386
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
386 points (93.9% liked)
News
23275 readers
3499 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
He'd still have the 30 km per second (67,000 mph) of sideways velocity that Earth has when it's orbiting the sun, and that speed is enough to prevent Earth from ever hitting the sun.
Orbits aren't very intuitive; if you want something you launch from Earth to fall straight into the sun, you actually need to fire it directly opposite to the direction that Earth orbits in. So if you imagine Earth orbiting clockwise, you want to shoot the thing counterclockwise. If you do that at the right speed, you counteract all the orbital speed and the thing just falls into the sun.
If you can speed something up a completely unlimited amount then sure you could aim straight at the sun and just fire it so fast that it hits the sun anyway. It'll be off-centre a bit but the sun is pretty big. Consider how much of the sky isn't sun though. If the sun is directly overhead and you shoot straight at the sun, the thing you fired is already going 30 km/s sideways before you even started. We could do the trig to figure out how fast you need to shoot it to still hit the sun anyway but I think the more important part here is getting a feel for the motion involved.
How about if you leave the earth's atmosphere first, come to a stop, then fire him/accelerate directly at the sun? Or I guess just leave him there so he falls into it slowly? I'm not trying to be difficult or anything I'm just interested.
Depends on what you mean by the "come to a stop" bit. Stop relative to Earth? You're still going Earth speeds relative to the sun, which is what you're trying to hit. It's like throwing a ball at something while driving past it. If you mean stop relative to the sun then sure, you don't even need to shoot him towards the sun, he'll fall right in. The trouble is that stopping relative to the sun is specifically the bit that takes a lot of energy.
Cool, thanks for the info, it's very interesting. I, for one, vote for trying it with Musk, even if it goes wrong he won't be here anymore.
Even if we fail, Elon Musk ends up further away than he currently is