation pointless.
(1) Would proceed rather slowly, radiating at the speed of light from the nucleation point. The advantage of (2) is that it might be instantaneous.
You could run out of U-235/Pu-239.
OK, but if the weapon is too large, maintenance could be extremely difficult - and the larger and more complex the weapon, the more things that could malfunction.
A black hole would make a pretty effective weapon though. Just push your enemies into it.
Is OP asking literally how to create a bigger kablooie? Some posters have suggested bioweapons that could quietly do much more damage. Enlarging on that note, consider the possibility of some kind of psychological weapon that could reduce its victims to drooling blobs of dysfunctional protoplasm, in large numbers.
As suggested in 1960’s-era sci-fi, 500 copies of the Stella Mudd (wife of Harcourt Fenton Mudd) fembot could do that.
Teller reportedly kept a list of hypothetical large weapons and their delivery methods, the last of which was “backyard”.
Political Correctness will be the most devastating weapon of destruction.
In theory it’s possible to move Earth or another planet via gravity with enough close fly-bys of an asteroid; occasionally it gets mentioned as a possible very long term way to move Earth away from the Sun as it warms up over geological time scales, and preventing a runaway greenhouse effect.
Presumably you could use the same technique to ram a planet *into *the Earth instead of moving it out of danger. It would take a very, very long time though; my guess would be millions of years. So it depends on whether or not the time required is factored into the “practical” part of the question.
IIRC, the meteor over central Russia a few years ago was supposedly about the size of a small apartment building (70 feet diameter?). Siberia seems to be the aliens’ favourite test firing range…
Heck, if you wanna do that a decent quarry will work just fine.
Great cite/site.
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Commodore, political commentary is not appropriate for General Questions. Don’t do this again. Since I note that you have engaged in witnessing in another thread, be on notice that further posts of this kind in this forum will be subject to a warning. Restrict yourself to factual statements here.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
From Chelyabinsk meteor - Wikipedia
Is this the first meteor breakup ever photographed in medias res?
Or are all sorts of night-time sky streaks meteor breakups? (Asteroids, meteors. comets: can never tell 'em apart.(
To the unaware, including me: this is an SD (GQ?) inside joke. I don’t know the referent (:() but I’ve seen it dragged in whenever possible–although here it’s on the money.
The Peekskill Meteor back in 1992 was caught by over a dozen camcorders (the numbers I’ve seen say over 20, but Wiki says 16), mostly due to the stroke of luck that it fell on a Friday evening in October (when many Americans happen to be outside with camcorders running, watching high school football). It was probably also caught in a great many still photographs: It was visible from pretty much the entire eastern US, and lasted long enough that a person could plausible have gotten out their camera during it.
Neat. Thanks.
Perhaps a supercomputer capable of analyzing the butterfly effect on human society, bring about the small change that would bring us to the brink of extinction, or extinct perhaps via WW3, damaging environmental practices, political methods or educational steering of society. Yes it would take some time to happen if we could even figure out how to predict the results of these small actions but could be a very powerful weapon and perhaps irreversible once triggered.