How to destroy the Earth (2006)
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How to destroy the Earth (2006)
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Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#2This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time.
My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10
Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#3This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.
I didn't bother to search HN for the title, just the link, and this is the first time this particular variant of the link (https) has been posted. Sorry; I wouldn't have posted it if I'd realised it had appeared multiple times before.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#4hmm...the singularity not the same as event horizon. The Schwarzschild radius of the earth is 9mm. The singularity is infinitely small
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#5This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.
> My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10
I don't think you can. Even if you could give the whole Earth a push toward the sun, it has enough orbital velocity (~30,000 m/sec) that it'll miss and keep on going around. You might turn its orbit into a slightly different ellipse.
Say we want to straight up (down?) launch a probe into the sun. It's a hard thing to do because it has to shed all of that orbital speed to get its velocity vector pointed in the right direction (at which point it can fall in on its own). If you only get rid of most of it, you'll fall into a long elliptical orbit.
You could potentially dump some energy with a gravitational assist off of Venus (transfer some of our momentum into speeding up its orbit while slowing ours down), but there's still the matter of getting the Earth to Venus for that to work. And at that point maybe you just want to stick to #9.
I haven't played enough KSP to be sure of all that, but that's my understanding of the orbital mechanics.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#6This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#7This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.
> My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 I don't think you can. Even if you could give the whole Earth a push toward the sun, it has enough orbital velocity (~30,000 m/sec) that it'll miss and keep on going around. You might turn its orbit into a slightly different ellipse. Say we want to straight up (down?) launch a pro…
If you wait for a while (8 billion years, give or take) the Sun will expand enough to meet the Earth, and presumably that will happen long before any drag effects will cause the reverse to happen.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#8This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.
I didn't bother to search HN for the title, just the link, and this is the first time this particular variant of the link (https) has been posted. Sorry; I wouldn't have posted it if I'd realised it had appeared multiple times before.
Nothing to be sorry about: a lot of HN readers (invluding me) are seeing it for the first time. And I will upvote this next time I see it, too.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#9This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.
It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#10Man, I feel old. I remember this when it was the alt.destroy.the.earth FAQ...