In theory you could blow up the Sun.

[Gingerbread Demon]

http://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-say-its-possible-to-blow-up-the-sun-on-pur-1081542892

So far only 2 scientists have come up with this but according to the link they claim it could be theoretically possible to blow up the Sun, our Sun, the life giving star that we orbit..

I'm not 100% sure on this one as only two people have made such an outrageous claim?

 

[Metryq]

Isn't it normal practice to make a patch (Sun 2.0) before publishing an exploit?

 

[Gov Kodos]

Lifeboat Foundation, a group of chicken littles who dream up civilization ending scenarios in order to scam money out of the gullible. There are plenty of real ongoing threats, bio-diversity extinction, over reliance on fewer and fewer grains and other foods, global warming, exploding suns are pretty far down on the list of things to worry about as is a lot of the other nightmare scenarios that group of alarmists/shysters can and do dream up.

Besides, any bomb large enough to have any real effect on something as massive as the sun really wouldn't need to be exploded there. The planetary detonation on Earth would be devastating enough.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Reminds me of that Asimov robot story where manipulation of the weak force was used as a weapon against the Sun to make the Earth uninhabitable. However, the proposal referenced is a non-started seeing as by their reckoning a large solar flare should already have destroyed the Sun (or any other star in the Universe for that matter). It's similar to the concern that the early developers of nuclear weapons had that they might cause a runaway nuclear reaction in the Earth's atmosphere. The probability is actually infinitesimally small.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Reminds me of that Asimov robot story where manipulation of the weak force was used as a weapon against the Sun to make the Earth uninhabitable. However, the proposal referenced is a non-started seeing as by their reckoning a large solar flare should already have destroyed the Sun (or any other star in the Universe for that matter). It's similar to the concern that the early developers of nuclear weapons had that they might cause a runaway nuclear reaction in the Earth's atmosphere. The probability is actually infinitesimally small.

Is that the thing where they say you could ignite the atmosphere?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yes, as the link describes.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Is that the thing where they say you could ignite the atmosphere?

Pretty much, but Admiral Nelson and the Seaview handled that, already.

 

[arch101]

But why would you WANT to blow up the sun? Unless you were, say, a Bond villain?

 

[PurpleBuddha]

Here's a handy summary of the article.

Claim:

"Conditions within the bomb can be optimized in a small area to initiate ignition, then spread to a larger area, allowing [for the production of] a hydrogen bomb of any power," write the authors in the study. "In the case of the Sun certain targeting practices may greatly increase the chances of an artificial explosion of the Sun. This explosion would annihilate the Earth and the Solar System, as we know them today."

Rebuttal (article quoting a "commenter"):

There isn't a statistical chance that a self-sustaining reaction could be started in the sun, which hasn't already happened trillions of times already! Simply, the energies involved with the largest X-class flares (and from extrapolation far larger ones than we've yet seen in 50 years of quantitative instrumentation) dwarf any conceivably deliverable thermonuclear weapon that would be able to penetrate the sun's chromosphere and shed enough of its "ablative shield" in such a way as to couple efficiently enough to the surrounding hydrogen, deuterium and helium to cause additional thermonuclear detonation of the coupled local material.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Pretty much, but Admiral Nelson and the Seaview handled that, already.

I like that movie, it had Barbara Eden and Joan Fontaine as the crazy person.

It had the Van Allen belts as a physical tangible thing that you could attack. Irwin Allen science at work haha.

Like that episode of Lost In Space where a comet was going to melt the hull of their ship if it got close..

 

[scotpens]

But why would you WANT to blow up the sun? Unless you were, say, a Bond villain?

It obstructs my view of Venus.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

But why would you WANT to blow up the sun? Unless you were, say, a Bond villain?

Let's just say, promising not to blow up the sun might be somebody's good idea for how to make a million dollars!

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Let's just say, promising not to blow up the sun might be somebody's good idea for how to make a million dollars!

Only a million dollars, that was as stupid as Dr Evil not accounting for inflation.

Maybe we need Marvin's illudium 6 space modulator

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Now we know what really happened to the Hobus star. What will Federation apologists say if it turns out Nero was right in the end, eh?

When I opened the article, “SCIRP” immediately rang a bell, and it is bad when something rings a bell. Turns out I've been spammed by their marketing emails inviting me to publish anything in their journal, to which it seems I've retaliated by trying by reporting them to their ISPs to make their lives harder – not that they cared.

At least now I know their journals aren't fake.

 

[publiusr]

Now I seem to remember something about a gamma ray laser perhaps having an effect--but the energy needed would be astronomical.

In one of my books--there was talk about the Suns life being extended by having large bombs do a better job of mixing the hydrogen.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Stir up the Sun -- otherwise it will only fuse a fraction of its hydrogen before it exhausts the hydrogen in its core. Red dwarfs have much longer life spans because they are fully convective. Perhaps use externally generated magnetic fields to do the MHD stirring. You might also be able to propel the Sun and solar system as described in Feersum Endjinn.

 

[publiusr]

The shipstar http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=30948

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Pity we haven't the tech to build a structure around the sun and make our own Earth worldship...... Like the one the magog use.

 

[B.J.]

Or the Puppeteers from the Ringworld series.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Or the Puppeteers from the Ringworld series.

I love the Ringworld books