Current Events > Apparently, oppenheimer worried the bomb could destroy earth

(+) Yeah! (+)

I have not seen the movie but I heard there is mention of something I never knew, that in real life he wondered if there was a chance the bomb could set off an apocalyptic event where the earth's atmosphere would erupt into fire and cook the entire earth

Makes me think, who has the right to risk things like that? If that really was a higjer than zero chance of happening, does anyone have the right to decide to risk the literal world on something like that?

Reminds me of when people were scared of a black hole opening from that hadron collider

Oppenheimer has jack shit on tiktok.

Zikten posted...

I have not seen the movie but I heard there is mention of something I never knew, that in real life he wondered if there was a chance the bomb could set off an apocalyptic event where the earth's atmosphere would erupt into fire and cook the entire earth

Makes me think, who has the right to risk things like that? If that really was a higjer than zero chance of happening, does anyone have the right to decide to risk the literal world on something like that?

Reminds me of when people were scared of a black hole opening from that hadron collider

Look into the Tsar Bomba. There was the possibility of setting the atmosphere on fire. So they scaled down the size of the bomb used in the test and it was still way more devastating than they originally thought.

Only one way to find out for sure

I don't think this was ever really taken seriously as a potential threat. The possibility was mentioned in passing a couple times, and then passed along by people who should have known better because it sounds flashy and exciting. They had calculations showing that the temperatures generated by the detonation couldn't be high enough to start a chain reaction.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Zikten posted...

I have not seen the movie but I heard there is mention of something I never knew, that in real life he wondered if there was a chance the bomb could set off an apocalyptic event where the earth's atmosphere would erupt into fire and cook the entire earth

There was an old radio show from the late 40s called "X minus 1". In one episode, astronauts returning from a moon mission are told by mission control that nuclear war has erupted back home. They witness the ignition of the Earth's atmosphere from orbit and come to the realization they have nowhere to return to since the Earth is now uninhabitable.

At one point they had math saying that the reaction 'could' repeat forever and ignite Earth's atmosphere, but it was in the same way that a particle accelerator 'could' create a black hole due to high density energy collisions. IE it wasn't really a worry once they looked into it.