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It’s a slow death for me, but a fast death for mankind.
Now I’m not some fancy science-man, but I do reckon that an impact of that magnitude would propel massive chunks of Earth debris in every direction at incredible speeds. Odds seem fairly well even that you’d get your own little impact death pretty well soon after.
If you’re lucky.
eh…given the distance and the weird orbits it’s gonna take for the debris to actually hit…a few days probably?
couple of days for the bombardment to hit the surface, and then it’s a game of statistics how long it takes for a direct hit or secondary ejecta to hit your landing site/base.
probably a better idea to take all the fun pills all at once than to wait for that…
actually, you can probably simulate this rather well in universe sandbox! ;)
Yeah no that thing impacted with a lot of speed. Like >1% of the speed of light to go through the entire earth like this. Consequently, the debris is moving very fast as well.
the ejecta themselves would definitely pose a danger, but air supply running out would probably kill you before they impact the moon.
the distance between earth and moon is already significant, the angle shown in the picture is pointing away from the moon, most of the mass would stay in the same place due to gravity pulling everything back together, the orbital path the debris has to take in order to impact is gonna take multiple orbits for most of the debris, and only a fraction will impact on the site pictured.
still dangerous, but not as immediately as one would think.
the only significant projectiles would be a small portion of the debris just off-center from the exit crater (the sort of “cork” shooting out):
- some of that mass would be going the right way
- some of it will be going the right speed to arrive in time before air runs out
- and some of that is gonna rain down roughly in the area the picture was taken at
so it would only be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that even has a chance of coming down onto the astronaut pictured, but that’s still gonna be enough to be dangerous.
it’s also gonna take a couple days to arrive most likely; the debris is not gonna come straight at the moon, because by the time it makes it there, the moon would have moved and it would miss.
a vanishingly small fraction will move fast enough to impact on a (mostly) direct trajectory. those impactors will still take at least a couple hours, even at close to relativistic speeds, and it’ll consist almost entirely of dust and tiny micro meteorites. the fast movers have to be tiny, because anything larger would be torn apart by the acceleration.
(…actually I’m not sure any material apart from more exotic states of matter like nuclear pasta (which doesn’t exist on earth. yes, that’s an actual technical term) could even theoretically be accelerated to a significant fraction of c in the presumably less than a few seconds pictured above without being torn apart at the atomic level…and dense material experiences greater gravitational pull, so it would have a harder time reaching the moon…)
in order to impact, the vast majority of the debris would need to move on parabolic trajectories, and most of those will take multiple orbits in order to impact.
during those orbits, most debris will be pulled back onto earth, or in orbit around earth, since it’s gravitational pull is so much greater than the moons. add another fraction to the ones above ;)
we’re still missing a bunch of considerations, but I’m gonna stop here.
point is: as pictured above (apart from the impactor being impossibly dense) the danger to someone on the moon is mostly manageable and secondary to the danger of supplies running out.
I think at that point you would just take of the helmet.
Is it bad that I would possibly give it a bit?
Like, I’m fucked either way. Who knows, maybe I’ll make it for another sleep cycle, and the last thing I’ll see will be those fragments further scattered. Something pretty, as the liquid in my eyes begins to rapidly boil.
Death by starvation isn’t this person’s fate, is it? I wouldn’t think it would take more than a few days or maybe even hours for the debris to land. I’d just sit there in existential horror while trying enjoying the view, waiting to get taken out instantly by some giant chunk of the mantle landing on my head. Of course that’s mostly because I’d be too afraid of the pain to take off my helmet.
Actually, can you even take one of those helmets off without equalized air pressure or is there a mechanical safety that locks it? If there’s a separate nitrogen tank and you have control over the mixture, just turning off the oxygen would be the way to go.
So, uh, is it a bad sign that I put that much thought into hypothetical ways to kms on the moon?
In this scenario, it would probably be the rational path forward, as you’re in a situation where you’re guaranteed to die either way. So why not make your death as painless as possible?
I dunno… I don’t know how much help they needed from the ground to pilot (I know they needed a lot, but I mean in the case there isn’t any, could they pilot at all?), but if they could manage to get picked up by the guy orbiting it might be interesting to just fly through space for a bit, or even do something super crazy like try to land back on a peice of the earth. Worst case scenario you die crashing into the centre of the earth or something.
So it looks like maybe? But it would be extremely difficult. The suits are internally pressurized and designed for removal when external and internal pressure are closely matched, such as in an airlock.
Depending on which mission this is it could be a lot shorter. The original PLSS backpacks had a two hour air supply. The LM was powered by batteries and could only sustain life for 48-72 hours depending on configuration. If they launch and rendezvous with the orbiting CSM, they can extend their survival by several days, but there’s functionally nowhere to go.
For my money the best way to go is probably in the suit, outside, and let the oxygen run out while the carbon dioxide scrubbers are still working.
I’d be out there until I was floating in a most peculiar way.
My thought exactly
The amount of energy it would take to punch a hole through the Earth would probably be enough to kill you from the moon.
Like just in terms of “bullets” ejected?
probably radiation:
that kind of impact is gonna tear apart a lot of atoms and the energies involved would create high temperature plasma; basically a very big fusion bomb…
“somebody is fucking with me”
The Earth is way too close, and I don’t think a meteor strike on the earth, no matter how energetic, would look like a bullet going through an apple.
You assume this is a meteor strike and not some type of planet killing weapon
Or a moon late for work.
That’s no moon.
Kinetic kill vehicle.
Maybe a piece of very dense matter (neutronium ?), at very high speed (relativistic) could do that ?
I think any matter going fast enough would do that. In the fast going thing’s perspective the earth would basically be just a thin membrane.
Yeah but the projectile itself would also liquefy. Maybe if it was something super dense.
that’s basically chemistry. At relativistic speeds the electrons of the projectile don’t have play a significant role. It’s going to be atomic nuclei hitting atomic nuclei and the time it takes to go through the earth is like two microseconds for the projectile going at ( 1 - 10^-9 ) c. Even that, I suppose, is too long for the particle beam to scatter momentum from fusing with other particles, creating gamma rays, creating exotic particles etc. But we could just always go even closer to c? (on paper)
Well… shit.
I’m Polish, so the same thing I say in any situation: “Kurwa”.
Such a beautiful language.
It means whore.
Literally yes, But it’s more of an f- bomb
Oh, didn’t know that meaning 😁.
But what about the stock market?
To the moon
That triangular dust cloud doesn’t look right.
Yeah, all parts of this image are in an uncanny valley where you can understand how someone thought the image would read a certain way, but then also it doesn’t actually read that way to me at all
The massive mushroom cloud does?
Likely whoever made it didn’t know how this scene would look like.
Try to contact the ship that escaped. The one that was being built in silence under false pretenses by people who knew the planet was screwed, but convinced themselves it was better not to cause riots by informing everyone.
Small chance, but the billionaire investors might want to pick me up as a novelty story, or to make themselves feel like heroes
“This is the SCP foundation, to all survivors give us five minutes.”
Radio static for four and a half minutes
“Okay we are about to do a temporal shift to six minutes ago in a localized portion of space time, 05 council and the Foundation wish you luck.”
Eh, both permanent space habitation as well as generation ships are so comically far out of our reach that any effort to escape would be doomed. All the billionaires would have accomplished is that they’d die slower. Unless we had decades of advanced warning and even then it would be a stretch. Additionally, in the latter case there’s no need to keep it secret. The world is going to end in 50 years just wouldn’t cause as much panic.
Secondly, if you look at the picture, the projectile directly pierces the earth. So it would have to be going extremely fast to accomplish this. So chances are we wouldn’t see it coming to begin with.
Thirdly, this sort of direct hit implies intelligence. So, chances are whatever wants us dead would then follow through to ensure they get any survivors. Or not, as I pointed out earlier, all survivors are screwed either way.
*the general and president walk down the underground corridor
Sir, it’s time to reveal to you where all the real NASA money has been going for the past 60 years.
Wait is that-
Yes, alien tech recovered from Roswell.
That’s not NASA money. NASA doesn’t get any funding. It’s all Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin that have the reverse engineered anti gravity drive.
The stealth coating tech on the G5 fighters is just what they allowed to leak to the public.
That’s not how planetary collisions work.
Earth’s core is a solid ball of iron-nickel alloy as hot as the surface of the sun. Not even a huge asteroid could just go through it and come out the other side.
The ball on the bottom right, is the earth’s core leaving.
BTW, the book Seveneves is worth a read/listen. It covers a scenario of something very very dense passing through the moon.
I like the idea that it hit the core and knocked it out the other side while remaining in place like that one executive desk toy thing. Newton’s cradle? is that what that thing is called.
Someone get Randall Monroe on this image, he’d do the math.
The thing that strikes me…the object hit the earth dead on, on the sunlit side, so the object would have come right out of the Sun or slightly behind. Like it looks like it was about 2 PM where the object hit. So the object would have barely missed the Sun…yesterday or so at the speed it would have to be moving to splat the Earth like a bullet through a melon.
I think to hit that hard it would need to be moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, in which case there would be a tremendous amount of nuclear fusion. Like, probably an exaton blast.
The thing is Randall already kind of did something like this in his “What-if?” which talked about a diamond meteor hitting the earth…
And basically it boils down to: Either Galileo/Newton/whoever was the smart fuck that discovered it was right and the meteor would only create a crater roughly as deep as it was itself. (This if it could touch the core it would be at least the same size as the earth and the picture would look different)
Or it would be going fast enough to ignore most of all that classical physics stuff, phase through most solid material and blow apart every piece of the earth because it would have enough energy to completely overcome the gravitational force holding everything to everything else here on earth.
(Now granted, those were the two extremes and there might just be a perfect balance in between, but I’m sure as hell not going to look for it! At the very least because getting funding for the experiments is seriously difficult for some reason…)
I started that book, because I was super interested in the concept, and I couldn’t continue after a few chapters. The way he writes women seemed very poor to me.
Yeah, his writing of characters is not the best. He does not come across as a people person, so I will give him some leeway.
silently take delight in knowing all my enemies are dead
I mean you’ve got to look for positives, right?
Do people have enemies? That seems exhausting.
Arch nemesis… only Arch users have those.
I’ll tip my Fedora to that.
And my axe
But I use blendOS? What does that mean?
You’re your own worst enemy 🤷…
Thats the curse i guess of being the real chimera of os’s.
I’m your enemy now
I’m your enemy now. I will exhaust you.
Oh no… My stuff!
The economy!
From the looks of it the astronaut was just out of the lunar grocery store starting to walk home for some dinner and down time.
Honestly… It looks like he will have a lot of downtime now.
shit, I didn’t bring enough food
And beer.
