The sheer ignorance contained in this single paragraph beggars the imagination. He's wrong about the effects of 100 megatons, he's wrong about Carl Sagan's predictions (those were wrong too, but he was wrong about them), he's wrong about the nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR, and like all minimalists, he really has no way to rationalize his absurdly scaled down power estimates with the Death Star. If an ISD requires such a huge reactor to produce such limited amounts of power, how the fuck does the Death Star even move itself?Goramm Moron Sarli wrote:To give you an idea: Saxton calculates that it would require over 400 million megatons of energy, equally distributed over the surface of a planet, to melt its entire crust to a depth of 1 meter. Now, as a comparison: 100 megatons is enough to wreck the Earth and cause nuclear winter (see Carl Sagan's "The Nuclear Winter"), and the total US and Soviet arsenals during the height of the Cold War was somewhere around 400,000 megatons (give or take a hundred thousand), enough to completely obliterate every human on the planet several hundred times over. Saxton, meanwhile, assumes that the Imperial Navy would choose to spend its time liquifying the surface of a planet for no good reason -- why keep shooting once everyone is dead and there's nothing left in a usable form? -- and thus he comes up with a number about 1,000 times more than the combined arsenals of our entire planet. (Another comparison: This is 8 times more than the energy that would be produced by a 6-mile asteroid or comet smashing into the Earth, the current likely suspect for killing the dinosaurs and almost all life on the planet other than the the smallest scavengers such as rodents and insects.)
He's also slightly off in his figures about the K-T asteroid impact, although those are not as spectacularly wrong as his other figures. I can only imagine that his idea of scientific research is to Google. Badly.
PS. For those who don't know, a 100 megaton blast would not cause noticeable environmental damage to the Earth, never mind "wrecking" it (the Soviets set off a 60 megaton device in the 1960s with no noticeable effect whatsoever). The Cold War arsenals were less than 10,000 megatons. 400,000 megatons would not actually obliterate every human on the Earth several hundred times over, although it would cause a mass extinction event and severely reduce our numbers. Carl Sagan's "Nuclear Winter" was debunked a looooong time ago; something he would know if he did even the slightest bit of research, and he misstated its predictions anyway. As Camaas showed us, a BDZ operation leaves a planet so devastated that it would actually be easier to terraform a barren rock than to resettle it (a little detail he forgot in his attempt to downplay what a BDZ does to a planet). And finally, there is the aforementioned point about the Death Star. This guy has the scientific skills of a gopher, and he misrepresents the Star Wars literature too.
PPS. My reference source: Hazards Due to Comets & Asteroids, T. Gehrels, University of Arizona Press, 1994. Sarli's reference source: his ass.
[EDIT: Planet name corrected; it was Camaas]
Oh, and he doesn't like dissent or someone making a discusiion that proves him wrong.