And if we put our minds to it and work together, we can raise the temperature of the planet until it kills off all the people (followed by the billionaires).
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Can we heat it just enough that it kills off billionaires but leaves everything else alone? 🤔
Maybe just some extremely localised heating, like you might get from a flamethrower.
No worries mate, it's already in the bag!
I would argue that's the only thing that makes sense. Given the immense scale, everything has to be so much more localized. What would be much more insane to me is if we were able to raise the temperature of a huge chunk of space by a large amount. Like the universe right after the big bang.
Well think about it, an asteroid just a mile wide hits a planet, the impact plume would reach about 20,000k, or 35,000 F, but on a planet wide scale even those numbers are meaningless, a statewide scale? Forget about it. We may think we're hot shit when we can raise our ovens up to 500⁰ or melt steel, but, in the grand scheme of things we're playing with grains of sand on the beach of energy manipulation
I'd say the amount of energy manipulation we do makes perfect sense for beings about the size of a human. We still have a long ways to go regarding efficiency but no need to heat a planet when heating your room or your food is enough.
I think your fascination with this just boils down to a fascination with the scale of the universe in general.
Could be, I tend to find things rather fascinating
I am envious of your sense of wonder.
I'm not sure I understand this. Small scale fluctuations are the easiest things to achieve, in fact they occur spontaneously. It's the large scale fluctuations that would be difficult to achieve.
For example if you have a room filled with air, then changing the temperature of all the air in the room would require doing a lot of work or transferring a lot of heat to the entire room. But on the microscale, if you were to look at a random 1 micrometer cube volume of the air, then you should expect temperature fluctuations to occur all the time, even without the addition of heat or work to the room.
It's like staring at static on a tv screen. The overall shade of the entire screen is middle gray and over time stays gray, but unsurprisingly individual pixels will fluctuate randomly between pure black and pure white. Small scale fluctuations occur spontaneously.
Well think about this, are you able to manipulate temperature within one degree? Sure. Get a stove. How about one one millionth of a degree? Is that easy to achieve? Its not. Same on a cosmic scale, changing things by one million degrees? Easy as pie, one degree? No way. Sure, you have done it a million times to get to a million degrees but you didn't do it with precision.
That's what I think is amazing, our precision only capable at this level because of our size and capability in this universe
How about one one millionth of a degree? Is that easy to achieve? Its not.
Get an infrared lamp and do some maths ... about the same difficulty I'd say.
My man... You cannot achieve temperature stability within accuracy of a micro kelvin with "an infrared lamp and some maths"
You were just saying "manipulate" temperature so far, but ok. If you want temperature stability you'll also need a raspberry pi.
My mistake with the wording, I will say though infrared light raspberry pi or no, still would not be enough for that. You need serious lab equipment. Like advanced cooling methods to achieve this sort of thing. That's why I chose this range. With your method I could see possibly being able to do a percentage of a degree in keeping it stable with no outside forces, but accuracy within a millionth I think is a stretch
Like advanced cooling methods to achieve this sort of thing.
Alright so you want to cool something down to an absolute temperature that is in the micro kelvin? Yeah, that's is going to be hard.
But you could just go from 300.000001K to 300.000002K for example, no super cooling required. So far your wording only implied a change, no absolute values. Otherwise it would also be pretty hard to get to 1K for your one degree example.
With your method I could see possibly being able to do a percentage of a degree in keeping it stable with no outside forces, but accuracy within a millionth I think is a stretch
Yeah ok, if want to keep an object at an exact temperature with that precision, you'll need some additional stuff. But I don't think you'll need a top tier lab for that. A vacuum chamber with the test object, an array of infrared lasers suspended inside and a bit of electronics in a temperature controlled room should give some good results.
A millionth isn't that small though, but it will get impractical if you go even smaller.
Is one degree really small?
Degrees are a manmade concept. Why do you think 1 degree is small?
I don't really see why it is insane. We are quite small ... so of course we can make small changes.
But raising the temperature by 1 agree isn't even "small" considering we can manipulate individual electrons or photons.