How much charge would destroy the world?

Someone invents a machine that creates electrons. It takes in some electrically neutral matter, and produces electrons of equal mass.¹

Let's consider two quantities of negative charge:

$q$ is the amount of negative charge that a typical individual might reasonably want to create and use, not counting in lab experiments.

$Q$ is the amount of negative charge that if added to the Earth, would soon destroy human society as we know it. (It wouldn't necessarily kill everyone, but it would trigger a huge leap backwards.)

I'd like to keep $Q\over q$ within a few orders of magnitude of $10^{10}$. This way I can keep $q$ in the budget range of an upper-class individual, while making $Q$ too expensive to create outside a major government attempt.

What are reasonable values for $q$ and $Q$?

¹ Of course this violates the principle of conservation of charge. Some skeptics claim that the machine actually sucks the electrons from another part of the universe, but it doesn't really matter.

posted over 8 years ago

abcde‭

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