How Oppenheimer could REALLY have destroyed the world

Why AI might be our next Oppenheimer moment: • How AI could destroy t...
The most famous quote from physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is ‘Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’ But how close did he come to actually destroying the world?
Correction:
01:13 I say Trinity produced about as much energy as 25 tonnes of TNT, ie 25,000 kg. It was, of course, 25 KILOtonnes TNT equivalent, so 25,000,000 kg. The comparisons in the rest of the video are OK because I did know this, just slipped up while recording! Argh. :) I’ve corrected this in the subtitles.
Sources and further information
If you want a deeper dive into the math of why this is ‘incredibly impossible’, I really enjoyed this quick summary from ‪@WelchLabsVideo‬ • Oppenheimer's Apocalyp...
The hottest known naturally occurring temperatures come from asteroid strikes, a mere few thousand degrees gizmodo.com/th...
More about the Castle Bravo test nuclearweapona...
Castle Bravo’s Wikipedia page is very comprehensive too en.wikipedia.o...
Credits
Oppenheimer trailer copyright Universal
Photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer coutesy of LANL: Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.
The first moments of a nuclear blast are taken from Operation Teapot Tesla, CC-BY-SA LLNL
Castle Bravo detonation footage via US DoE commons.wikime...
Deep-sea videos via NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Video Portal www.ncei.noaa....
Climate model animation via NOAA www.gfdl.noaa....
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[@DrAndrewSteele]

This video is part of an unintentional two-part series on the end of the world! Catch up on part 1 here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aXS1i52oo8l5pbc

[@busuiocus]

it blows my mind how underrated your channel is. This is very valuable content. I feel privileged to have found you. Cheers from Romania

[@DrAndrewSteele]

That’s very kind! Cheers from Berlin :)

[@Mandarinmeals]

Yahh love from India

[@squamish4244]

Castle Bravo was the real watershed moment for nukes, because it was so powerful and devastating that it made people realize nukes are not just really powerful conventional weapons, as they had been viewed before that, but potential world-destroyers. There's a Castle Bravo documentary out there that is really revealing about just how the scientists miscalculated and how badly things went wrong, with interviews from the men actually involved. One said, "I've never regretted my role in developing the H-bomb...but I wish the politicians would stand on a ship 30 miles away and feel the heat from an explosion before they make any decisions."

[@gregf9160]

If Oppenheimer _had_ stopped the Trinity test, somebody else, probably Soviet Russia a few years later, would have been far less cautious, and with far fewer scruples. It was, by 1945, known to be _extremely_ unlikely (though not _entirely_ zero risk) that atmospheric Nitrogen Fusion would be likely to have happened. But -- it's that lottery ticket moment that you don't _really know_ for sure 😬

[@DrAndrewSteele]

Yes, totally agree! As the physicists observed at the time, since it’s physically possible, it was a matter of when not if…

[@ronaldgarrison8478]

What I heard was that the concern about Trinity igniting the Atmosphere was that the extremely high temperatures might somehow cause nitrogen and oxygen to combine exothermically. They do combine all the time, for example in lightning, but the reaction is self-limiting. The question was whether a nuclear bomb would be fundamentally different. You can say this doesn't matter, as we would all be dead either way, but the chemical reaction idea seems much less of a stretch than fusing nitrogen into silicon.

[@saxtremer]

I sometimes think that the end will come from something really unexpected, like a fungus that would learn how to surpass our immune system. Very mild COVID-19 showed that we'd be about as prepared as our ancestors were during the plague times. Thank you, Andrew, it's always a pleasure to watch your opinion videos.

[@DrAndrewSteele]

Thank you :) And yeah, I worry too about both the unexpected and the next pandemic…

[@squamish4244]

Well, maybe not The Last of Us. But yeah, another deadly pandemic is certainly in the works. One would hope that our early warning systems have been upgraded since Covid hit.

[@reynoldskynaston9529]

That’s cool that this came out the same time as Veritasium’s video.

[@lauriparkkamaki4854]

I wonder was it intentional

[@insidejazzguitar8112]

This is a really good channel, and I predict it’s really gonna take off. By the way, I’ve always felt that, intuitively, it wouldn’t be possible to ignite the atmosphere like that because then the atmosphere would be like a star, and it doesn’t seem that there would be nearly enough gravity or pressure to sustain such a reaction

[@DrAndrewSteele]

Thanks so much! Hope you’re right and the channel can start a (non-thermonuclear) chain reaction… Re: fusion… I was really fascinated thinking about this: if you made a big enough part of the atmosphere hot enough, it really could cause a self-sustaining chain reaction. Like you say though, the gravity and pressure of the sun really helps: that’s why you ‘only’ need 15 million °C to do fusion in there, whereas you’d need to heat up a 57-metre sphere of air to several billion degrees (according to the Manhattan physicists’ calculations). So incredible to think about (but perhaps impossible to do, even in theory!).

[@insidejazzguitar8112]

@@DrAndrewSteele “start a non-thermonuclear chain reaction..”🤣

[@milanvidakovic9715]

Trinity yield was 25 kilotons of TNT. It is 25000 tons, or 25 million kilograms of TNT

[@DrAndrewSteele]

Oh no! Thanks for pointing that out! As you can see from the comparisons to other bombs later in the video, I did know that… Dammit! Edit: added a correction and fixed in the subtitles at least…

[@raamv15]

Awesome content

[@Mandarinmeals]

Hey can I get some work for you anything you need to do like personal assistant for your side work...any work I will like to do.

[@zachaa_]

Good vid i was looking exactly for this answear

[@yeetyeet7070]

yes