We actually have the technology to destroy life on the planet with one thing, the cobalt bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb It's a salted nuclear bomb made to throw an enormous cloud of radioactive cobalt into the atmosphere of a planet. It would be as if hundreds of Chernobyl powerplants exploded in the air and the fallout would circle the globe, fall on all the people and plants and slowly kill them over a few years. The ecosystem would be devastated and the planet would become unlivable for some time. Luckily we decided hydrogen and neutron bombs were about as bad a device as we wanted to build and left cobalt bombs on the drawing board.
Obvious clarification: Destroying life on earth isn't the same as destroying the earth.
Edit: Also, please don't bring up Chernobyl like that, without any comparison to modern nuclear tech. Modern safe nuclear power is necessary for avoiding dramatic climate change, which would hurt a lot of humans (but not earth).
While I agree that nuclear power is important, I also think that trying to get people to include tangentially relevant opinions as context is a bad idea. While pushing your opinion on Chernobyl every time you mention Chernobyl might help to push that opinion, it decreases the signal to noise ratio of what you're trying to primarily convey. Additionally, it can introduce unnecessary opinions into otherwise neutral or slightly opinionated comments.
It is the same. Otherwise you would could live on Mars, where the atmosphere is gone, radiation strikes directly through, no life is possible.
Modern nuclear tech obviously also could lead to such an outcome, that's why we banned them. But the biggest problem is politics, the assured strike-back policy, which almost destroyed earth a couple of times already.
Plus corruption which led to the current climate crisis, leading to the destruction of the atmosphere. See Mars.
Mars is dead, Earth just not yet.
There is, at that's exactly how we do it for that last 100 years. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
About 80% efficiency, and 95% of electricity is stored this way. Burning fossils is of course stupid.
> Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW.
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I'm skeptical this would end all life on Earth, or even wipe out humanity. For one, it won't circulate evenly. Some places will be irradiated an order of magnitude more than average, but some places won't be irradiated at all. Simply adding more bombs and bigger bombs doesn't help here: you've got to point them at all the safe spots.
Even ignoring those safe spots, some forms of life can probably exist in irradiated areas: Chernobyl's dead zone isn't by any means devoid of life.
There are probably shelters that could provide a safe harbor, though I don't trust them functioning for more than a half life or two.
More interesting to me is, given that people (I'm not sure who) say that in principle a thermonuclear bomb can have unlimited stages and size, would it be practical to build a "regular" bomb several orders of magnitude bigger than Tsar Bomba that would essentially blow up the whole planet. Let's say > 10x the dinosaur killing projectile.
If you read the article, you'll find that the Earth is extremely hard to blow up. It's an enormous ball of iron, and almost any explosion at the surface is unlikely to affect it much. You'd have to detonate a bomb close to its centre, and that bomb would have to be astronomically large. Remember that the Earth got hit with a presumed Mars-sized object in the past, yet Earth is still around (the debris formed the Moon). Such a collision might eradicate all life, but it wouldn't "blow up the planet".
Well, yeah, I would consider making the top mile or two of crust molten "close enough for government work". I didn't mean dispersing a cloud of debris to infinity.
After the collision that created the Moon, I believe some research suggests that the Earth was literally as hot as the surface of the Sun, deduced from evidence of the effect of "earthshine" on the Moon.
If the Chicxulub impactor resulted in a global rain of molten rock, I'd also consider that scale of explosion to be "enough" even though some living things survived.
It would need to be many, many orders of magnitude bigger. Chicxulub was approximately 10E6 more energetic than Tsar Bomba, and it didn't even manage to kill off all life. And that barely left a dent in the surface of the planet.
Also worth noting is that bigger bombs don't scale particularly well in terms of damage. Double a bomb's size, and much of it immediately just goes to outer space. Another large part of it is reflected from the surface of the planet to go, again, to outer space. Damage at radius r ~ E^(1/5).
I also have heard (from "a reliable source") that one of the best nature preserves in the US is not labeled a nature preserve. It's off limits because it's the area around a nuclear plant.
With no people around, other life forms tend to thrive. Humans are lousy stewards of planet earth more often than not.
It's absolutely habitable, there were even some people who refused to leave / came back. You are much more likely to get cancer, but it certainly is habitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaUNhqnpiOE
This is why I'm skeptical the cobalt bomb would even do it.
We'd have huge cancer rates and a drop in life expectancy, and a massive rise in birth defects, but eliminating the human race? Even substantially wiping out society?
I'm kind of doubtful. We've kept having babies in conditions objectively far worse for our entire history.
