Oh, now I need to know. If the entirety of the radiation the sun puts out was concentrated in one beam - a laser - and it hit the earth, how much energy would that be?
Even concentrating a few square feet of the duns energy can start fires, so how much more would it be?
Hmmm…this can be saved by math I think using the fact that at twice the distance the energy is reduced 4 times…
How far is it to the fun…ummm…I need to get some figures.
It seems, though, that concentrating a single stars energy would destroy just snout anything.
Warning: rough napkin math
The sun emits as much energy as about a million high-end power plants. Call it about 100 million MW. I’m not taking into account diffusion, both because the earth is very large and because light takes 8 minutes to get here, and I have no idea how to do that math. Assume some fraction of the below.
We have a MW laser. In a 5 second pulse it can destroy missiles mid-flight. If the sun were a deadly laser, it would be as if a million of those were turned on the entire “sunshine” face of the earth at once. This would be beyond catastrophic.
To heat up 1kg of water 1 degree C, you need 4200 joules of energy. 1 MW is approximately 1,000,000 joules. If it hit the Pacific, it would vaporize 1,000,000 kg of water instantly. That’s roughly 1,000 cubic meters of ocean water per second.
Obviously, if this hit land, everything on the land is catching on fire, if not outright destroyed. Metal will warp. Forests are burned. People are cooked. The sun is very large, so assume the entire “sunshine” face of the earth is hit, and you have anywhere from tens of millions to billions of people dying near-instantly, depending on time of day, and 1,000 cubic meters of ocean boiled away every second.
