So there’s this concept called “specific heat.” It describes how much energy is required to raise the temperature of a given substance by one degree C. It also includes the energy costs of state transitions from solid to liquid, liquid to gas, and back again. Among other things, it also explains why you can have snowdrifts on a 50 degree day, or why the lake doesn’t freeze over immediately upon hitting 32.
Anyway, today at work, a couple of the guys were discussing farts and one of them said something about a 1.21 Gigawatt fart. Intrigued, I mentioned that was a pile of energy, and wondered what it would do to the one issuing such an emission. Went to lunch and did the math.
In terms of total energy, “1.21GW” is actually meaningless since there’s no time component. If the pulse was short enough, it could actually deliver less energy than your phone uses, and if it was long enough it could vaporize a planet. So we’ll assume this fart lasted a second.
1 Joule is one Watt-second. Thus, this one-second fart delivers 1.21 Gigajoules. The entire nuclear energy capacity of the United States in 2019 was 98 gigawatts. On avearge, a US nuclear reactor has a capacity of 1.7 gigawatts (58 reactors divided into that 98 GW). This theoretical fart is delivering 70% of the average maximum capacity of a nuclear power plant in the US.
It takes 4.184 Joules to heat a gram of water 1 degree C. It’s 2.09J/g for steam. The transitional heat from liquid to gas is 2257J/g.
Average human body temperature is 37C.
Let’s assume our bioterrorist is 221 pounds. I work in a machine shop, and we’re mostly proper men, not weedy little dainty-boys. 221 pounds just happens to come out to 100Kg, which simplifies our math considerably.
It takes 28.0328MJ to raise the temperature of 100Kg of water from 37 to 100C. Converting that water to steam at 100C takes another 225.7MJ.
This leaves us 956,267,200 J.
Dividing that by 2.09, and dividing by his mass gives us 4,575 and change.
Our farter has just reduced himself to a cloud of 4,675 degree C steam. The surface temperature of the Sun is 5,778 K, or 5,505 C.
By comparison, the explosion that opened the core at Chernobyl was estimated to be around 40 GJ.
Realistically, our farter isn’t going to absorb all the energy and be perfectly converted to steam. He’s much more likely to explode with a force equivalent to several tons of TNT. That’s enough to destroy a building.