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Hey Vsauce! The loudest we reached just was
123dB, which is incredibly loud but how loud
would something have to be to physically move
you? In the video game Skyrim, there are powerful
shouts that can be used against other characters,
and one in particular that blasts them away...
What would happen to you if you were on the
receiving end of that shout? What if you were
Fus Ro Dah'd?
Starting from the bottom of the decibel chart,
0 dB is the sound of a mosquito 10 feet away.
65dB is about the level of me speaking to
you right now. Then we get to 100 which is
a normal car stereo at maximum volume and
since dB are on a logarithmic scale, 100dB
is actually 10 billion times more powerful
than 0dB . At 145 your vision starts to vibrate,
after 165 your eardrums will just rupture
and once we get to 195 dB, we no longer have
sound waves, we have shock waves.
A shock wave or blast wave can cause a considerable
amount of internal damage without causing
any external physical damage. After air raids
in World War 2, casualties with no wounds
or any sort of marks. It wasn't until the
autopsies when doctors noticed that their
internal organs were destroyed.
To actually propel you into the air, the shout
would have to be the equivalent of a high
explosive, that you are only a few feet from.
The intense rise of pressure and heat would
blow you backwards, and that blast wave would
ripple through your body rupturing your lungs,
scorching your skin, and as it transfers through
different parts of you going from bone to
tissue, to where your joints are, your limbs
become incredibly susceptible to being ripped
off. In fact, you wouldn't even hear the final
word in Fus Roh Dah, since the shock wave
would hit you, blowing out your eardrums before
the sound could even carry.
Once your body finally skids across the ground
to a stop you can take solace in knowing that
due to Newton's Law of Motion, that every
action has an equal and opposite reaction,
your attacker would be destroyed as well.
But a sonic boom or shock wave doesn't have
to be due to a huge explosion. What you hear
when a whip cracks is the tip of the whip
breaking the sound barrier. Even a trombone
can create a shock wave....
But lets get ridiculously loud and turn the
volume up to 11...hundred dB.
At 1,100 dB it is the equivalent to 10^98
watts of power which if it lasted for only
1/10th of a second would produce around the
same amount of energy as the Tsar Bomba...multiplied
by about 47 quinvigintillion (79 zeros or
4.78x10^79 tons of tnt). In this great paper
by Professor David Boulderstone he talks about
the Death Star destroying Earth and calculates
it would take 53.7 sextillion tons of TNT
to annihilate the planet. Which is quite a
bit less than what 1,100 dB would produce.
In fact, if someone were to shout at you with
this much energy density, instead of being
blown away, you might actually be pulled in...because
that shout just created a black hole.
According to NASA the estimated mass energy
of the Universe is 4x10^69 Joules which is
considerable smaller than the energy made
by this 1,100dB shout. Taking that immense
energy and converting it into mass gives us
1.113×10^80 kilograms which would mean the
radius of the event horizon of this Fus Ro
Dah black hole would be 1.747x10^37 light
years or larger than the diameter of the observable
Universe. It would quickly spread at the speed
of light devouring Earth, our Solar System,
the Galaxy and then the Universe.
So a normal Fus Ro Dah would kill you and
be a suicide mission for the person shouting,
but a 1,100dB one would bring you and your
attacker as close together as you can, in
a singularity...and as always, thanks for
watching.