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Earthlike planets that have little or no rotational motion will produce very little life, if any. This idea is for a manless spaceship with enough explosives to induce rotation in a small planet (I'm guessing a few Teratons of TNT in the form of nuclear warheads could be stuffed into canyons and aimed
with a nonsymmetrical blast radius to induce a massive momentum into the side of the canyon wall and thus spinning the planet.
edit: by canyon walls I mean sea cliffs and mountian bases (no opposite sides).
If you shaped the teraton charge...
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Baum.html
...I suspect you'd just punch a hole. [pertinax, Oct 29 2007]
Blast the earth
http://www.lpl.ariz....edu/impacteffects/
[Klaatu, Oct 31 2007]
[link]
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I'll defer to the resident explosives experts, but I'd have thought that this wouldn't work in a canyon; the other side of the canyon would surely take almost as much of a hit as the side where you stuck the bombs. I know you can direct the force from, say, the warhead of an anti-tank missile, but I'd be surprised if the shockwave from a teraton nuke could be tamed in the same way. |
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Wouldn't you really need to find something more like a sea-cliff, where there's no equal-and-opposite cliff between bomb and horizon? |
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Yes, yes that sounds better, thanks [pertinax]. I agree that the probablility of being able to do this remains quite low at the moment. |
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It's like waking up the dormant lifeforce in the universe, all very positive and foreward thinking. |
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Wouldn't the explosions need to be outside the atmosphere? |
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Strange category, unless it's actually a
metaphor for getting yourself into a spin. |
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[neutrinos_shadow],surely the non-rotation of the atmosphere would simply give you a gentle East wind (i.e., a wind which, from the point of view of someone standing on the ground, would seem to come from the direction of sunrise). |
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Gentle, but somewhat radioactive. |
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Mmm. I reckon you would just get a big hole too, but we need to get off this rock sooner or later. Be nice to have a place to go. Terraforming is a good start, perhaps a more gentle approach? |
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"...and there we were, planning our hol's to the sunny side, when some massive explosion knocked us off our feet. I'm goin' to get my money back, 'cos now it's only sunny for half the time. Damned inter-galactic do-gooders." |
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[marked-for-deletion] This is bad science. For reasons of conservation of angular momentum, your explosion won't do anything at all. You can't simply create angular momentum with an explosion. It will push on the cliff face, but it will push on the air in the opposite direction as well. Equally. That air will eventually transfer its momentum to the planet, and you'll be back where you started. |
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Or not. If I jump off a small boat, the boat moves. The air around me dosen't whip back around to catch the boat. |
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You, your boat, and the air are not in a closed system. You're pushing the boat precisely because you're leaving it - you go to one side, balancing the movement of the boat to the other. The explosive blast isn't leaving the earth; it stays within the atmosphere. |
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Yes, [jutta]. The warhead casings would go flying! |
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Note that we are using directional explosions. They perfer to explode into the wall, thereby pushing it as the casings go bye bye probably up into space. |
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Also, note that it may be possible to aim the explosions into the surface of the planet at some angle and still impart an overall tangential force. So, we can angle lower into the planet to ensure elimination of the casings. This might be essential as [jutta] points out (something has to leave the planet). |
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//Note that we are using directional explosions.//
Doesn't matter. Even directional explosives don't break the conservation of momentum laws. |
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Besides, explosives aren't as efficient as chemicals with less snap to them. The best way to try this wouldn't involve explosives at all. But I'm not going to try to explain a good way to spin up a planet. I'm just gonna say it's going to take a whole lot more energy than you'd ever think (--look at tidal energy and think in billions of years). |
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Bad method, bad science, bad fish. |
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Earth has taken some awfully big hits in it's lifetime, from meteors, nukes, etc., and the rotation speed hasn't been affected much by any one of them. |
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//Earthlike planets that have little or no rotational motion will produce very little life, if any.// Says who? |
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I was about to ask if anyone had done
the calculation, or was the "few
Teratons"
just plucked out of thin air? The
rotational energy of the Earth (as an
example) is something on the order of
10^22 or 10^23 Joules. So, if you want
to spin an earth-sized planet up to
earth-like speeds, that's how much
energy you need to put in. Strangely
enough, a teraton of TNT is about 0.4 x
10^22J, so a few teratons of TNT would
do nicely. |
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You would have to use that energy to
eject some stuff (maybe an alp or two)
into space, at a tangent to the planet's
surface. Otherwise (as some have
noted), conservation of angular
momentum takes hold and all you ewnd
up with is a non-rotating planet with a
large dent. You'd probably also want to
do this symmetrically on opposite sides
of the planet. |
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It would be quite cool to make the
planet spin north-over-south instead of
east-about-west. |
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Thanks, [MB]. Insightful. |
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[21], the dependence on lifeforms and rotational activity is assumed due to the prevalance of biorhythms and the conditions on earth. A cycle, at some point, is necessary. |
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//The rotational energy of the Earth (as an example) is something on the order of 10^22 or 10^23 Joules.//
According to a calculation on Wikipedia, the figure is roughly 2.6E29 J. (Probably a bit less since they assumed uniform density.) |
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OK, so going with [MaxwellBuchanan]'s explanation, and supposing we're going for conventional rotation (sunrise in the East), we find the eastern side of a mountain and dig a very large L-shaped sapper's mine (first down, then westward), preferably close to existing fault-lines in the rock. |
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Then, we dig some more, to the north and south, getting shallower in each direction, until we have a striped approximation to the cone of a shaped charge. I'm supposing we couldn't make an actual, continuous cone without making the tunnels collapse. |
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Then, we pack the tunnels with nuclear explosives (maybe more in the horizontal tunnels, because of the need to overcome gravity), light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance. |
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If this works, then I suppose it could also give us an extra moon. |
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//The dependence on lifeforms and
rotational activity is assumed due to the
prevalance of biorhythms and the
conditions on earth. A cycle, at some
point, is necessary.// |
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That is, if you'll pardon me saying so, a
circular argument. Big things that live
on the surface or in shallow water have
adapted to day/night because it would
be boorish not to. But most living
things (bacteria) generally don't bother
about diurnal or any other cycles.
Likewise, things that live in the deepths
of the ocean generally don't bother
about night/day or even tidal motions. |
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There's no fundamental reason why you
need diurnal variation for life, other
than to make sure that one face of the
planet doesn't freeze while the other
toasts. |
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Perhaps, but might there be some geological activity arising from the rotation that begets even the deep ocean lifeforms? |
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[daseva] The only thing we are less knowledagble about than life on Earth is life elsewhere in the universe. |
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From experience, the Sun must rise in the East for life to evolve. |
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//Perhaps, but might there be some
geological activity arising from the
rotation that begets even the deep
ocean lifeforms?// Perhaps, but
perhaps not. In the case of Earth, I'm
pretty sure that our rotation doesn't
cause any significant geology. In the
case of places like Europa, tidal forces
caused by its rotation relative to its
parent body, Jupiter, cause massive
tidal forces that probably keep its deep
oceans liquid. But the the tides (both
solar- and lunar-powered) on Earth
aren't all that significant; some life has
had to adapt to them, but that's about
it. |
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1. Drive a post into the ground.
2. To that post attach several hundred thousand miles of carbon fiber nano-rope.
3. Wrap that around the planet a whole bunch of times.
4. Throw those teratons of nukes into a propulsion device attached to a rocket.
5. Light it up.
6. Spin that planet like a top. |
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7. Pull it a little out of orbit in the process. |
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I think it would take a LOT of nukes to do this. I have supplied a <link> where you can impact the earth with different-sized objects at varying speeds and angles. Most produce no effect. |
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Added: I impacted the earth with an object 120 miles in diameter at a velocity of 25 km/s at an angle of 45° and got: |
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Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.23 x 1028 Joules = 5.34 x 10^12 MegaTons TNT |
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The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably. |
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Alright, [klattu], for a given simulation here are my answers: |
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Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
100.00 percent of the Earth is melted
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably. |
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So, melted but not damaged. Ok, I'm sceptical. |
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I'm pleasantly amazed that the energy
needed to melt the earth is much less than
the energy need to alter its rotation. Learn
something new every day. |
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I picked a 5000 mile impactor, and I still didn't get a rotation change. Of course, there was no longer an earth to rotate: "The Earth is completely disrupted by the impact and its debris forms a new asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Venus and Mars." |
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//I picked a 5000 mile impactor, and I still didn't get a rotation change.// |
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Try 2500 mile - 10000 density - 30 km/s - angle 25° - Crystalline impact. You will get rotational changes. It only melts 1/2 the earth. |
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The interesting thing is the mind-boggling yield it takes to efect a change in planet rotation. |
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Be sure to put yourself 10,000 miles from impact. It still won't save you, but:
"Your position is in the region which collapses into the final crater." |
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