I remember watching this cartoon when I was a child. Colonel Bleep had a secret base at zero degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude (off the coast of Africa). They called it Zero-zero Island.
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@nyrath
Is there a name for a sci-fi trope that aliens become aware of the Earth more concerned about the Earth because of nuclear weapons?
@swope @nyrath Not that I know of: if there is, it's a scientifically illiterate trope. *Nothing* we can do will significantly affect Earth as a whole; we can't even poison the entire biosphere. Worst we can do is *maybe* unalive our species and a few others, and even then I wouldn't bet on it.
Any alien civilization with the tech to get here and a sapience model that might be concerned with the likes of us would have to be be ludicrously far beyond us.
@farbel @swope @nyrath Not with any number of the kind of bombs we've built to date.
(It's not ruled out by the laws of physics, but … once you get over about 100Mt yield, you run into the law of diminishing returns: most of the energy goes straight up into space, and meanwhile the "useful" energy that a given nuke releases doesn't go up linearly with yield.
Much more detail than you ever wanted to know on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
Agreed. My father was in USAF-SAC as a bombardier on a B-52. He showed me how saturation bombing a city with 100 nuclear warheads (each with one unit of fissionables) will inflict far more damage than one warhead with 100 units of fissionables.
The 100 unit bomb wastes most of its energy on the sky and the ground.
I once worked out a series of events by which humans could destroy the Moon and reduce the Earth's surface to magma.
It would require a couple of hundred years and a truly outrageous number of nuclear bombs to run asteroids into one another until much of the asteroid belt was destabilized.
But we could do it.
Let's not.
@michael_w_busch @cstross @swope @nyrath I do not want to read that scifi novel. Please do not write it!
@michael_w_busch @swope @nyrath Yeah, that'd do it. It'd also give everybody else enough advance warning (asteroids being nuked, and colliding!) to work out who was doing it and punch them in the head repeatedly until they stopped. Beyond that, we're getting into "Forge of God" territory.
