Doomsday Scenario: Lavos

[Hadriel]

Most of the world's governments have doomsday plans set up in case something cataclysmic befalls the entire nation, such as a nuclear war.  And, with regards to Chrono, no greater cataclysm exists than the Day of Lavos in 1999.  In the Chrono timeline, Crono's intervention is the only reason people would still be able to argue Coke or Pepsi.  But, we (as far as we know) don't have a band of time-traversing saviors coming to our rescue in the event of global apocalypse.  So I put this hypothetical question to you:

How do you think the U.N. would handle the Day of Lavos, and what would you do to combat him if you had to decide?  You are allowed to use any country, any tactic, and any technology that currently exists or is known to be in development.  No magic is allowed, though.

In my opinion, a full military offensive would be the first choice for several of the more aggressive countries.  Forget about special forces -- probably almost the entire world's military could be expected to descend on the Devourer.  Knowing what we know about Lavos' sheer power, such an attempt would have about a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.  But, since Lavos emerges on land in 1999, I'd expect to see a massive tank corps doing battle with him, as well as an attacking <a  style='text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 3px double;' href="http://www.serverlogic3.com/lm/rtl3.asp?si=24&k=air%20force" onmouseover="window.status='air force'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">air force</a> attempting to shoot down his spike missiles.  The usage of nuclear weapons would not be out of the question, but biological weapons are a little iffy.

Presumably, if Lavos possesses the DNA of every lifeform on Earth, he might also possess a weakness to biological warfare, though I wonder how likely it is that he'd succumb to it.

As far as preserving the people, I really don't have any idea, though I presume this is why the environment domes were built.

What do you guys think?

[GrayLensman]

1.)  In 65 million BC, Lavos impacted the surface of the earth at meteoric speed, creating a fireball that covered most of the continent and caused a global climactic change that lasted for millions of years.  This explosion is similar to the K-T Meteor impact, which is estimated to have released energy equivalent to 100 trillion Tons of TNT.

For comparison, the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever produced had a yield of 50 million Tons, and the total world nuclear arsenal has a combined yield of approximately 5 billion Tons.  The explosion of Krakatoa, the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history, released energy equivalent to 200 million Tons.

Lavos, a biological organism, survived this impact with no apparent injury..

We're toast.

[Hadriel]

That much was obvious from the beginning.  I'm just asking how you think the U.N. would handle it.  They have no way of knowing Lavos' age or aims.

[GreenGannon]

How would the UN handle it?

Man, I wouldn't trust the UN to clean my house!

But as for how they'd handle it,

About 1/3 would want to unload everything we had on it, another 1/3 wanting to try diplomatic measures, and another 1/3 wondering how to extort this for their own personal gain.

[Leebot]

How would the UN handle it?

Man, I wouldn't trust the UN to clean my house!

But as for how they'd handle it,

About 1/3 would want to unload everything we had on it, another 1/3 wanting to try diplomatic measures, and another 1/3 wondering how to extort this for their own personal gain.

And with no majority, they'd end up doing nothing.

The best solution I can think of is the Neutron Bomb, a nuclear weapon which is heavily damaging to all biological materials. Aside from that, maybe we could try to shove an H-bomb down its throat.

[Radical_Dreamer]

They'd spend a lot of missiles on it, which would be pretty successful. The Epoch made it thru, after all. Then they'd probably bomb the hole to open it up wider, and force more missiles in.  It'd probably work. And, it would deplete the military power of most of the major nations, and have that nice "common enenmy against all humans" effect, so maybe, just maybe, people could get over some of their petty, trivial bullshit. Maybe.

That, or send some kid with a mop to go fuck him up.

[Daniel Krispin]

The UN would act very quickly indeed. Being Canadian, I was quite pleased that our Prime Minister did not join the US in their folly-ridden invasion of Iraq. Whatever the purposes of the President - though I think they were likely ones of conquest rather than liberation - they have yielded very little benefit, and have not served to stabilize the area. Thus I think that, if such an event were to occur, we would need to trust to the UN security council, rather than the rash actions of one rebellious country with an itchy trigger finger. The US, as it has so recently done, would probably attack, but as the UN would at once approve all war measures, I don't think there would be much debate. Now, let's see how the war would occur.
Firstly, we see from the speed of Lavos' assault that very little is left, in a sort of Independence Day style strike. Not everything can be hit, however, and this give the chance of a counterattack.
Firstly, the non-US countries can do very little. They would follow what I outline in the following as first strike options for the US, but do not have the final nuclear power neccessary to finish the deed. So we'd probably see a massive marshalling of Tu-144 Blackjacks - do the Russians even have any left, come to think of it? - and all sorts of strike fighters. The ground forces would be decimated, so any strike would be aerial. Carriers here would probably be the way to go as well. Canada... well, we'd be helpless here. Our helicopters would probably crash before we crossed our border. Sorry, world, we tried. Anyway, NATO would give some measure of support as well with Tornadoes, and all their LGBs. Sea-based cruise missiles would be launched en-masse, and this would severely weaken Lavos.
As far as the US goes, I think their first choice would be a tactical strike through the use of F-15 Strike Eagles and Joint Strike Fighters, likely using the sort of bombs meant to penetrate bunkers. This would probably fail, and they would instead opt for a full-scale conventional bombardment via. any B-52s they have, and their ever-impressive largest bombers, B-1 Lancers. Again, they'd probably be armed with bunker-busting high power laser guided bombs, and perhaps some of those nasty ones that cause implode all air to their centres. Again, though this may weaken him, it would likely fail. Finally, they'd resort to Nuclear Weaponry. No tactical nukes here, they'd probably go straight to DefCon 1, or whatever Nuclear War is, and launch ICBMs. As strong as Lavos is, I honestly don't think even he could survive a 20MT nuclear warhead; the radiation and fallout effects would be neglidgable. The US detonated one in Bikini Atoll in the 50's, and all the area about Lavos would be rendered ruin as it is. Someone mentioned Neutron bombs, and I figure that, also, would be a good choice. That would be the reprisal, and as much as I'd hate to admit it, the world would owe its safety to the militaristic Americans. After all, I don't think anyone else has the strike power to deal with such a threat. I figure the US would be all but destroyed however, a last stroke of glory before their doom; it's likely where Lavos would surface, and so most of the central states would be rendered barren as a field of a nuclear war.

[Hadriel]

As for the speed of Lavos' attack, the bad ending scene of the Earth being destroyed is likely time-lapse "photography" occurring over a period of several hours, or possibly even days.  The Rain of Destruction attack is presumably the same one he uses to annihilate major cities -- Crono and crew fortunately have obscenely powerful armor and weapons that somehow enable them to take explosions rivaling ICBMs.  The kicker there is that Lavos uses Rain of Destruction infrequently -- if he could use it more often, it's damaging enough that he would just use it constantly until the heroes die.  Even with the best equipment and max defense, Rain can easily drain a third or more of a maxed-out character's health, and in some cases as much as two thirds.

I can't see missiles working on Lavos -- absolutely nothing we have is capable of exerting 100 TT, which Lavos can survive with barely a scratch on the paint job.  Not only that, we have Lavos' temporal magic to consider, though there's no way the world could know about it.  Even if the first two forms were taken out by missiles somehow, which would only work if they managed to force them down his throat and hit the core, Lavos' true form would pull out all the stops and draw upon the spacetime-warping power of the Tesseract, the locale of both games' final fights.  It's unclear whether anything physically exists in the Tesseract -- where there should be nothing, the party members can breathe and fight, leading one to believe that things in the Tesseract may exist in spirit form only.  As missiles have no spirit, they might simply cease to be, lost between timelines.

The Epoch was going incredibly fast and also has much more mass than a missile.  Its M/AM reactor assembly was likely set by Crono to explode after they jettisoned.  With this will come several million TJ of energy.  While the Lavos Shell superstructure can withstand this, it's uncertain how much the mouth can take before caving in.

Assuming 100 TT as a maximum figure, it would take around a million kg of M/AM material to punch through.  That would have to be packed into a form usable as a weapon, and dozens of things could go wrong in that process.  Though, since Lavos is to all appearances unhurt after the crash, it would probably take a lot more than that to get through -- possibly a trillion kg or more.  There is also the problem of Lavos' time bubble -- if the mouth was broken through, and someone actually managed to pump enough missiles inside to destroy the core, the bubble would collapse without Lavos' power sustaining it, brutally annihilating everyone unfortunate enough to be in the area, or worse, banishing them to the Tesseract.  As culture nowadays seems averse to the idea that people die in war, that would be a difficult one to pull off.  Power jockeying in the U.N. could result from that, but I don't see how people in the U.N. could make a power game out of the complete annihilation of humanity.  Perhaps I'm missing something?

[Leebot]

Actually, it's worth noting that Russia still has nukes they could train on Lavos. In fact, their nukes are BIGGER (no seriously, during the Cold War, the USA tried to limit the size of nukes, and the USSR tried to limit the number. Hence, the USA has more, smaller nukes, and Russia has fewer, bigger nukes).

On the neutron bomb: The biggest advantage to this is it avoids collateral damage, harming only biological components. This means that its effect would likely pierce through Lavos' shell (most shells have few organic components in them) and hit the core directly.

[Hadriel]

Yeah, the Tsar Bomba device would probably be the best chance we'd have to pierce Lavos' mouth.  How do you think we'd get the missiles to go in, though?  Lavos is so low to the ground that it can't be done by conventional jet fighters, and tank armaments aren't powerful enough to dismantle the core in either of its forms.

[Lazarus Plus]

Does anyone have information on how powerful a three stage device (IE antimatter) is? Because we are not TOO far from being able to build one, and I bet that would make Lavos uncomfortable at the least.

[SilentMartyr]

We would be done for, I would just hope that this is the original timeline and not any keystones

[Leebot]

Well, we're not even talking about kilograms of antimatter here. We'd be lucky to get a couple grams out of it, which would be on the power level of the first few atomic bombs.

Now, one point that should be made: It isn't just the amount of energy that matters, it's how it's focused (ie. Energy/Area or Radiance*Time). When Lavos hit Earth, a lot of the energy was focused outwards, and what wasn't was spread across the entirety of its shell. If we were to coat our warheads with something even stronger than its shell, such as diamond, and then could attach it enough, we could focus all the energy into a square-meter or so, with much greater results.

That being said, we have the capability to cut through diamond with lasers, so Lavos's shell likely wouldn't be too much harder. This is all on the assumption we could get close enough. Lavos probably wouldn't protect the back of its shell that well (unless it would launch its spikes at itself), so someone could get in behind, drill a cavity with a laser drill, place an H-Bomb inside it, then set it off.

[Hadriel]

I was speaking theoretically there -- antimatter's notoriously unstable, too, and even preserving the small amounts of it long enough to be used would be a feat for the ages.

Do you have an estimate on energy per square meter of surface area that the shell took?  Considering the size of the spherical energy release and being conservative in my estimate, even if a thousandth of the energy hit Lavos, an extraordinary amount of J/m^2 still got delivered.  We can use a spherical shape for the energy release and another one for the surface area of a Lavos spawn's front side, though considering that a Lavos spawn actually fits on the screen, it can't be that large.

What's the surface area and volume of the max amount of diamond we've been able to cut through?  Simply due to the sheer amount of energy Lavos survived, as well as his relatively small volume at the time for having done so, I'm inclined to believe that his shell is exponentially stronger than diamond.

IMO, gamma ray or X-ray lasers would be interesting to use on Lavos.  They can potentially modify genetic code by rearranging the very atoms of the subject's DNA.  That again leads us to the question of whether the shell is organic or not.  I lean toward it being organic, simply because it grows.  Though I have no idea what kind of organic material can take 100 TT.

[Leebot]

I really doubt it's organic, most shells aren't. I was also thinking that it's possible Lavos' shell didn't survive its impact, but instead served the purpose of absorbing all the energy so the organic part could survive.

If we're talking from a purely scientific point of view, it's extremely unlikely that anything could be harder than diamond (well, short of neutronium, but that's just not an option). The strength of Carbon-Carbon bonds and the covalent lattice make it unparalleled in strength. Heavier elements form weaker bonds, and no lighter element can form a lattice structure. The only known material that even comes close to diamond's properties is Cubic Zirconium, but its hardness is 8.5 to diamond's 10 (10 being the top of the scale). Maybe, just maybe, if we could get Carbon Dioxide to crystallize, we'd have a winner here...