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What would be a realistic mitigation strategy if a massive one was on collision course with earth? Besides changing earth's trajectory
by kekebo 4y ago
What would be a realistic mitigation strategy if a massive one was on collision course with earth? Besides changing earth's trajectory
- nwallin 4y agoThe least unrealistic mitigation strategy would be to colonize Mars. Note that even a near miss will cause a significant perturbation to orbits in the solar system. It's likely that a black hole passing through the solar system and not hitting anything would still render life on Earth impossible.
- ericbarrett 4y agoEarth even with massive temperature swings from today (due to wacky orbit or whatever) I think Earth would still be more hospitable than Mars. It has a magnetic field and a moon and lots of water. If all the life has died, and the atmosphere has frozen or boiled off, well, you're still no worse off than Mars, and you've still got that magnetic field and aquifers and petrochemicals to get back to space eventually.
- gpm 4y agoEarth has active plate tectonics, volcanism, hurricanes/tornadoes (with enough mass in them to destroy things), land slides, floods, lightning, and maybe worst of all other humans. If we're living in a closed-ish habitat anyways, I think Mars might even manage to be easier (provided there was a critical mass of humans living on it). It seems like the only unpredictable natural disasters there are dust storms. Especially if you consider that any post apocalyptic habitat scenario is going to leave a lot of people out, and they aren't going to be peaceful about that during the transition.
- generalizations 4y agoSeveneves is a novel that uses a similar black hole event as part of the story's setup.
- spaetzleesser 4y agoI thought they never explained why the moon broke up.
- generalizations 4y agoMicro black hole was explicitly mentioned as a possible cause, though you're right: the author also said the cause didn't matter. The crevasse in the core was associated with the path of whatever object caused the damage.
- spartanatreyu 4y agoLooking at black holes with known mass ranges: the realistic mitigation strategy would be to just to leave the Solar System. Even if a black hole missed the Earth, just flying through the Solar System would be enough to completely disrupt all planetary orbits. Any mitigation strategy to alter the course of the black hole itself would require so much mass/energy to the point that we'd be making our own black holes for the purpose of space travel, so the Solar System wouldn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things anyway. ------------------------------------ But as we look at smaller and smaller black holes outside known mass ranges (e.g. primordial black holes, artificial black holes, etc...), things start to change. A black hole with the mass of anywhere smaller than a star to the mass of a planet is more or less still going to result in the same effects as a stellar mass black hole. A dwarf planet mass black hole on a collision course with Earth would destroy Earth. If we knew it was coming say a 400-1000 years in advance, we may be able to accelerate a large asteroid into it resulting in a different trajectory for the black hole causing it to miss the Earth, but the tidal forces would still rip the Earth apart or at least send it into a different orbit. An asteroid mass black hole would strike the Earth causing a massive amount of gamma radiation cooking everything on the surface as it entered the Earth's atmosphere only for it to continue through the planet, emerging on the other side with another bout of radiation cooking before continuing off to shoot back out into space. It would be about the same as two small moons crashing on either side of the Earth. A tennis ball mass black hole going close to the speed of light would go right through the Earth without too much fuss. The black hole's radius would be too small (smaller than an electron) to cause any damage. Edit: Added "going close to the speed of light" to the tennis ball mass black hole explanation. If it was not going fast to the speed of light, the black hole would evaporate before it could travel through the Earth. The evaporation would probably also cause so much heat it would cook the planet.
- spideymans 4y agoExcuse me if this is a silly questions, but you got my imagination going. >A tennis ball mass black hole would go right through the Earth without too much fuss. The black hole's radius would be too small (smaller than an electron) to cause any damage. Is it possible that tiny black holes of this size could be travelling through the earth at a regular basis? Do we have the means to reliably detect black holes that small?
- patentatt 4y agoNow I'm a imagining a science fiction weapon: the black hole trebuchet. Just launch a small black hole at your enemies planetary system and they're doomed one way or the other. If the gravitational signature is too much of a dead giveaway, then launch two from exactly opposite sides and their force will cancel out - until they collide in what I imagine would produce a catastrophic explosion and either blow up or consume the enemies host star.
- behnamoh 4y agoJeez man, peace in space!
- ars 4y ago> from exactly opposite sides and their force will cancel out The gravitational force will only cancel out exactly in the center. Everywhere else, for example other planets, and when the Earth orbits, will easily detect the gravity. > or consume the enemies host star. It would take an infinite amount of time to do that, time dilation near black holes is intense.
- dylan604 4y agoThis would take some intense pre-planning. So since you obviously can't capture a black hole to launch into a trebuchet, you'd have to do it to the original star before it collapses. Then time the launch so there's enough time for the collapse to occur during travel. You'd want to back up that launch time well before "just before collapsing" as the star's surface will have expanded to just be a tad bit unruly to handle. Better to grab it before that last bit of expansion just to keep things a bit easier to handle
- hinkley 4y agoDavid Brin uses this in one of his books, playing a bit with some of the same kinds of ideas that gave us the Dark Forest theory as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox: intelligent species are out there, but nobody wants to be spotted because they’ll be killed preemptively.
- bawolff 4y agoCommiting suicide? I think there is literally nothing we could do given our current technology level.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoThe same strategy as if a massive star was on a collision course with earth. Namely, kiss your butt goodbye. But it's not likely to happen. There's nothing magically destructive about a black hole. The free-floating ones in our galaxy have masses comparable to stars, and they have exactly the same gravitational effects as stars. If we found one within a few light-years of Earth, the only effect on us would be a bunch of ecstatic astronomers. The rest of us would (or rather, should) just call it Tuesday.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoDepends on the mass of that black hole. In most cases we would be screwed.