It's the End of the World As We Know It...

Last night, instead of proceeding to bed time as usual, we tried to destroy the earth:

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

Larkin and Finn really wanted to explode it into lots of bits which would drift off into space as you would expect from sci-fi cartoon explosions. The best we could do was cause the whole planet to melt and re-solidify as a result of a direct hit from a fast moving chunk of iron the size of Asia.

It would be nice if there were visuals to go along with the results, but we had a lot of fun reading about the theoretical destruction we were wreaking and tweaking all the variables. Also discussed metric vs. english measurements and I made a first attempt at describing the meaning behind Joules, Megatons and (the kids' favorite) Megatons of TNT.