I don’t think the writer is particularly good at writing about science and making it accessible, but this bit was interesting:

What would it take to vaporize the planet? Let’s define vaporization as blowing it up so hard that it disperses and cannot recollect due to gravity. How much energy would that take? […]

If you make some basic assumptions, it takes roughly 2 x 1032 Joules, or 200 million trillion trillion Joules. That’s a lot. For comparison, that’s the total amount of energy the Sun emits in a week.

So much for the Death Star. Not that I’d never have figured it would make sense for a planet to explode if I cared to think about it. (Of course, having the planet implode by creating a black hole in Switzerland is another matter.)

via kottke.org