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[LordBaal]

But make sure at least one of the astronauts is a maniac that secretly desire the human race to die out.

[Kagus]

Watched that one for the first time not too long ago, actually... Mmmm, squishy!

Nice music though.

[Il Palazzo]

Here's a paper discussing the possibility of blowing up the sun with a targeted nuclear bomb in order to ? ? ? because ? ? ?

I'm no expert in blowing up the sun, but it seems legit?

That the journal is a predatory one should be a clue as to how legit the paper is. Half of it reads like 'facts about the sun' essay for school assignment, copied from Wikipedia. The other half is the authors making bunk claims (the rate of p-p reactions in the Sun is so low due to there being a weak interaction involved, not because of Coulomb barrier - which is also why no bomb uses it), referencing irrelevant figures (talking about p-p reaction rates but showing deuterium/tritium/helium-3 rates), basing arguments on sweeping assumptions (like, at one point they even say something to the effect of: 'we don't actually know how this works, but let's talk about the bomb delivery now'), and referencing random shit and own work (the bibliography is hilarious) - because the principal author appears to have already had this idea 40 years ago and is still going on about it.
The formation of stars involves much higher energies than what any number of bombs can supply, and yet they don't explode, because the plasma is in self-regulating hydrostatic equilibrium. But I'm guessing if they ever used textbooks it was only to lift a few equations to prop up the already assumed conclusion.

[Sirus]

I haven't looked at the paper, but my long-ago astronomy classes have led me to believe that the Sun puts out the equivalent energy of something like thousands of nuclear bombs every single minute. I don't see how a single nuke could possibly affect it in any meaningful way.

Not unless it was something absurd like the size of Saturn or something, and at that point it'd probably collapse under its own gravity and go critical anyway.

[LordBaal]

From what I skimmed they bring up the factoid that a nuclear bomb has for an instant a higer temperature than the innards of the sun and that detonating one inside the sun would somehow result in a chain reaction that would turn it into a gigan nuclear bomb? Long history short it fails to take the volume, mass and other facts into account.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The idea is that the sun is mostly composed of material which is available as fusion fuel, but being used gradually (this part is true, as I understand it). And so, what if you created conditions like that of the sun's "engine" in its "body" via a fusion bomb? The argument is that it would cause the fusion reaction to massively propagate itself due to the available fuel for further fusing, i.e. blow up the sun.

I think it's probably bullshit or at least impractical compared to, say, triggering MAD. That said, I know other principles of "here's how to hypothetically fuck around with stellar fusion" are theoretically valid, like pumping the sun full of iron to artificially age it since iron is the heaviest fusible element outside of nova conditions.

[LordBaal]

The other way around is funnier, what if we got pieces from the sun here on earth.

And here is the answer

[Madman198237]

Yeah, unfortunately, not possible. You can't force a Sun-wide fusion reaction with a mere thermonuclear bomb. There are times during a typical Sun-sized star's life where large-scale fusion will arise in areas outside the core, but it cannot disturb the equilibrium because a sun-sized star is a naturally stable system until it starts to run out of fuel, at which point it will work towards a new equilibrium state, and so on until it settles into a white dwarf.

Basically, the areas outside the Sun's core just can't sustain fusion unless things drastically change, and a thermonuclear bomb is so small a change that it's laughable. Look at the energies released in a typical solar weather event (magnetic reconnections and whatnot), it's pretty huge, and those don't do anything meaningful to the star's internal conditions on the scale of the entire star.

[Starver]

One can also bring up the Manhattan Project boffins who were reportedly fairly sure that their bomb (first of a particular type, differently reported in various retellings) would not have enough energy to convert the immediate atmosphere to suitable fuel to then convert the surrounding atmosphere, to ultimately go round the world...

They'd done the calculations that said it wouldn't happen like that, but weren't quite convinced.

(So it is said, that is.)

People like those stories. A collapse of false vacuum is an equivalent tale on a cosmic scale, of course.


Right now, we've got more to worry about Russian anti-satellite satellites giving us a Gravity situation without the eye-candy (Sandra or George, your choice).

[Kagus]

(Sandra or George, your choice).

¿Por qué no los dos?

[LordBaal]

Porque tanta belleza junta es peligrosa Kagus.

[delphonso]

UAR and China had successful launches toward Mars. If their rovers land that'll be a first for both of them. Perseverence should be flying off this week.

[Starver]

Interesting factoid: The NASA mission is carrying an actual piece of Mars back to Mars.

[Il Palazzo]

Good ol' USA. Gotta send those immigrants back where they came from.

[LordBaal]

Hahahahaha.... or maybe they are appeasing the voif dragon of mars.