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Walking on a cube-shaped planet

straightdope.com

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#51
Another planetary thought experiment (edit: sorry, credit where it's due: excerpt from The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks):

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter, 'moon' seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) The moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one's way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon.

Where a strange thing happened.

For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from.

This was, of course,—

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#52
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point, but I'm not so sure. We take the shortcut of assuming that the earth's gravity is drawing everything toward a point at the center of the earth. But that's not really correct; every bit of matter is drawing everything else toward it. So those giant mountains that comprise the vertexes of the cube would be pulling the oceans toward them. That works against your point. I don't know where the equilibri…

A sphere with some gravitational influence from the points, but with most of the mass towards the center of the cube, it would still be mostly sphere-like, I think.

That's right. If you are in the center of a face, the center of an edge, or on one of the vertices the gravity vectors all point towards the core.

An imagined sphere inside the cube holds 52% of the mass and so the remaining mass is divided among eight vertices, about 6% for each.

If you are off a ways from one of the points listed above, the sphere part (52%) will always pull towards the center. A lot of the force from the corners will be mitigated/cancelled by symmetry, and whatever is left over, again, it's only 6% maximum per corner.

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#53
post #45

Very fun thought experiment. It reminded me that we did a problem in calculus to compute the effect of gravity inside a hollow sphere. It turns out to be ZERO. So, if the Earth's mass, was all densely concentrated in a, say, 1 mile thick shell, you could drill a hole through the shell and experience total weightlessness when you popped out on the "inside" (assuming a total vacuum on the inside - if not - you'd experi…

If the inside was a total vacuum, the moment you finished drilling through the 1 mile shell, the vast majority of the planet's atmosphere would be sucked through the open hole at an insanely fast rate.

OK so let's say you install an airlock in between the inner and outer crust.

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#54
Naturally, the large airless portions of the surface would be pocked by craters, with enormous scree fields washing center-ward from from many of those craters, as the debris fell back to earth to bounce, slide, and roll "downhill".

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#55

Regarding the perceived gravity on a cube planet, the movie Sunshine tries to portray accurate physics for a similar situation. It has great sci-fi visuals, though the end gets a bit... silly.

I don't understand why everyone thinks the horror aspect of the film was silly. The captain of the other ship was driven mad by pure light and retreats into the darkness. He then tries to sabatoge the attempt to restart the sun so he (and all of the human race) can be forever encased in the night. These effects were illustrated in some of the characters on the second ship as well. And the final moment of the film was…

Thanks for this. The weird ending had me mystified and not thinking well of an otherwise good movie. It finally all makes sense. I'm going to have to rewatch it this weekend.

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#58
post #21
post #20

I'm getting an error when I try to load it. The cache is still alive, though: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&#38...

It was working up until about five minutes ago. I suspect I'm not the only one who'd never heard of the The Straight Dope and started clicking through the archives after reading this article.

The Straight Dope was where I first learn of the Monty Hall problem. It's also where I found out exactly how stubbornly wrong some people can be in the face of absolute proof.

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#59
The Integral Trees (Larry Niven): the habitable space is a torus.

It's a torus of air in orbit. The trees look like integral signs because they align pointed toward the star, but have constant wind in opposite directions at either end, because the air there has different orbital speeds, being closer or further from the star.

Re: Walking on a cube-shaped planet

#60
It seems that both the straight dope and ask-a-physicist links describe the effects as something similar to having eight giant mountains on Earth whose summits make up the points of a cube. This led me to wonder, what if we consider the case where the Earth is exactly the same (geologically) as it is now, but in the future we put up eight giant towers whose tops describe those summit points? Assuming a supermaterial has been discovered whose properties allow for an extremely light structure with enormous compression strength relative to its weight, like aerogel ( http://bashinginminds.com/2010/01/23/playing-with-nasas-soli... ) but even aerogel-ier. What would that be like?

Is it then too far-fetched to imagine that some freak process of nature or other might conceivably allow for the creation of a bizarre planet with an immensely dense spherical core and a lighter mantle and crust that take on the shape of a cube externally? Nature is not averse to giving us cubes, after all: http://www.gemstoneslist.com/pyrite.html

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