Movie Clip - Titan A.E.

Titan A.E. - Earth is Dead and So is Physics

Titan A.E: A Death Star on Steroids

Picture a literal giant cannon that shoots pure energy into an object for massive cataclysmic damage. Picture it splitting the Earth into hundreds of tiny pieces destroying everything you know and love and picture it wiping out the moon with its large chunks of debris. Wasn’t that fun?

That’s basically the opening scene to the movie Titan A.E.; an animated sci-fi film about a dude name kayle who has to go on this mission through the galaxy to find a spaceship his dad built that can literally create a planet. This lack of care for physics is shown in the first opening scene of the movie that I just talked about. Take a look:

  

Basically, big alien ship comes to earth, big alien ship powers up its laser, laser destroys Earth, earth destroys moon, and we are left to ponder how the heck everything that just happened actually happened. Well there are some things that we can analyze about this scene in order to determine if this laser beam of death is remotely possible.

Let’s start at the obvious question, just how fast are those pieces of Earth going? Well, we actually have a perfect way to measure that. We know the distance between the earth and the moon, and the time between when the earth exploded and when the earth hit the moon can be measured with the movie. So, according to the movie. We can do the following calculation.

            Well, we now know that the pieces of Earth are moving approximately 32 million meters per second (11% the speed of light) after it’s blown to bits by the blue dudes. Now we can ask the question, how much energy would that take? And, is that even possible to create in the manner that the bad guys did?

Well we can use the equations for kinetic energy to find out how much kinetic energy the pieces of Earth has as they are moving. That energy must have all come from the energy released into the earth by the weapon. So, knowing that we can do the following calculation. Note: In the following calculation “m” represents the mass of the earth.

Ok, so now we know that the energy needed for that is massive. Absolutely massive. For reference, that is the same energy produced in 7.3 x 10²⁹ tons of TNT. So, what in the universe could possibly generate that much energy? Well, the most powerful thing that I can immediately think of is the sun. So, let’s start there. Our sun has a property to it called luminosity which is how much energy it produces over a unit time. Our sun has a luminosity of 3.84 x 10²⁶ watts. This means that we can then find how much time it would take for the sun to generate that much energy.

 

            So, even our very own sun sitting right next to us, providing light to all the planets in our solar system and sustaining life as we know it, would require 250,000 years to produce that much energy. However, in the movie, the aliens charged up their laser to that amount of energy in under a minute.

            The rest of this movie is honestly pretty good but it has no intention of being scientifically accurate. There is even a scene in the movie where the magical sphericalspaceshipp in the opening scene create a planet in a little under a minute by breaking apart a space icicle field with some other lasers. In summary, blowing up the earth with that much energy is impossible without a shadow of a doubt. It would have been so much easier just to bomb the planet with nukes to create a nuclear fallout.