Re: Atomic bug bomb!

Logan Kearsley wrote:

Of course there is- neutrinos can do damage to your body by
transmuting the elements it's made of. You just need a stupidly huge
flux of neutrinos to get a noticeable effect, since absorption is so
low. If you were unlucky enough to be orbiting a star about to go
supernova, for example, the neutrino emissions would probably kill you
before anything else, seeing as how they can escape the core fairly
directly.

Yes, various calculations of the LD50 distance for a type II supernova put it at about ~1-10 au. Given that the neutrino pulse of is about 10^46 J, that puts the LD50 energy (not power) flux at about ~10^21-10^23 J/m^2.

An evaporating micro-blackhole ought to do the trick.

Not sure about that; as a primordial black hole shrinks, its temperature (and radiation power) rises, which means that the spectrum of radiation (including which type of particles) cycles through "heavier" types of radiation. A black hole on the verge of evaporation would likely be emitting the vast majority of its energy in radiation types other than neutrinos. Whether they'd still be enough total radiation to compensate for the shift isn't clear to me.

Though given the original poster's premise, it sounded like he was talking about a magical particle that would break all technology, rather than kill all humans.

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