Project Sundial was 10 gigatons, so, 10,000 Tongas.
I’m t was enough to ignite all of metropolitan FRANCE if detonated at an altitude of 45km.
The earth would survive, sure, but I’m pretty sure there would be significant global effects.
Comment on what really happened to the Titanic
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 6 days agoIdeas are not the same as possibilities.
Also, the Earth takes hits bigger than that. Even the Tonga eruption was about 10 megatons of energy.
The Chicxulub impact is estimated to be around 100 trillion tons of tnt equivalent. 10000x bigger than Sundial was even proposed.
Chicxulub did not shatter the Earth.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 6 days ago
Well yea, it killed off the dinosaurs, who survived on the planet tens of thousands of times longer than humans. It was catastrophic.
Still not Earth shattering, though.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Project Sundial wasn’t just theoretical. We had the ability, the materials, and the technical knowledge to build it. You know how you can absolutely verify that? We built it in thousands of different bombs rather than just one big one. If we had made a 10 gigaton device where it was supposed to be located in eastern California, or western Nevada, blowing that up would have created a massive crater that probably would have measured at least 30 miles in diameter, and all of the US would die in the first blast. The shockwave would circle the globe multiple dozens of times. This is a world ending bomb. Half the planet’s crust would be molten for decades if not centuries. 10 gigatons is about 1/4-1/5 the amount of energy that Theia imparted to Proto-Earth which created two moons for a very short period of time, and made the entire planet molten for another 1/4 billion years.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 6 days ago
lol no. It would not kill all of the US. At all. In any way. It would be 10000x smaller than Chicxulub. Which also did not instantly wipe off that large of an area.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sure. I’m gonna believe you, a rando on the net, rather than my experience as a Navy Nuclear Power Program Electronics Technician Instructor.
Fuck off. You don’t have any clue about what you are talking about.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 6 days ago
rofl clown.