Super Weapons
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
00:00
The Future of Nuclear Weapons
The amount of energy needed to vaporize a planet the size and composition of your typical Earth mass planet is going to be on order of 10 to 32 joules. Even just peeling the crust off the planet, which should take about 1% as much energy, should do the job. If you had to buy that energy in real modern dollars at something like a 100 million joules for every 100 millionJoules produced by our current global economy it would cost $10 trillion or more per year. The assumption is that you have some cheaper or singular power source with super weapons, but never forget that energy is originally and literally defined as how much work goes into blowing things up.
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