Shining The World's Most Powerful Laser At The Moon!

hey everyone today we're going to be seeing what would happen if we shine the world's most powerful laser at the moon and if it doesn't destroy the moon what would it look like and how big of a laser would we need to actually destroy the moon and we won't stop there let's see how big of a laser we would need to destroy even the earth or the sun even so the other day we were viewing the comet neo-wise in the sky and my kids couldn't see it so they asked if i could use a laser to point to it but that led to a lot of questions could you actually see the laser on the surface of the comet or if you shined it at the moon would you be able to see the laser on the moon so first let's start off by using my ultra high powered laser and shining it at the moon okay three two one okay it's not doing anything now it looks like the beam is reaching it but if you were able to see it from the surface of the moon you wouldn't be able to see anything actually so one of the most powerful lasers on earth was developed by the department of defense and mounted on a boeing 747 and it was used for shooting missiles out of the sky and it was a megawatt power laser so now we're going from watts to megawatts so that's a million times more powerful than the laser that i use so let's change our power here to one megawatt here we go three two one and i'm not seeing any effect on the moon still so this is one megawatt nothing happening here now the world's most powerful laser is actually the confinement beam at the national ignition facility and it's used in the fusion research laboratory it's an ultraviolet laser and it puts out a whopping 500 terawatts now this laser is so powerful that when we use it on earth it only fires for a nanosecond and in that nanosecond in one billionth of a second it outputs the energy equivalent to a half a cup of gasoline which is a lot of energy in a nanosecond now let's say we were able to output that energy continuously well here's what it would look like shining it at the moon okay let's turn it up to 500 terawatts okay the confinement beam aimed at the moon three two one still nothing you can see we're not raising the temperature of the moon at all okay so that still didn't do anything exciting but what if we gave a confinement beam to everybody on earth and told them to shine into the moon at the same time well first of all it would destroy the earth because just the energy of the laser hitting the atmosphere would ignite the earth and everything on it and explode it but let's just say that we were able to somehow get all those lasers pointed at the earth and had enough energy to do so which we don't on earth let's see what it would do to the moon and that's equal to 0.004 yatta watts a yattawa is 10 to the 24 watts okay let's see what this looks like three two one hey we're actually heating it now look at the temperature of the moon going up hey look at that [Music] [Music] [Music] so just a few hours of shining it on the moon and it's already heating it up so still we haven't done much to the moon i mean we've raised the moon to 20 degrees celsius now so that's pretty warm but it's not going to do here we need to do a little bit more damage so let's turn it instead of .004 yatta watts let's turn it to four here we go now look at that now the surface of the moon is over 200 300 degrees celsius now whoa it's starting to just shoot off plasma now so we're just turning the surface in the moon with the plasma oh man that is awesome [Music] so hitting the moon with this much energy is actually enough to push the moon away from us there's so much energy in this laser now that it would actually start moving the moon away from the earth now we're at almost a thousand degrees celsius now but to really destroy the moon we're going to have to go a little bit more let's go to 40 yatta watts of power [Music] oh man let's go 400 yatta watts 3 2 1. 2000 degrees celsius now so the moon is just a complete plasma now you can see it just pouring off into space around it okay 4 000 yatta watts and the moon is gone just complete dust now okay let's see at 4 000 yatta watts let's see what that would do to the earth melt the ice caps oh that is awesome okay here's 40 000 yatta watts [Music] whoa [Music] look how it just pushed the earth away from us so i heated it up so much that's just the plasma evaporating and shooting away from the earth and one more zap well it's this dead rock now that is crazy so now let's see what this would actually do to the sun so the sun's at 5 500 degrees celsius we're shooting it here and i don't see any rise in temperature so this laser completely obliterated the earth okay we're gonna have to get even more powerful than this to do anything to the sun so one little blast from this obliterated the earth but it's not doing anything to the sun [Music] now this is similar to a question that was asked in the book what if one of my favorite books by randall monroe and in it he discusses the different types of strong lasers on earth from the least powerful to the most powerful laser on earth and talks about what it would look like if you shined it on the moon everybody thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet and also you can hit the bell to be notified when my latest video comes out and check out the actionlab.com for the action lab experiment boxes we have the vacuum chamber box and the self pouring fluid box and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 1,010,296

Rating: 4.7044806 out of 5

Keywords: Moon, Laser at moon, world's most powerful laser, strongest laser, blue laser, star wars, death star, the action lab, action lab

Id: 9srfJNPzK_Q

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020