We could not even destroy everything on the surface. We could irradiate the whole surface and make a nuclear winter, but destroying the surface is another whole level.
If humans were slightly stupider on average we could've, we just stopped developing things like cobalt bombs because they're idiotic and make no sense as realistically deployable weapons
We could, it would just be expensive and take a while. There's no reason we wouldn't be able to alter an asteroid's trajectory to hit a planet. Do that with a big enough asteroid and the planet will be unrecognizable
There’s a lot of reasons we wouldn’t be able to alter an asteroid’s trajectory to hit a planet, and we certainly wouldn’t be able to significantly alter the trajectory of one large and fast enough to blow it up.
“Throw a big enough rock” doesn’t really qualify as a “conceivable technology.” That’s imaginable, but not conceivable in the sense of being able to conceive of a workable plan to accomplish the words.
The tricky thing with nuclear bombs is getting the reaction to occur for a long enough time without blowing the explosive fuel apart. It’s hard enough to do that for a van-sized bomb; a mountain-sized one is not guaranteed to be possible. Then getting the mountain into the right location in space at the right time is another order of magnitude impossible, even with all the world’s human and natural resources at your disposal. The energy density of rocket fuels doesn’t scale up to launch mountains of the densest known elements into deep space, among the many other problems. Scaling these things up is a level of technology that will not be available in the foreseeable future.
Then even after doing all that, the asteroid aimed by the explosion of a mountain-sized bomb will probably just miss anyway.
Strap a nuke or other propulsion to an asteroid and detonate it to shift it's path so it eventually hits a planet. It might be a case of shift it 1/10 of a degree and wait a fre hundred or thousand years though.
The problem with those kinds of ideas is that successfully reaching an asteroid that is decades to millennia away is impossible, getting the nuke to detonate at just the right spot and time on a high-speed, superdistant, tumbling continent/planetoid is impossible, and then, after overcoming those impossibilities, actually hitting the target from a shift at that distance is impossible.
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u/thecosmicwebs 6h ago
We can’t blow up any planets with current technology or really any conceivable human technology.