On top of that, even if you accelerated the rate of fusion temporarily in part of a star... so what? The heat produced per unit volume of the sun's core is less than that of a compost heap and orders of magnitude less than human flesh.
Really? Fascinating. I kind of expected it to be more than that. But then I suppose that would mean it would inevitably burn up in less than billions of years so that makes sense.
I don't care if this was authored by Isaic Newton, it's utter bullshit and the idea of someone taking it seriously confuses me.
He did author some bullshit, now that you mention it.
I suppose that would mean it would inevitably burn up in less than billions of years so that makes sense.
Yeah. The sun is just so hot due to its huge mass to surface area ratio - so much volume per square meter of emitting area. The total heat energy inside the sun at any given moment is also equal to several hundred thousand years worth of its fusion output. You could somehow shut down the fusion and never have anyone else in the solar system notice a thing for kiloyears unless they had a neutrino detector, until it starts to slooooooooowly shrink a...
Bolonkin & Friedlander (2013) argues that it might be possible for "a dying dictator" to blow up the Sun, and thus destroy all life on Earth:
Warning: the paper is published in an obscure journal by publisher #206 on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013, and I was unable to find confirmation of the authors' claimed credentials from any reputable sources with 5 minutes of Googling. It also has two spelling errors in the abstract. (It has no citations on Google scholar, but I wouldn't expect it to have any since it was only released in July 2013.)
I haven't read the paper, and I'd love to see someone fluent in astrophysics comment on its contents.
My guess is that this is not a risk at all or, as with proposed high-energy physics disasters, the risk is extremely low-probability but physically conceivable (though perhaps not by methods imagined by Bolonkin & Friedlander).