Online devastation calculator

[Karlos]

I wonder, just out of curiosity, if you had a material that would heat without shattering and ablate in a controlled fashion as it traversed the atmosphere, what sort of initial size/velocity a chunk of it would have to be to land as a sufficiently aerobraked harmless pebble...

[KennyR]

Or what about a chunk of degenerate iron from a stellar core? Melts at 120,000K, weighs a tonne per cubic centimetre...or more. That would make a nice little hole, even a pebble of it.

[Karlos]

@Kenny

Dude, you solved the martian terraforming problem :-D

We should hit mars with a steady stream of sharpened degenerate iron projectiles that will sink to the core and increase its mass enough to give it a decent gravitational pull :-P

-edit-

Im sure we mused over this material before. I really don't think you could have a pebble sized chunk of it. It probably only exists when there is enough pressure to form it and requires some sort of critical mass to continue existing in absence of the forces that created it. The internuclear repulsion would easily overcome gravity unless you had a stonking big hunk of the stuff.

[blobrana]

@Karlos
Hum,
How about dark matter?
Most of this exist  as a `halo` around our galaxy but some would have collected  within large gravitational objects (er, like stars, or our sun)...
They wouldn`t really react with anything there, being WIMPS*,  but would interact gravitationally...

If you could collect enough wimps an inject them into the Martian core, then you would increase the gravity of Mars...




[WIMP = weakly interactive massive particle]

[KennyR]

Blobrana wrote:
If you could collect enough wimps an inject them into the Martian core, then you would increase the gravity of Mars...

But how would you hold them in, if they go straight through normal baryonic matter? ;-)

[blobrana]

Doh!





Oh !
Er, by creating a small black-hole (bigger gravitational well) and `fishing` for them in the sun...?

[Karlos]

KennyR wrote:

Blobrana wrote:
If you could collect enough wimps an inject them into the Martian core, then you would increase the gravity of Mars...

But how would you hold them in, if they go straight through normal baryonic matter? ;-)

Surely they'd just oscillate about the common centre of gravity and gradually come to rest at the centre, right?

I mean, you plop into mars at one point, it sinks trhough, accelerating towards the core. Once it hits the core its moving at its maximum speed and as if flies out the other side it will be decelerating again.

No matter how weakly they interact I doubt they'd travel trhrough an entire planetary mass without some kinetic energy lost to other processes somewhere.

[KennyR]

Karlos wrote:
Surely they'd just oscillate about the common centre of gravity and gradually come to rest at the centre, right?

Sure they would. Except the common centre of gravity would be the Sun or Jupiter, not Mars.

No matter how weakly they interact I doubt they'd travel trhrough an entire planetary mass without some kinetic energy lost to other processes somewhere.

Why not? A neutrino can travel through 35 light years of dense matter and not interact, and WIMPs interact even less.

[Karlos]

I thought we were working on the assumption we'd fished them out of the sun?

Or you are implying theyd just drift all the way back to the sun as the solar systems centre of mass?

Degenerate iron shells it is then :lol:

[blobrana]

Yep,
we've fished them out of the sun.
And they would orbit around with mars...

[yes, this solar system is unstable and eventually they , and mars, would be swallowed by the sun or flung out into deep space]



the only problem is how to get rid of the black-hole... (evaporating only leave nothing, me thinks)

[Karlos]

Aye, you sure don't wanna leave a black hole lying unattended in the sun's vicinity.

Ever read the Night's Dawn Trilogy? A doomsday superweapon called "the alchemist" is in the second book, based on the principal of creating an intense gravity well sufficent to create an event horizon, or just crush surrounding matter to neutronium depending on the setting. When it does get used (albeit fired into a poor unsuspecting gas giant), the imagery described is awesome :-)

[blobrana]

@Karlos
No never read the book...

hum, the  warping of space , as an alternative to using a black hole  (messy), would be a better solution....


Er, now all we have to do is discover 25^th century physics...or perhaps some alien artifact... :-)

[Karlos]

blobrana wrote:

@Karlos
No never read the book...

Aww. Your'e missing out. I read the whole trilogy a few times and enjoyed it just as much each time around. All the people I know who read it enjoyed it, I'm sure you would too :-D

hum, the  warping of space , as an alternative to using a black hole  (messy), would be a better solution....

Plenty of that goes on too. Living, organic, sentient spacecraft (voidhawks and blackhawks) warp space to create wormholes for travelling, whereas conventional (that is technological) spacecraft create a massive space warp around their hulls to squeeze themselves out of the universe at one point and back into it somewhere else.

Er, now all we have to do is discover 25^th century physics...or perhaps some alien artifact... :-)

Well, the story begins in 2583 or so in a universe where mankind has populated some 800 star systems, but the main story starts in 2611 or something.

Read it, you know you want to :-D

[bloodline]

Read it, you know you want to

But does she still want some friction burns?

[KennyR]

Wrap yourself in velcro and lunge at her some dark night.