Originally posted by Illustrious
And in case you were wondering, yes a meteor impact has ridiculous force, I could calculate it for you, but I hope you can envision it.
Screw it... I'll enlighten them
Asteroid or comet impact (real-life)
You don't need to watch sci-fi to learn about the awesome power of a planet-killer. A sufficiently large asteroid or comet impact could theoretically devastate a planet's surface in real life, and our planet bears mute testimony to such impacts, with many large craters scarring its surface. Indeed, if it weren't for erosion and tectonic plate movement, the Earth would look like the surface of the Moon.
Even the smallest asteroid impact can be extremely destructive. The infamous Tunguska blast (estimated yield: ~1000 times the Hiroshima blast) was thought to have been caused by a mere 50 metre wide asteroid, which would have easily fit into a football stadium!
The destructive power of a large asteroid impact is truly horrifying. If we assume a silicaceous asteroid with an average density of (for example) 2700 kg/m³, a 30 km wide asteroid moving at typical Earth-crossing velocity of 25 km/s would hit our world with the kinetic energy equivalent of nearly three billion megatons of TNT. This is a number which is so staggeringly large as to beggar the imagination; just try to imagine detonating a Hiroshima bomb every second for more than six thousand years, and then compressing all of that into a single titanic blast.
Impact Energy
Result1
1E5 to 1E6 megatons
Land impact destroys a large state (eg- California, France, Japan) and produces enough atmospheric dust loading to affect global climate, freezing crops. Ocean impact creates hemisphere-spanning tsunamis but no global climate change. Global ozone layer is heavily damaged.
1E6 to 1E7 megatons
Both land and ocean impacts produce enough atmospheric dust to affect global climate, freezing crops. Impact ejecta are globally distributed, causing widespread fires. Land impact destroys a large nation (Mexico, India).
1E7 to 1E8 megatons
Probable mass extinction event. Global climate changes last for weeks or months. Direct destruction occurs on continental scale (Australia, United States). Massive global firestorms. The K-T extinction event 65 million years ago fell into the upper end of this category.
1E8 to 1E9 megatons
Large mass extinction event. Most of the Earth's biosystem is destroyed.
>1E9 megatons
Global extinction event. All complex forms of life probably destroyed.
One of the most common misconceptions regarding asteroid impacts is that they do all of their damage through stratospheric dust loading. This is not true; asteroid impacts can damage or exterminate a biosystem through a variety of mechanisms:
Wake radiation. A large asteroid or comet will create an enormous "bow wave" of superheated, ionized gas in front of it as it passes through the atmosphere, and it will leave a "wake" of superheated, expanding gas behind it. The wake can be modelled as a cylindrical explosion, with the effects of a conventional nuclear fireball: shockwaves, intense thermal radiation, etc. Moreover, the height of the elongated fireball column means that much of this radiation will propagate through upper-atmosphere layers which are essentially transparent to thermal radiation, so it will have much more widespread effects than a surface-level nuclear explosion of equivalent yield. In fact, it is theorized that massive casualties on a continental scale may be caused by wake radiation alone, even before a massive impactor hits the ground.
Impact groundquake. Like a hammer-blow, an asteroid impact will produce powerful seismic shockwaves that propagate directly through ground matter. These seismic shockwaves will cause a vast region of destruction (hundreds or thousands of kilometres wide) in any case, but they are particularly destructive to human civilization, especially major cities with their large scaled structures and sensitive installations such as chemical plants, nuclear power plants, toxic and/or radioactive waste storage facilities, biological and chemical weapons research laboratories, etc.
Impact fireball. In addition to the columnar fireball produced by the impactor's hypervelocity passage through the air, there is a huge fireball produced by the violent release of kinetic energy upon impact. This fireball is similar to that created by a nuclear explosion, with powerful atmospheric shockwave (or underwater shockwaves for ocean impacts, although these don't travel as far) and thermal radiation effects. The fireball tends to be drawn up into the ionized wake, so it takes on more of an elongated vertical shape than a spherical nuclear fireball. It should be noted that these effects scale according to the inverse square law for radiation and the inverse cube law for shockwaves, so the radiation effects easily outstrip the shockwave effects for large-magnitude impacts.
Tsunami. A large-body ocean impact vapourizes a column of water, thus producing a "hole" in the ocean. A column of vapourized water is hurled into the stratosphere, and an enormous water wave is created. This water wave moves outward from the impact site until it reaches the shore, whereupon it loses speed and gains height, thus causing a height increase of 10 to 20 times. Numerical simulations of an ocean impact by a 10 km wide stony asteroid with a velocity of 20 km/s have led to the conclusion that the resulting tsnumai would be a staggering four kilometre high water wave a thousand kilometres away! Unlike atmospheric shockwaves, tsunamis scale according to the inverse square law rather than the inverse cube law, so ocean impacts are actually more destructive than land impacts, particularly since human civilization tends to concentrate at shorelines rather than inland regions.
Ballistic impact ejecta. A large asteroid impact tends to produce more melted and vapourized particulate debris than a nuclear explosion, and much of this debris is hurled upwards as a hypervelocity plume. Much of it is hurled well beyond the atmosphere and into space, whereupon it eventually falls back into the atmosphere due to gravity at speeds similar to its ejection speed (up to 5 km/s). Like any other hypervelocity atmospheric entry object, the condensed and coalesced debris particles will ablate from air friction, thus re-heating them and the atmosphere. These processes have the effect of converting the kinetic and thermal energy of ejecta into globally distributed thermal radiation and elevated upper-atmospheric temperatures, thus igniting global firestorms and altering the climate. Extremely large impacts (tens of billions of megatons) can produce so much high-energy ballistic ejecta that the entire atmosphere will be radiatively heated beyond 1500K, in which case all other damage mechanisms essentially become irrelevant because the planet is completely sterilized.
Acid rain. Hypervelocity shockwaves produce NO (nitrogen oxide) because of chemical reactions in the energetic "shocked air". Such shockwaves are produced three times: once by the impactor's passage through the atmosphere, again by the movement of its ejecta plume up into space, and yet again by the re-entering ballistic hypervelocity ejecta. NO can also be produced if the impact happens to strike a sulfate or carbonate-rich area of the surface. The result would be ozone layer destruction (much more than for nuclear explosions) and a global increase in acidity of surface waters, which would provide yet another environmental damage mechanism. It would take many years for the NO loading of a large impact to be removed from the atmosphere.
Water injection. A large hypervelocity impactor can produce a towering column of water and steam which reaches up over 100 km in altitude, and which contains 10 to 30 times the mass of the impactor. This has the effect of literally humidifying the entire upper atmosphere, but the effects of such humidification are not known. Cloud particles can produce a runaway greenhouse effect or they can reflect sunlight, but these particles can produce heating or cooling effects depending on their size.
Electrodynamic interactions. The ionized wake, ionized hypervelocity ballistic ejecta plume, and consequent atmospheric shockwaves of a large impactor will all contain ions (obviously). The ionized jet will interact with the Earth's magnetic field to create a giant magneto-hydrodynamic generator which alters the shape of the magnetosphere and converts the jet's kinetic energy into thermal energy in the ionosphere. This will destroy the ozone layer and disrupt the Van Allen belts, with unknown but probably detrimental effects upon the biosystem.
Atmospheric dust loading. This is the most famous consequence of an asteroid impact. Much of the ballistic ejecta plume condenses into tiny droplets which are small enough to remain suspended in the upper atmosphere for months, blocking sunlight and cooling the Earth, as well as disrupting plant photosynthesis.
It should be noted that nothing in our direct experience could prepare us for such phenomena, because some of them are a direct result of the sheer size and concentration of the effects. Even the largest nuclear weapons in human history (~60 megatons) only cause two of these eight phenomena; they do not produce wake radiation, tsunami, sub-orbital ballistic ejecta, acid rain, upper-atmospheric water injection, large-scale electrodynamic interactions with the Earth's geomagnetic field, or significant stratospheric dust loading2. This limitation is due largely to their relatively insignificant yields, since many of these effects are dependent upon an extremely large release of energy in one concentrated place at one time.
Good stuff. Scientists believe an 1E8 or 9 Megaton bomb took place around 250 million years ago, which was responsible for the last great mass extinction before the infamous one 65 MYA (which took out the dinosaurs).
Even these ridiculous impact forces did not jar the planet out of orbit. In fact, even at these nearly unfathomable impacts, the planet still sailed on as usual. To take the analogy further, it would be like throwing wads of paper at a bowling ball. Even if the bowling ball is perfectly still, you need to throw a small wad of paper at extremely fast velocity to even budge it a few millimeters. Now imagine if this bowling ball was moving at fast velocity (like the Earth or Moon in orbit). Throwing the same wads of paper likely won't even make a noticable change, even if you start launching them out of a cannon.
To extend this further, the likelihood of it being "easy" or "unimpressive" for Superman to literally move a planet would be simply astronomical. It would require more force than thousands upon thousands of meteor impacts centered at one point.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, it is more than likely Superman would simply pass through the planet because the force would be so centralized and strong, it would pass through layers of earth like a knife through butter, but since some laws of physics are ignored (or we are left to assume a "psionic" influence), the sheer force of Superman's strongest punch will send Goku to his instant doom. It will literally knock his head off.
Originally posted by Illustrious
WTF? 50-19 Goku? That's just ignorance at its finest.
Another quote for my profile... nice! I'll edit it so it relates that Superman is losing.
So yeah, make that 50-20.
DBZ is really, really poor to use in debates. The Japanese mentality about anything is "It is, therefore it is." As oposed to the Western mentality "Is is, wtf?"
DBZ is really, really poor to use in debates. The Japanese mentality about anything is "It is, therefore it is." As oposed to the Western mentality "Is is, wtf?"
That's a sig quote there.
DBZ is poor for debates because it's all about flash over substance. I don't know how a series of 180 or whatever the hell episodes, where each one has people flinging blurs for punches and light beams for attacks at each other, can be so successful.
And apparently not good at reading and comprehending the posts. I was giving factual information to back up Illustrious' points earlier. If you'd like to go back and read them and then use the facts to back up that information, you'd get his original point. I'm not going to reiterate it for you. I contributed, but I'm not going to spell out what's already posted up there.
Originally posted by Illustrious
To actually MOVE the object, instead of having the object move him, he would have to generate enough force to counter the raw mass of the object. That is still an obscenely high amount of force.It's not as simple as saying any force will jar it out of orbit. Otherwise all of those meteor impacts, or people jumping would jar the earth out of orbit. It hasn't happened yet, now has it?
And in case you were wondering, yes a meteor impact has ridiculous force, I could calculate it for you, but I hope you can envision it.
Ilustrious: You need a HELL of a lot of force to be able to move something like a planet, otherwise meteor impacts could do it. And they haven't thus far.
Originally posted by Deus Ex
Click on 'post' above to read the real thing.
Deus ex: Yeah you need this much force *shows information about meteorites that failed to move the earth
The logical conclusion was Superman put out MORE force than these meteorites, in order to move the planet.
>1E9 megatons
Originally posted by Deus ExWait, wait, wait.
And apparently not good at reading and comprehending the posts. I was giving factual information to back up Illustrious' points earlier. If you'd like to go back and read them and then use the facts to back up that information, you'd get his original point. I'm not going to reiterate it for you. I contributed, but I'm not going to spell out what's already posted up there.
Just in case I was added in that, my comment was at Hit_and_miss, because he can be a smartass.
I comprehend you fine, but I'm not sure if you did.