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

Instead of petawatts I’d love to hear what it can destroy.

I imagine a scale like:

1: Mosquito

…

10000: Planet (Death Star)

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-...

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.

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