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[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 35 points 9 months ago

That’s their point, how do you get such a heavy thing to orbital speed without spending all that energy? You can’t unless you build it from materials harvested in space.

[-] Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Oh, I apologise, I suffered some curse of knowledge there, the answer is time.

A blast is a release of energy over a short time, the whole point of building weapons is to store and handle energy in safe amounts over time.

Global electric energy consumption is about 200 PJ a day, approximately the same as the Tsar Bomba, but there's no risk for a huge explosion neither when you incinerate trash or turn off the AC.

Because time.

Although we could explode a nuke and propel things ballistically, it turns out it's a lot easier to use rockets. A rocket, although carrying frightening amounts of fuel and exploding spectacularly when it fires wrong, has several safeguards to not expend all that fuel at once. And also gives the opportunity to correct course along the way.

Now imagine that the same amount of energy has been expended many many many times over the course of the space era, and almost any mass in orbit has serious potential for damage.

For example, the MIR was 130 tons, orbiting at about 7,8 km/s, for a kinetic energy of 4 TJ, and another 235 GJ of potential energy. Totalling about a tenth of Little Boy that levelled Hiroshima.

Edit: Specifying and correcting the global energy consumption.

[-] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 8 points 9 months ago

Wait this can't be right or I am missing something. Are you saying that the Tsar Bomba released 10 PetaJoule of energy more than our current world uses in a year?

[-] MacAttak8@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Tsar Bomba released 210–240 PJ of energy according to Wikipedia. Not sure about global energy consumption.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
423 points (95.5% liked)

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