A Recipe for Disaster

For our winter exhibition this year, we got the chance to choose an aspect of the Star Wars franchise and create an inquiry question about it. For my question, I asked, ‘how might a planet be destroyed using modern or plausible technology?’. I then moved to the research step. I interviewed Stephen Perrenod as one of my sources. He has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard and has written multiple books on the subject of dark matter and space. He told me that currently, there is little to no way that a planet, especially earth, could be destroyed. He did, however, point me in the direction of a few websites and other sources that looked at how planets could potentially be destroyed in the future. I created four different recipes that had instructions for how a potential destruction could happen, which I will insert a couple of here.

URANIUM FUSION

Time Needed: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

• A medium sized planet (Earth would be a suitable size)
• A 5km wide ball of pure uranium
• A lack of any neutrons

Directions:

1. Drill a hole into the core of your previously chosen planet
2. Carefully insert the pure uranium into the core of the planet
3. Be sure to keep any neutrons as far from the uranium as possible
4. Watch the planet explode before your very eyes!

ANTIMATTER MILKSHAKE

Time Needed: a spare afternoon

Ingredients:

• 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter
• A planet of your choice

Directions:

1. Take your antimatter and launch it towards your planet
2. Make sure to launch your antimatter away from any nearby planets, spacecraft, or pedestrians
3. Get as far away as possible from the explosion
4. Your planet will be split into a thousand pieces!

BLACK HOLE À LA MODE

Time Needed: over 800 years

Ingredients:

• A planet
• A very large black hole
• Extremely powerful rocket propulsion engines (also known as a jet engine)

Directions:

1. Locate the distance between your chosen black hole and your planet
2. Diligently attach your jet engine to chosen planet
3. Point your planet towards the black hole and turn on the jets
4. Wait 800+ years until they collide together, thus sucking the planet into the black hole

Then, I mounted everything on a poster board. After bringing it to school and receiving constructive feedback, I took it home that night and redid the entire board so it matched more with our star wars theme. I was much prouder of my final product then my first draft. The next afternoon, the chaos started. I was put into a group with Lauren, Jamie, Caleb, and Kyle because we all had military-themed projects. We decided to make our section somewhat like a Star Wars battle and had toy lightsabers and a tv showing Star Wars fight scenes. We had only a couple of hours to completely transform our library into a Star Wars dark side base, which was a big challenge. We finally finished it only a couple of minutes before the exhibition started. I showed off my presentation all night, and I had meaningful discussions with the people who approached me. All in all, this was most likely my favourite project I have done to date.