At school my teacher would unironically say; that "we could literally explode the earth many many thousand times"
well... if we blew up Tokyo, a thousand times the death toll would be that of every human on the planet.
But we do not live as densely populated as in Tokyo.
do we really have the power to kill every human on the planet?
Don't forget that everything outside of the actual fireball is a potential survivor.
i just want to put an end to this meme.
>>75039179
>Critical mass
>>75039146
I can't remember the name of it but I read a long paper on nuclear warfare and how it would actually work. Even using every nuke we have now would be far from enough to explode the earth. We might nuke ourselves back into the stone age though
>>75039146
No, we don't have the ability to kill every human on the planet with current nuclear stockpiles. Probably not even with past nuclear stockpiles either.
Do we have other means of wiping out all of humanity? Yeah, probably. I'd wager the most likely method would be targeted bioweapons designed to rapidly infect, spread, and kill.
Aside from that, one of the spacefaring nations could, relatively cheaply, hook an asteroid into a collision course with earth - depending on the size of it, that could very well kill most life on the planet. (And this is one of the reasons I think the first nation to actually seriously colonize space is going to become what I'd term a spacepower)
If loads of nukes go off it wouldn't be explosions that kill most people, it would be the sudden ice age that would result from soot going into the atmosphere and stopping a lot of the suns energy from reaching Earth
>>75039502
Which would probably kill off humanity
>>75039336
>not saying "with no surviving starmen"
>>75039461
>Aside from that, one of the spacefaring nations could, relatively cheaply, hook an asteroid into a collision course with earth - depending on the size of it, that could very well kill most life on the planet. (And this is one of the reasons I think the first nation to actually seriously colonize space is going to become what I'd term a spacepower)
What would prevent another spacefaring nation from changing its course again?
We should have enough to nuke the entire middle east though, if you ignore the desert areas.
>>75039502
thats a fucking meme
>>75040861
Their lack of initiative
>>75039146
>>75039461
Yes, we do have the ability to kill everyone on the planet. Not the way you put it, but with the fallout that would follow.
>>75040962
Fallout doesn't just magically kill people
And the 'nuclear winter' thing is a lie carl sagan perpetuated with incorrect models, for the express purpose of convincing idiot politicians that nuclear war would kill everyone.
Realistically, a nuclear war would probably kill ~30-40% of the population in targeted countries, from direct and indirect means.
>>75039502
Are you describing a solution to Global Warming?
>>75040962
perhaps the radioactivity would cause the chances of getting cancer to rise from 10% to 11% but that is VERY unlikely.
you need to know that you live on a ball of radioactivity, and what humans produce is a mere fraction of what the earth is capable of delivering and taking.
if you are worried you might destroy the earth, take a good grip with your fist and threaten that very ground you are standing on, it will take a hard beating but you will feel dumb, as the earth has stood the test of hardships humans could never comprehend.
we will be washed of this earth by natural means long before we could be able to do so ourselves.
it would require some 300 000 nukes to cover the earth with a 50% survival rate, you are half way there, only 3 000 000 000 to go.
as for the trees and plantlife, they are made to be able to perish and then grow again, they'd love more than anything to see the surface leveled.
if every human on the planet decided to kill all plantlife we would not stand chance.
what color is the earth?
>>75041909
yeah, fuck carl sagan. why would you want to convince people that total nuclear war is probably a bad idea?
>>75040861
what bullshit,
with the largest rockets man can muster we barely have the ability to escape the earth, from there we are merely along for the gravitational ride and we'll slingshot past planets,
this is the problem with dealing with an asteroid on collision course.
at best we can use our space crafts gravitational pull to barely miss the earth if we are seriously early on, and even that does ofcource depend on the size of the asteroid..
best we can hope for is to have the asteroid entry with such an angle that it burns up in the atmosphere, or just have it hit the pacific.
but i guess if we are so lucky as to have an asteroid go near-miss, we could potentially waste a trillion dollars, if we are really really quick to abuse the situation to make the asteroid enter our atmosphere which would cause massive damage even if it never even hit the ground.
Wikipedia: 2120 nuclear weapons have been detonated, averaging a kt of 255 kt.
Hippies: 100 nuclear weapons with a kt of 15 each can 'destroy the world':
http://www.globalzero.org/blog/how-many-nukes-would-it-take-render-earth-uninhabitable
The earth could easily handle the 15,000 nukes we have stock piled. the countries getting nuked could't.
