Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

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EDIT - Thanks to bonzini for catching a mistake, I'd typod 47 as 74 on the first line and drastically inflated everything after that. It's still huge though.

Wolfram Alpha gives a solar mass as 1.988435×10^30 kg. Multiply that by (299,292,458 m/s)^2, you get ~1.78×10^47 Joules.

The most powerful manmade explosion in history was Tsar Bomba, a Soviet hydrogen bomb with 210 Petajoule (210×10^15 J) yeild.

Amount of energy released by the black holes merging is 8.48×10^29 times greater, so you'd need to set off that many Tsar Bombas to get equal total yeild.

The universe is 4.3×10^17 seconds old, meaning if you set off a Tsar Bomba every second since the beginning of time, you'd still be off by a factor of 1.953×10^12.

You need about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 Tsar Bombas every second since the big bang to match it.

The mind boggles.

EDIT - originally compared the last factor to number of grains of sand on Earth squared, but after catching the error above that's much too large.

So how big is the remaining 2x10^12 bombs per seconds?

Wikipedia has some other suggestions:

    ~10^12 stars in the Andromeda galaxy
    1.98x10^12 links on Wikipedia
    3.04×10^12 trees on Earth in 2015
    3.5×10^12 estimated fish in the ocean

So take every link on Wikipedia (or two thirds of the trees on Earth), turn each one into the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated, and blow them all up every second since the beginning of the universe, and that's how much energy we're talking about.

Thanks again to bonzini for spotting the rather large error!

Funnily enough, the past two XKCD comics are both relevant here: https://xkcd.com/1894/ https://xkcd.com/1895/

Nicely (back of) napkinned!

Originally typo'd pretty hard and had numbers much too high! It's still a larger amount of energy than I can even imagine.

That's what I get for trying to do math in a <textarea> instead of on paper.

That 10^74 should have been 10^47, shouldn't it?

So it's "only" a million billions (10^15) tsar bombas (10^15) every second (10^17, 15+15+17=47).

Good catch, can't believe I flipped that! Certainly changes things, one second while I revise.

> The mind boggles

This may help[1]

[1] https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

For comparison, they estimate the observable universe contains 10^78 to 10^82 atoms. Though comparison is a bad term. The human brain can't meaningfully picture numbers that large.

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