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You bought the whole brownie, but youâll only need⌠the edge! 
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Simple, increase temperature by 50 deg F and add 20 min of baking time. All edges.
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For that extra-crunchy texture! (Or because youâre running short of cinderblocks for the foundation youâre building.)
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Chocolate cookies could be interpreted as all-edge brownies.
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The mountain in the cartoon does look a little bit like monomorphic VT:
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Mountains will do that to you.
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What could go wrong?
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81 Gt is strangely specificâŚ
Anyway, a bit of context for this load of bollocks:
The biggest nuke ever to this day is âproduct 602â (Nikita Sergeyevichâs âKuzmaâs motherâ) at maybe a tad over 50 Mt.1)
There is no theoretical upper limit for the yield of a thermonuclear device;2) other than that if you keep going, at one point youâll end up with a brown dwarf or something.
Sure, Eddie Teller lobbied for bombs in the Gt range. Because of course he did; Eddie just was like that.3) And while a one Gt bomb theoretically would destroy an area the size of France, there is a practical limit to actual weapons. Depending on how you model it,4) there is a sweet spot somewhere between 400 and 500 Mt where the upper atmosphere becomes the weak point in your bubble of thermonuclear destruction and every Mt added basically just vents into space.
There is no way5) to âcontainâ a 81 Gt yield. Period.
This isnât geoengineering; this is terraforming.6) At scale.
I tried to put this yield into Alex Wellersteinâs excellent NUKEMAP7) - but it only goes up to 100 Mt.
Footnotes
1) The original design was ~100 Mt, but they scaled it down. The main reasons weâre to keep down the fallout (which is why it was an air drop rather than a shot tower) and the destruction. For one thing, the bomber dropping it wouldnât have survived. The effects were still quite something. The flare was observed more than 1,000 km away, windows were shattered 700 km away, the mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km. The blast wave circled the globe three times (which was recorded as far away as New Zealand) and had a seismic effect at ground zero equivalent to an earthquake of 5 to 5.5 on the Richter scale. The seismic waves also circled the globe three times.
2) Product 602âs design team pointed this out in one of their early reports. With the technology they had at the time, 150 Mt would have been feasible. The possibility of devices in the Gigaton range was mentioned.
3) Nicely illustrating the old adage that itâs sometimes tricky to tell apart genius and madness. My take on Eddie Teller is that he wasnât mad, but a colossal asshole.
4) High airburst, low airburst, on the surface, somewhat below the surface (like with a bunker buster), weather, topography, and so on.
5) No fucking way, to be accurate. Unless maybe you place the thing lower than the Earthâs crust. Which is beyond our capabilities right now, but it is a good premise for a silly, yet entertaining film.
6) Since Iâve brought it up: Andy Haverlyâs notion may or may not have been inspired by the Fanboisâ dream of terraforming Mars by nuking its polar ice cap. Again, theoretically possible. Scott Manley did the math on that in one of his videos - youâd need 25,000 times the yield of all the nukes there were at the height of the Cold War.
7) How would your hometown cope with a 50 Mt nuke? Find out:
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Does âKuzmaâs Motherâ=âTsar Bomba?â Thatâs the biggest nuke ever detonated. Around 50 megatons. I doubt we would know if some black site had created something bigger, but the gap between 50 megatons and 81 frigginâ gigatons is a hell of a chasm. I donât care where you put that, it would absolutely be terraforming! Madness.
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Detonating such a bomb at the bottom of the ocean would be cataclysmic. The tsunami alone would be a major problem world wide.
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Well, Kurzgesagt looked into this as far as Tsar Bomba goes. 81 Gt is a lot bigger, but at least for 50 Mt, ainât gonna do much.
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Maybe we need an âOngoing Cephalopod Happeningsâ thread?
This elaborate neural architecture is critical given the octopusâs dual role in the ecosystem as both predator and prey. Without natural defenses like a hard shell, octopuses have evolved a highly adaptable nervous system that allows them to rapidly process information and adjust as needed, helping their chances of survival.
Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar, now, doesnât it? âWithout sharp claws or vicious teeth, they had to fall back on their intelligence to survive.â I love sushi, but I will not eat octopus. They fascinate me!
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That feels sort of backward to me. With their adaptable nervous system, octopuses have been able to give up their costly shells (and then the fast-swimming mobility of relatives like squid too). Or, you know, the changes happened together. But I kind of doubt they spent millions of years being stupid helpless prey and came out with a better neural architecture as a result.
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I suspect, like with us, itâs a chicken-and-egg sort of thing. Evolution works with the cards itâs dealt and crafts survival machines. I could see a scenario where the loss of the protective shell for one reason or other led to a necessity for increasing intelligence and adaptability, which lead to more of same over evolutionary time. I canât see it going the other way, though. But what the hell do I know? Iâm just a pediatrician. I find this stuff fascinating, but cannot claim anything other than hobbyist-level knowledge. Sort of like tree-dwelling apes having to adapt to less and less trees on the savannah, finding that brains can replace brawn. No clue what the equivalent was for octopuses, but what we see now is pretty amazing.
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