10 Huge Disaster Movies That Scientists Called Bullsh*t (And Why)
9. It Would Take A Bomb With More Energy Than The Sun To Destroy The Asteroid - Armageddon (1998)
The Disaster: As an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles towards earth threatening to condemn mankind to the same fate suffered by the dinosaurs, NASA scramble to come up with a plan. Stumped, they turn to a rag-tag team of oil riggers, who volunteer to land a space craft on the surface of the asteroid and bury a nuclear bomb deep in the rock, blowing it in two and saving the earth from certain doom. With only 18 days until the collision, the odds don't look good, but Harry Stamper has never missed his mark. Why Its Bullshit: Backed into a corner, you would expect the worlds most prominent space agency to come up with something a little more inspiring than lets just blow the damn thing up! If this strategy was actually suggested at NASA HQ, the person making the suggestion would quite frankly be laughed out of the building. To successfully blow an asteroid the size of Texas in two, you would need a bomb that explodes with more energy than the sun. To put it into perspective, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth was Big Ivan, which the Soviets tested in 1961. Big Ivan exploded with an energy output of 418,000 terajoules. Bruce Willis and his boys would have needed a bomb capable of kicking out 800 trillion terajoules. This would have all been futile anyway, as the most powerful telescope available in the 1990s (the Hubble Space Telescope) had a range of eight billion miles and by that point there would have been no stopping the asteroid from colliding with earth, no matter how many pieces it was in.
