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I didn’t see this one: Death by planetary obesity. Kind of the opposite of meticulously deconstructing the planet, instead bring more and more mass to Earth -
by jl6 6y ago
I didn’t see this one:
Death by planetary obesity.
Kind of the opposite of meticulously deconstructing the planet, instead bring more and more mass to Earth - souvenirs, visitors, imports, a few hundred trillion quadrillion kilograms of precious metals... doesn’t matter what, just keep hoarding more and more stuff.
Eventually Earth will either change orbit and sink into the sun, or it will become a sun itself, or it will become a black hole.
- zachrip 6y agoIs this actually possible? We're already dwarfed by other planets that are fine?
- Filligree 6y agoWell, in principle. It wouldn't sink into the sun, unless you use a interstellar lithobraking for all your souvenirs to deliberately do it, but you could perfectly well turn Earth into a black hole that way. Of course it's not very practical, and also it'd turn into a star much earlier in the process, at which point it arguably isn't a planet anymore anyway.
- jacobr1 6y agoAre there any nearer-term concerns? Imagine we have large scale asteroid mining within the next century. Is there a point where the extra-mass matters on any reasonable timescale (hundreds of years) similar to the impact of industrialization with Co2 and climate change? Other odd side effects from landing the material?
- jl6 6y agoNo, no near term concerns at all. It’s a very silly sci-fi scenario. You could smash the mass of Mount Everest into Earth a hundred times a day for a thousand years and it wouldn’t even increase the planet’s mass by 1%.
- ravel-bar-foo 6y agoA piece of extraplanetary mass being brought to Earth only changes the planet's orbit insofar as its orbit on entry to Earth mismatches that of rest of the planet. Furthermore, it will only slow down Earth's orbit if it was initially slower in the orbital direction, which means it would have to originate from the inner solar system. Now, the retrieval of such mass to earth is (physically) an inslastic collision. Inellastic collisions usually dissipate energy, so the thermodynamic problem of overheating the Earth's atmosphere will be an issue before orbital changes or spontaneous nuclear fusion.
- justin66 6y ago> A piece of extraplanetary mass being brought to Earth only changes the planet's orbit insofar as its orbit on entry to Earth mismatches that of rest of the planet. No, the Earth’s orbit would also be affected over time by the altered gravitational relationship with other bodies as a result of its increased mass.
- saagarjha 6y agoAt that point it would cease to be a recognizable “Earth” and be more of a sort of protostar.
- justin66 6y agoJ6 floated an idea like that above, but a less drastic outcome where the earth takes on some very small fraction of one percent of additional mass, and the shape of its orbit merely changes a tiny bit, is also a possibility.
- ravel-bar-foo 6y agoGood point. That's a second-order effect I had not considered. However, orbital mechanics being what it is, that would not result in the Earth "sinking into the sun," which is the claim I was responding to.