Yeah, but propelling them out of the solar system just sounds like the kind of fake-ending that ends up with the super villain coming back stronger in a decade. Have we learnt nothing from science fiction? You have to destroy your foes whilst you can.
From the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList
4: Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
7: When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”
13: All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not Left for Dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.
Man, I haven’t thought of the Evil Overlord List in many, many years. Thanks for that.
The phantom zone ain’t gonna cut it.
Which angel is that?
Going easy on traitors is how Germany gave us WWII.
Sun’s bad then too. Don’t want them Voyage Homeing their way into the past
They can still come back from another parallel reality or some such - villains are like cats, they always come back (unless they are bored and then they don’t).
Yes, one is a final solution, the other is just pushing your problems elsewhere without regard for who else it could affect.
Back when RT wasn’t shit.
Why is that - wouldn’t you be working against solar gravity? Like you don’t have to get them there quickly, just launch them in some orbit that will decay and be taken in?
Because the Earth is really cookin’, and
anythinganyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a highly-eccentric yet stable elliptical orbit.“Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.
(Edit to add: I may have explained this poorly. Basically, if you don’t change your orbital speed at all, any movement you make toward or away from the host body means you just end up in an orbit of the same average distance, but in a more eccentric [elliptical] shape.)
By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.
So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.
That’s a great explanation, thanks! 🙏
So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.
This is true, but the possibility of gravity assists mostly nullifies the difference. If you can get out to Jupiter you can basically choose: either let it sling you out of the system, or let it cancel out all your orbital velocity so you fall into the sun.
That’s assuming all cows are a point on a frictionless 2 dimensional plane.
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you don’t need to hit the sun dead center to be incinerated.
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the sun is huge
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you aren’t in a frictionless environment, your orbit will decay into the sun.
These are all technically correct but fairly inconsequential. Even just to graze the sun you need to lose 90% of your orbital velocity. And although everything orbiting the sun will eventually fall in, the friction is really low. It will take billions of years to lose enough velocity to fall in.
Billions of years and billions of times less energy, would you agree?
If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.
What does engulfing the earth mean to you? The mass of the sun expanded to a body 1 au would not be very dense. My money says the earth would continue to orbit “inside the sun” for quite a while, but the orbit would degrade more quickly.
But yes, I argue get them out of the earths gravity well and let Newton handle the rest, no reason to propel them in any direction, eventually they’ll get to the sun.
If the sun became a red giant tomorrow, and Earth found itself inside the outer layers of solar atmosphere, then drag would start slowing it down. In less than 70,000 years, it would fall close enough to the center to be torn apart by tidal forces like one of Saturn’s moons (assuming it hasn’t already been vaporized).
If we’ve already waited 5 billion years to have our revenge, whats another 70k? The lowest amount of Delta V we can spend on this project is zero.
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That’s the thing - in space, orbits don’t decay. Orbital decay only happens if there’s dust or atmosphere that you bump into along your orbit to slow you down. But in interplanetary space, there’s no dust or atmosphere, and certainly not enough to decay your orbit fast enough to achieve results (otherwise, the Earth would have already decayed and melted in the Sun)
You need to spend fuel to lower your orbit to hit the Sun, and you need to spend fuel to raise your orbit to escape the solar system. It turns out to be really freaking difficult to hit the sun because it simply requires so much fuel to lower your orbit enough to hit the Sun.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space
You are making 2 opposing assumptions there, 1) there is nothing to bump into in outer space, the earth picks up 43 tons of new mass every day.
- the earths orbit would decay, the earth is absolutely massive compared to the amount of mass gained, and also off gasses a significant amount of mass every day.
If orbits don’t decay, why do even high orbit satellites need to make elevation corrections?
If you put a small body into outer space it would absolutely be (slowly) effected by the miasma of particles out there.
And let’s not forget we don’t have a time table for reaching the sun, and we aren’t aiming for the middle of the sun to see results. And as you approach the sun you will bump into more and more particles as they too are being drawn around the sun.
Short answer; the earth is orbiting really fast around the sun.
It’s an easy talking point from the Internet and high school text books, it is disregarding of many actualities of our universe. It would be true if the sun were an infinitely small point on a 2 dimensional plane with a perfect lack of friction.
And while for instantaneous results it would be easier to get something out of the sun’s gravity well rather than hit the exact middle of the sun, practically, if you have time, and you don’t actually need it to hit dead center of the sun, it’s much cheaper and easier to incinerate something proximal to the sun than it is too send it out of the solar system.
Also let’s not forget gravity sling shots work in both directions.
Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun’s gravity well would do the heavy
liftingpulling.If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
That one’s been sitting unplayed in my library for a very long time. I guess it’s time to give it a shot.
Imagine that you’re standing on a train and have a baseball. If you throw the ball off the train, the ball will still have momentum in the direction of the train’s movement.
If you want to throw the ball to a friend the train just passed, you have to be able to throw the ball faster than the train is moving or it will never reach them.
Exceptions do apply, things like near-immortal beings or cursed objects may require the destructive power of a Sun and no less
Well, I guess this applies to me. I say that a lot.
You could always put them in a co-orbit with earth or something and then just use solar sails to provide the delta-v
But I also like the idea of certain peeps having time to understand the error of their ways before slowly falling into the sun faster and faster.
And before some one says “well, there’s still plenty of time for that with a rocket…”
Naw. We’re talking about a truly idiotic person. It’s gonna take them a while,
Wouldn’t shooting them into Jupiter be the easiest?
I’m sure I’ve read a few things about what an impact that big bugger has on trajectories in our solar system.
Intuitively I feel like a push towards Jupiter would be easier than a push to get all the way out of the solar system avoiding Jupiter.
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Any suggestions on modeling software?
KSP
