Posted on 08/05/2009 8:58:53 AM PDT by rjsimmon
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot.
All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I would prefer running the air conditioner longer.
I don’t see any possible problems with this scheme.
/sarc
LOL!!!
This idea has been around for awhile. And the nothing would actually collide with the Earth (If all goes as planned.).
Let me see if I can figure this out: the people who wrote Obama’s healthcare bill are now running the space program, too.
“The sun is destined to heat up in about a billion years and so ‘seriously compromise’ our biosphere - by frying us.”
THERES NO TIME TO WASTE, WE MUST ACT NOW!!!!
Oh yeah.
This’ll work.
We are actually spending money on the salaries of absolute idiots who dream up stupid stuff like this??
I guess it won’t make any difference anyway, we are now rushing headlong into a period of extreme cold weather that will have us all shivering in our boots.
whoopsie!
I love this plan. I'm excited to be a part of it. Lets do it!
Won’t work. Algore promised me that it is the evil car in my driveway - not the Mr. Fusion In The Sky (known colloquially as the Sun) - that is causing the Earth to warm.
I feel very sad that part of my paycheck went to this.
Ok, i know we arent supposed to advocate violence. But *if* i know who is going to ALTER THE ORBIT OF THE EARTH, i say they have to be stopped.
I am under the quaint understanding that our orbit is critical to our survival. It would be an act of self defense. An earth that is 200 below zero, or 145 degrees would really suck. The arrogance of changing earths orbit is truly stunning.
I’ve been working on this for sometime now........on a freelance basis.
These guys tried it -- Global warming was the least of the concerns...
It's time to disband NASA.
ML/NJ
That has to be about the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Isn’t that like shooting your nose off so you can “move” it?
How stupid are these people? Don’t they know that objects the size of a comets big enough hitting earth would likely KILL everything ON earth? Damn, seriously there are some stupid people out there.
I hope they hit my neighbor's house. That guy always plays his stereo too loud.
-PJ
If you read the article they are talking about one billion years from now when the sun will expand and fry the earth. They say if Earth can then be moved further out, the planet (us) could survive an additional 6 billion years.
They were NOT talking about global warming.
They also recognized the dangers and difficulties of the move, but at that time the alternative will be Earth destroyed.
At least the hunt for ManBearPig would be over.
This is a stupid idea for very many reasons but I doubt they intend to actually hit the earth. We can talk about unintended consequences later.
What they are talking about is a problem in celestial mechanics. Consider the following picture: 
What they want to do is pass objects close in front of the earth in its orbital path so that the gravitational attraction of the object speeds up the earth. If the earth speeds up, it will move to a wider orbit around the sun.
The two biggest of many problems with this are:
1. How do they find and maneuver large comets, many of which are outside the orbit of Neptune? They will have to find several earth masses worth of comets to accomplish even a few meters per second of increased orbital velocity. This might move the earth one earth diameter farther out. I haven't had time to do the math.
2. How do they direct these comets with incredible precision to accomplish the gravitational tug without hitting the earth?
There would be one side benefit of this program. We would see some spectacular meteor showers from the dust trails of the comets for centuries to come.
A bigger problem would be that this plan would perturb the orbit of the moon. It would NOT strip it away as stated in the article. The moon does not orbit the earth. The earth and the moon orbit a common point about 2/3 of the way from the center of the earth to the surface. You can't do just one thing when you play around with gravity. Any comet passing near the earth affects both the earth and the moon.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I have read the article, that is why I posted it.
The crux of the argument was the arrogance of the scientific community believing they can control something on a planetary scale, specifically where it involves orbital mechanics. The math is simple enough, but the devil is in the details:
Remember, these are the same 'scientists' that buried a Martian probe a couple of hundred feet into the Martian soil because someone neglected to convert Miles to Kilometers.
The 'global warming' piece is the ultimate singing of Earth by Sol when she decides to grow up. I have heard that yellow stars do that, eventually becoming red giants...
A couple of small nits to pick:
1-The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 91 times that of Earth. An atmospheric probe that was sent was crushed.
2-No moon (tidal necessity)
3-Exceptionally weak magnetic field
Ummm... that’s a really crazy idea... :-)
Even trickier would be finding the right bacteria that could survive in that hostile environment.
When you are done using the asteroid for "nudging" Venus around, you park in a rather low orbit around Venus, and voila! You have a moon to generate some tidal action.
The math for this is fascinating. What would be the required mass and velocity to move Venus to a sustainable, higher orbit? What would be the ramifications of moving the planet to a higher orbit, but not increasing the speed of orbit? Would Venus end up in too eratic an orbit to sustain its place in the solar system? What would that do the remaining inner planets?
Well, 3 things are possible here:
(a) For small colonies, we create artificial magnetic fields locally, to protect the folks from radiation.
Talk about power generation! How many Gigawatts would that take?
(b) Since we have "spun up" Venus to a 24 hour (or so) rotational speed, we might find that the core of the planet will start generating a magnetic field like the Earth.
Number and size of comets required??? The number of trips to the Kuiper Belt would exhaust the resources of Earth. Or, would we just wait for strays???
(c) If the "moon" we park around the planet is sufficiently massive, tidal effects might help start some "core" sloshing around in Venus, to stimulate magnetic field production.
We would need some new oceans. But then, if we chose the right bacteria, oxygen and hydrogen creation could be the proper by-product. Any of those little bugs floating around???
Uh, they are discussing a problem that needs to be addressed ONE BILLION years from now and they acknowledged all the risks. It will not be the same scientists.
However, when I said if you read the article I was not directing that at you just to anyone that read the headline and not the article.
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One thing you need to keep in mind regarding any ideas of terraforming Venus is that Sagan’s “super greenhouse(TM)” theory is a bunch of bullshit. Venus is basically hot because it’s a fairly new planet which simply hasn’t had time to cool off. There’s likely nothing we could possibly do that would cool it in any sort of a hurry.
Lost in the vast quantum spaces between their ears, for sure.
please allow some editorializing . . .
The arrogance of changing earths orbit is truly
[mind bogglingly, galactically, infinitely, off the scale stupidly, terminally cluelessly, retchedly dumbly, horrendously brainlessly, . . . ]
stunning.
” If the earth speeds up, it will move to a wider orbit around the sun. “
Too fast and not enough for escape velocity only results in a elliptical orbit. Way close then way far away from the sun. Burn & Freeze, burn then freeze.
Or, if you're libertarian, you get Atlas to shrug.
Cheers!
And to think I felt silly when I put my wisdom tooth under my pillow...
That’s helpful; I was planning on taking the next week off.
Even if you tried to it would be difficult to accentuate the ellipse.
As for doing it too fast, that is not going to happen. You would have to pass many thousands of very large comets near the earth to have any noticeable effect. I would be far more worried about getting a calculation wrong or picking the wrong comet or asteroid so that the pull of the earth's orbit puts it into a short term earth crossing orbit. Or worse, causes it to break up and hit the earth like buckshot.
All of this isn't going to happen but it is an interesting academic exercise for mathematicians, engineers and other math literate people.
There are three types of people in the world, those that understand math and those that don't.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
>> One thing you need to keep in mind regarding any ideas of terraforming Venus is that Sagan’s “super greenhouse(TM)” theory is a bunch of bullshit. Venus is basically hot because it’s a fairly new planet which simply hasn’t had time to cool off. There’s likely nothing we could possibly do that would cool it in any sort of a hurry. <<
Venus is hot because of the lack of tectonic plates, the planet builds up so much heat in it’s core that it resurfaces itself every 500 million years or so. There is no tectonic movement to subduct or release carbon. So every 500 million years the planet builds up so much internal heat that it resurfaces itself and resales all of the pent up gasses in the crust. Too much at once and it covers the planet in a big blanket.
The best plan I have seen for colonizing Venus is to make floating cities in which the “lifting gas” in an Oxygen/Nitrogen mix. you build more and more floating cities as you process the atmosphere into something more habitable and even use mass drivers to toss off the excess gasses. Within a few thousand years the cities touch down on the planet and it has a breathable atmosphere.
Venus is very likely no more than about 10K years old, tops. Best book on the topic is still Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision”. Venus is the main thing which keeps me from being a young Earth creationist since the Earth and Mars don’t look like Venus at all and have to be significantly older.
zero science
That’s like “playing pool with planets.” I’ll do it!
Could you imagine the pool cue?
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