Nuclear, antimatter, strange matter, whatever the mechanism - will humans come together and develop a bomb with yield at least 10 times greater than the most powerful thermonuclear weapon developed so far?
Tsar Bomba had yield of 50 megatonnes, so a positive resolution requires a weapon releasing at least 500 Mt.
Must be a single bomb, an aggregate of smaller warheads does not count;
The bomb itself must release the energy, to exclude e.g. asteroid redirection or inducing earthquakes
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Betting No since the absolute biggest bombs were not really practical, and it seems the trend is more efficient (and relatively smaller), more deliverable ones. I guess novel physics would be more likely used for a man-portable or normal aircraft-portable system delivering a few tons TNT equiv.
@CamillePerrin Yeah, this. It's not that it's a completely insurmountable physics/engineering challenge, but it would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than the Manhattan project in real terms with essentially no militarily practical payoff, so I'm going to bet with the incentives.
@CamillePerrin I understand one justification for (unsuccessful) pushback against development of bigger bombs in the cold war was that you basically just vent more and more energy into space, since the blast ends up bigger than the earth's atmosphere.
@Tomoffer That, plus if I remember correctly there is a physics limit of how much yield you can get from a tonne of material in a nuclear bomb. Then the delivery mechanism becomes unwieldy plus as you imply, increasing yield 10x does not produce a 10x bigger area of destruction.
If it becomes feasible, I don't think generals and military planners would say no to a weapon able to, say, destroy an entire region with a single hit.
@lukres but lots of smaller bombs destroy the same area and are much harder to intercept (!) - plus we have those already. Seems like a superior solution (for those that desire to kill 99% of humans).