system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could a 1 trillion decibel sonic weapon actually harm a starship in orbit?

On one episode of Star Trek TNG, the Enterprise is attacked while in orbit by a planet-mounted sonic weapon which has a volume of 1 trillion decibels. On the face of it, this sounds completely ridiculous, because as everyone knows, there's no sound in space. But wait! Space is not a *complete* vacuum, and the decibel scale is logarithmic, with the energy involved increasing of a factor of 10 every 10 decibels, so a 1 trillion decibel sound has an energy of (if my math is correct) 10 to the 99,999,999,990 power times the energy of a 100 decibel sound... if something could actually produce a sound that loud, would it harm a starship in orbit?
gpt
**tl;dr: yes and then some.**

A 120dB sound translates to 1 watt/square meter at 1 meter.

A 10^12 dB sound would be 10^99,999,999,970 watts per square meter at one meter.  An Earth-sized planet has about 10^51 protons and neutrons giving us 10^99,999,999,919 watts per massive subatomic particle in the planet.  The planet would explode into a clould of incomprehensibly energetic gamma radiation, a sphere of absolute annihilation which would destroy the entire universe as it expanded at the speed of light.

This probably wouldn't happen though; the event would be so energetic that every Planck-volume in the planet would be trillions of trillions of times more intensely energized than the universe's volume a Planck-second after the big bang.  Presumably spacetime itself would be shredded as uncountable new universes explode outward in almost-uncountably many unfurled dimensions.  Changing spacetime can "violate" the speed-of-light barrier (see the Inflationary Epoch a smidge post-Big Bang) so our universe would be destroyed almost instantly.

It is safe to say someone fucked up their calculations.