The Minority Report

Ok, I’ll say it. This dude has wayyyyyy to much time on his hands. Matt Springer from Built on Facts sat down and calculated the amount of power it would take to destroy the Earth.

Now let’s say you wanted to take apart the earth. Yes, the whole thing. You want to grab each bit of dirt and pull it out of the earth’s gravity and move it out to deep space. How much energy in total would it take? There’s some practical reasons for wanting to know. The engineers who built the Death Star would need for their superlaser to deliver at least that much energy. And what could be more practical than that?

How much power?

And that’s our final answer, which is also called the gravitational binding energy of a sphere. For the earth, it works out to around 2.2 x 1032 joules.

Just read the blog: Built on Facts : The Physics of the Death Star

“The ability
to
destroy a
planet is insignificant
next to
the power of
the Force”“The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force”