• Question: Can you create an laser that has enough power to blow up the world?

    Asked by daniel1289 to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 16 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by xoxcorkyxox.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      That would take a *lot* of power. Not sure how much. I suppose if you could make the hot magma in the earth boil, it would blow the earth’s crust to pieces. That magma’s pretty hot already, but there’s a lot of it you’d need to heat up!

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I’m sure you could though it would be quite difficult. The laser I use is very powerful and does cause matter to explode. However it is also very small, the focussed beam is only a few microns. To blow up the world you would need a much larger beamsize. This is difficult though as you would need to have a large number of photons, with the same wavelength, in a large area and at the moment I doubt we have a source of light capable of that.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Actually, some of this has been calculated already, although using a fictional motivation. You can read more about it here, and there’s a link to the full paper that the scientists published.

      http://io9.com/5876473/how-much-energy-would-the-death-star-require-to-destroy-earth

      Now we just need to figure out how to build a death star…

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