Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jmclnx

> As the rubble crashed down, the energy released would have been equivalent to around six times that of the Tsar Bomba

Interesting, wonder if this Approx 1190 event had a global impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

Seems that ended in 1250, coincidence ??

View on HN

> … the energy released would have been equivalent to around six times that of the Tsar Bomba

But how does that compare to an Olympic swimming pool full of double decker omnibuses being dropped from the same height?

The lengths people will go to to avoid using the metric system!

They go in increments of 50m. If you asked the width people go to, it would be 25m.

So your comment about avoiding the metric system is not really accurate. We don't say the Earth is approximately equal to 150 million kilometres from the Sun, we say one AU. We just use numbers that can be comprehended.

93 million miles you mean

No, I mean 3 million Olympic size swimming pools, you "do anything to avoid metric system" person

OK then about eight light minutes. Not sure there is any 31 mile long olympic swimming pool, though, but there are plenty of units out there so I can admit the possibility.

No, you mean 3 billion Olympic sized swimming pools.

oops, you're right. i forgot the units. i always forgot to normalize my units in school. at least i'm consistent which makes finding the bugs easy

I think most people can understand what a meter is, or what a kilometer is, but would have no idea of what a kilojoule is, or what the energy inside a barrel of oil is.

I'm Canadian, and have never traveled to Europe but, every imported piece of food I've ever seen has the energy measured in kilojoules.

Actually it is both in kj and ccal

double-decker buses are clearly imperial units.

Funny how we went through the monumental effort to build and adopt a whole new system of units just because a few people were bad at grade-school arithmetic and mental math.

It's especially weird because 12 is so much more useful than 10.

Oddly enough, it's still possible to have 12 metres or 12 tonnes within the metric system. I realise this is baffling and confusing to Americans but it's really true!

I think the Tsar Bomba was designed metric (unlike the contemporary US bombs and space program) so perhaps it was chosen for that reason?

Almost certainly, when you scale nuclear weapons to the energy of the atmosphere in general they become irrelevant.

The earth receives about 1.74x10^17 watts from the sun, continuously. On Tsar Bomba released a little over 200PJ, setting off one per day would be around 2.3x10^12 watts.

In other words to equal the energy from the sun you would need to detonate on the order of 1 MILLION Tsar Bombas per day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com