ZEUS – A new two-petawatt laser facility at the University of Michigan

To kill a mosquito, you need "a few tens of millijoules, delivered within a few milliseconds" [0], so let's say 10W. To destroy the Earth (so that it turns into scattered dust and never reforms) you need about 10^32 J [1]; if we assume this is applied over maybe 100s, the laser would be 10^30W.

So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2].

So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star.

[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w...

[2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...

Thank you for this, I will be using this for the rest of my life!

This is awesome! Thank you!!

I’m still not sure what 15.3 on the MDS scale can destroy but I am sure the Emperor will be pleased to hear that we are half-way to building the Death Star.

Next question: on what planet/moon should the mosquito be to be _just_ safe from the laser?

The on a log scale is doing a fair amount of lifting here I think

Well, mass scales as the cube of radius, and we have 15 orders of magnitude to work with, so I guess it should be an object on the order of hundreds of meters in radius. But as noted, the duration of firing matters as well. Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054239, the actual laser can only vaporize much smaller things.

I don’t like log scales, they’re not intuitive.

> if we assume this is applied over maybe 100s

I think this is the crux of the assumption right here. It sounds like this is apply for well under a nanosecond.

I think we're closer to maybe killing a mosquito than "half way to building a Death Star on a log scale" (which, I guess is already much closer to a mosquito than a planet).

If we're comparing lasers that go for seconds and lasers that go for femtoseconds, I think measuring watts is way too misleading.

Measured in simple joules, mosquito is .04, earth is 10^32, and this laser is 50.

If we make a joules version of the 1-30 scale, the laser in the article would only score a 4.

Every step is a doubling of the previous step, no?

So true "half way to a death star" is step 29/30?

So I could kill all the mosquitoes in my yard in one pulse with this laser.

They used log10, so each step is 10x the previous, so in a linear sense, it would double when going from about 29.7 to 30. But it seems that humans tend to improve tech at exponential rates, where we are constantly making improvements here and there that keep stacking up, when it comes to things that are actually in a developmental stage anyways.

Say your "endstage" goal is GPU with 200 billion transistors. Using linear scale, the current biggest GPU is only halfway there, and it took all of human civilization to get this far, and it will take another civilization to get to 200b. In reality, we'll have that in a couple years with our current civilization.

If they get close enough together for that pulse to hit them all.

>humans tend to improve tech at exponential rates

A hypothetical "death star" project like this would require improvements in energy generation/storage capacity/etc., which haven't improved in nearly the way transistor production has (and are also much more limited by physical realities, such as the specific heat, enthalpy of combustion etc. of materials).

Yes, extremely high sustained power lasers still have a hard time competing with hypersonic projectiles in energy delivered. The difference in being able to throw nuclei at the problem.

Just send me out there and aim the pulse at the one spot in the middle of my back I just can't quite reach.

For sure; using total energy delivered makes a lot more sense. But then I think it would be better to use whatever tool humanity has that delivers the max total energy; let’s say Tsar Bomba.

Let’s say the mosquito is 1 again, so Death Star is 34. Tsar Bomba would be about 17.3. Over halfway again!

It’s kind of surprising that our max power output and max energy output are about the same on these scales.