Back a long time ago in one of the gun mags, someone claimed that a Volkswagen at some low speed had as much kinetic energy as an elephant gun, but using one to hunt elephants was not to be recommended.
So, point taken.
However, the original context was that the energy be released on the planet Earth, to "kill the entire world". In that event, the energy is sufficiently concentrated to be relevant even as you describe.
Even if the energy released is overstated. Still, hurricanes last long enough to release as much energy as the entire collection of nukes.
Resulting pollution being a somewhat different matter, but the pollution from the dino killing meteor was enormously greater than the worst case nuclear war is likely to be, as far as I can see.
Well, there's destructive energy and constructive energy. For perspective's sake, the 13 kilotons of TNT equivalent or so of energy released by the Hiroshima bomb killed, what, 150,000 people? Last year's hurricanes in the US killed...ah, a few dozen? So, to relate hurricanes to nuclear bombs, if you're going to compare them in terms of total energy released in the context of this thread, you probably should look also at some relative measure of destructive effect -- the *destructive* energy, in other words. You could do a complicated analysis of property damage but the thing most people care about is how many people wind up dead. And, by that measure, how many zeroes are behind the multiple of nuclear bombs versus hurricanes? My calculator that does scientific notation is downstairs in my briefcase, or I'd give it a shot.
That's true. How does it stack up against the energy represented by the total insolation received by the Earth each day from the sun? I'm told it's
55.6 x 10^23 joules/year. I'm also told that the energy released by an exploding megaton of TNT is 4.184 x 10^15 joules.
Which makes a nuclear bomb trivial, except when it kills a few million people in a couple of seconds, rather than making plants grow or heating the Earth to a comfortable temperature that warms your bones, rather than one that instantly turns your bones into quicklime.
It appears so. And your point about pollution is a good one, because, as the examples above show, you can't relate the "pollution" from energy released to the two different kinds of energy sources. Whoever may have tried to make some equation there was on a non-productive track.
The reason I jumped in was that the dramatic figures for energy released from a hurricane have nothing to do with anything much, especially when comparing them to nuclear bombs. The percentage of that energy that is
*destructive* is astronomically different in the two cases.
I'm afraid I don't follow that at all. What I meant by "time domain" is the term as it's used in graphing dimensions. You plot the energy released (Y-axis) against time (X-axis), and you get a graph of the *rate* of energy release. If you plot surface area on X against energy on Y, you get a graph of the *geometrical dispersion* of energy. That's how I was using those terms.
I doubt if it's bad science. It sounds like it might be an extreme case or an exaggeration, based on other figures I saw when I checked it out. The funny thing is that the 5,000 megaton figure shows up all over Google -- with no attribution or cited references.
In any case, it's just a small part of the energy that the Earth receives from the sun each day, if all you want to see is impressive energy figures.
So you're ignoring science in preference to folk wisdom. That explains much.
Of course. And if the design is made to minimize the ill effects of operator error, that's a safer design than one where operator error has catastrophic consequences.
Yes, and depending on the design, the humans are protected, or not.
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