Real vaporization is so much worse
than science fiction shows.
Everything in our best science fiction
is more advanced, from the ships to the computers
to the weaponry, but it's not just the weaponry itself
that is advanced, it's the way that they dispatch enemies
that is so futuristic.
The most powerful sci-fi weapons can vaporize targets,
reducing them to nothing but a flash of light
and a puff of smoke, but almost no science fiction
in media has shown you just how terrible
and horrendous vaporizing someone would actually be,
so let's do it.
That's my directive.
(upbeat music)
Sci-fi weapons that vaporize or disintegrate matter
have been around since the concept was introduced
120 years ago by the book Edison's Conquest of Mars.
Since then, movies like Mars Attacks!
have put their own spin on the idea,
and TV shows like Star Trek have been vaping for decades.
Sick.
There are many variations, but if these weapons
are actually vaporizing people,
we've never seen a popular depiction
that is scientifically accurate.
Real vaporization would look very different,
by which I mean super gross.
First of all, since terms are very important here,
when a sci-fi weapon is said to vaporize a target
and not disintegrate it or otherwise disassemble it,
what does that mean?
Computer, phaser, green.
(computer beeps and whirs)
No, red.
(computer beeps and whirs)
No, green.
Okay, I'm done.
Well, like we've said on this program before,
what it means to vaporize something
is right there in the name.
It's adding enough energy to matter
to change it into a gas from what it was, or vapor.
Computer, Earl Grey.
It's the same essential process
as using this phaser to heat up this mug of tea
until the water inside boils and then turns into steam.
Ooh, it's hot.
The simplest interpretation, then,
of what a vaporizing weapon does to something
or someone is put enough energy into that something
or someone to turn all of its liquid
and solid constituents into gas or vapor.
Computer, on screen.
On screen.
(computer beeps)
This is about changing the phaser color
back and forth, isn't it?
(computer beeps)
Fine.
There are four elements that make up
the majority of your mass.
Oxygen, for example, makes up 65% of your body's mass,
but it's almost always found in conjunction
with hydrogen in the form of water.
The majority of your body's mass, therefore,
is a single molecule.
So instead of calculating all of the complicated ways
that all of the chemicals in your body,
no matter how much there are of them,
vaporize, and different energies, and all of that,
let's just say that a vaporizing weapon
will be effective if it turns all of your water
in your body, nope, into steam.
(phaser gun hums)
Who's flute is that?
Being the good science officers that we are
and using a little bit of thermodynamics,
we can exactly calculate how much energy it would take
to turn all of someone's water into steam.
Using my body's mass as an example,
and the fraction of it that is water,
the total amount of energy it would take
to take all of my water from body temperature
to boiling and then to steam is 130 million joules,
which is a lot.
That is more energy than a (screams) light saber
puts out in four seconds, and this thing
could easily just cut through this hull.
(light saber hums)
Wow, I was certain by now it probably would have (screams).
A weapon flinging around this kind of energy
would be dangerous enough, but it's what this energy
actually does that's the worst part.
When water turns into steam, there is a dramatic increase
in volume, and if that increase occurs very rapidly,
steam expansion can pack a serious punch.
Computer, show the videos.
Come one.
(computer beeps and whirs)
No, you; fine.
Watch what happens when guy with a bad idea
throws a bottle of water into a vat of molten metal.
Yeah; it causes an explosion
that would have messed up the Terminator.
Now watch what happens when you pour just a tiny bit
of water into boiling oil.
The steam expansion throws the burning oil everywhere,
and it can be incredibly dangerous.
And watch how quickly steam shoots out
of this volcanic vent when cold water is poured down it.
There is a lot of destructive power here,
and again, like good science officers, hiyah,
we can calculate exactly how much.
You cannot sneak up on me like that.
I stored a happier version of myself in here a while ago.
As water gains more and more energy,
the molecules that make it up move further and further apart
until a gas better describes it,
and if we assume that that steam
is an ideal gas, which isn't a bad assumption,
then we can use the so-called ideal gas law here
to calculate just how big it will be
after it turns into steam, compared to the water
it was before.
For example, let's take 100 cubic centimeters of water
and heat it up until it turns into steam.
If we now let this steam expand
so that it matches atmospheric pressure around it,
it will act to fill 170 liters, or 45 gallons of space.
That is a 1700 fold increase, and remember,
this is just a tenth of a kilogram of water.
Humans have hundreds of times more water than this
in their bodies, which means
things are about to get a lot worse.
All of these corridors look the same.
Where am I?
Sure.
If you actually vaporized a person
with a sci-fi weapon like a phaser,
the result wouldn't be neat and tidy like we always see.
It would look more like this.
Hey, Kyle, get in here.
Set my phaser to realistic real quick.
And ready?
Man, I just love living life.
Fire.
(screaming)
Yeah, we probably should have simulated that.
Oh, he loved this flute.
A real vaporization would be horribly violent
and incredibly messy.
Turning all the person's water into steam
is the equivalent of asking all of that water
to instantaneously expand and fill the volume
of a blue whale, literally.
Even worse, if you're the one doing the vaporizing,
the pressure wave from this expansion
would at least rupture your ear drums,
and at most kill you on the spot.
It would be like popping a balloon
filled with 10 times the pressure
of a scuba tank in your face.
Real vaporization wouldn't just be terrible news
for targets; it's inefficient and dangerous overkill
for the vaporizer.
Come on.
(computer whirs and beeps)
Well, I'm done talking now.
It doesn't really.
Cool.
How many holo-decks do we have?
Vaporizing someone is really going all in on destruction.
Now in most of the situations where you see
someone vaporize another person in science fiction,
I would guess that a simple pistol bullet
or a bolt from a trusty laser rifle
would do the job just fine.
The kinetic energy or something like
a nine millimeter bullet is around 500 joules,
and a good blaster bolt, if you're doing some estimating,
might be around 3000 joules.
This makes a vaporizing weapon's
hundred million joule output somewhere between
43 and 260,000 times more powerful than it needs to be.
Vaporizing people is then like swatting a fly
with a tank instead of a fly swatter.
So much walking.
That is a lot of extra energy to invest
into a weapon system that is potentially so dangerous.
Not only could the steam explosion from a vaporization
instantly kill the person doing the vaporizing,
it might destroy the very ship that both are standing on.
A spaceship doesn't regularly have to move
through an atmosphere, nor does it have
to endure thrashing seas like boats on earth do,
and so a more realistic spaceship
is probably going to be pretty fragile by earth standards,
meant to only hold one atmosphere of air pressure.
Vaporize a person on a vessel like this,
and the localized pressure is going to ballon
to 1700 atmospheres, 50% more pressure
than you'll find at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
So if this happens on board, it could blow out
a section of hull and doom the entire ship.
What a fantastic day to be alive.
Mirror me, die.
(spaceship explodes)
Well, good thing we have a couple of these ships.
If everything that I've said so far isn't bad enough,
there's what a real vaporization would look like.
Now up until now, we have been considering a perfect
and complete vaporization of all a person's water,
but in reality, if you had a weapon
that could put out that much energy
and you directed it at a person,
that person's water wouldn't uniformly turn into steam,
nor would it happen all at once.
In reality, those neat and tidy
Star Trek style vaporizations are gonna look more like this,
like lightning blowing up a tree.
Now just imagine seeing this in your science fiction,
except it's bigger, louder, and with more people chunks.
And all this out of such an unassuming weapon.
(screams)
So why is vaporization so much worse than sci-fi shows?
Well even though terms are sometimes used
as techno-babble, terms like vaporize
have real meaning, and if you apply that to a person,
it makes things real bad.
At best you get a deadly mess,
and at worst, this very common sci-fi trope
would destroy the ships that the vaporizers themselves
are often trying to save.
These weapons do make light sabers look civilized,
and that's not easy, because science.
Computer, roll credits.
(computer beeps and whirs)
Thank you.
(upbeat music)
Although this kind of sci-fi vaporization is most seen
in Star Trek, there's a lot of other little examples
that would be just as bad.
Remember in A New Hope when Leia and the rest of the team
fall down into the trash compactor,
and she vaporizes the grate to get into it?
Imagine what would happen
if you instantaneously turned many kilograms of metal
that you are this close to into steam.
That rescue would have ended real quick.
Ahh, there's metal mist in my eyes.
Thank you so much for watching, Jonathan.
If you want more of me, you can go back to nerdist.com,
or you can go to alpha@projectalpha.com,
or if you subscribe now, you can get this show
two days earlier than everyone else,
and you can get discounts on our new merch,
which is awesome.
If you like this video on Facebook, like it.
If you liked it on YouTube, hit that subscribe button
and that notification bell, because we get up to
a lot of fun stuff on this channel,
not just these main videos,
but also the vlogs and livestreams.
And if you want to follow us on social media,
you can do so here, and then I won't have to talk so fast.
(digital beeps and whirs)