Thanks to what I decided to title the blog I feel I have a certain duty to make the first blog entry at least explain why on earth I would want to blow up Jupiter. To be precise I want to implode Jupiter not explode it. So my title is a bit misleading, but I don't feel that I am being too misleading since I do in fact want to bring an extraordinarily large explosive force to bear on that planet. The idea is to collapse the planet Jupiter into our very own local black hole. At about ~1027 kg Jupiter is about two million times less massive than it would need to be in order to collapse into a black hole by itself. Since Jupiter is the second largest mass in the solar system it is also the second easiest mass to create an artificial black hole from. Although the sun has a much larger mass than Jupiter (~1033 kg) it is somewhat less desirable to convert into a black hole for at least one very good, very obvious reason. Aside from the fact that it is desirable to keep the sun shining down on the earth there is the matter of the sun's internal fusion. The fusion in the sun would resist any collapse and it would be all but impossible to make that fusion cease. Jupiter then is very likely actually the easiest mass to convert into a black hole in the solar system despite its diminutive size. Since the core of Jupiter is believed to be made of heavy elements a resistive fusion force would not be a problem.
I still haven't said though why humanity needs a local black hole. Eventually mankind will need to have a local black hole in order to be able to really test the limits of physical reality. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on accelerator projects that allow us to reach energies which are still tiny in comparison with the sort of experiments we could do at the surface of a black hole. I propose this as the ultimate accelerator project and as the only way we will ever be able to really experiment with extreme curvature of space-time.
2 comments:
So ah what type of energies are required to make Jupiter into Fred the black hole pet? And more importantly in terms of Iraq wars how much would it cost to make Fred? Oh and I just thought it was cool that a guy named Boom is the first to post on a blog entitled blowing up Jupiter.
srry to burst your buble but I believe Jenna beat you to be the first comment. Albeit you are the first comment on the first entry so I guess that works out.
While I am not sure exactly how much the whole endeavor would cost I can give you a very rough estimate. I think that for just the necessary firepower alone to make jupiter into a black hole and to say nothing at all about how we get it there or how we coordinate the deployment of the firepower plus extra research and tests prepping attempts to protect titan etc. The firepower would cost a bare minimum of about 3 billion with economies of scale taken into account but this cost is essentially not even the tip of the iceberg since the largest cost would be deployment. Now here I am at a total loss as to how much it would cost. If we built the bombs and their delivery systems in space using materials mined on the asteroid belts then production costs for stuff would go up but the cost of producing millions of delivery devices and sending them into space to be deployed in Jupiter has costs that are not even feasible since that would cost in the range of hundreds of trillions of dollars Just in terms of delivery costs. So probably a minimal estimate would place the project at around 20 trillion dollars which is of course the entire gdp of the united states for a couple of years running... but then that is with today's tech.
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