[rescue] Energy

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, May 8, 2002 at 13:02:41 (-0700), Fogg, James wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [rescue] Energy
>
> ~ I'd rather get rid of it by burning it in our Sun rather than 
> ~ risk my 7
> ~ or 70'th generation relatives eventually tripping over it out there
> ~ somewhere.....
> 
> Considering that we don't *really+totally* understand what transpires in the
> sun, I would be very nervous about sending anything, even a Q-tip, into the
> sun. That 7th generation will never be born if we snuff out the suns "fire".

Considering things of all kinds of things, and things completely out of
our control, and things much bigger than we could possibly control today
anyway, fall into the Sun every day, I don't think you or I or any of
our 700'th generation relatives could ever toss anything in there that
would ever effect the working of the Sun.  It's really not possible for
humans now or in even in the most remotely possible of forseeable
futures to affect the operation of any star.

Maybe you've been overly brainwashed by the anti-NUKE weirdos and you're
worried about the side effects of something with the word "nuclear" in
it?  Don't worry.  Anything we can do the Sun does better and faster and
on what we would consider to be an almost infinitely larger scale.

Like I said, you really could probably push the entire Earth into the
Sun (gently), with all its current nuclear waste, un-mined radioactive
elements, and even all the current nuclear reactors running on
over-drive and ready to go critical, and it really wouldn't make any
more difference than a baby peeing in the ocean.  You could probably
even simultaneous blow up all the nuclear weapons all of mankind could
build in a thousand years using the local planet and asteriod resources
and still not manage to trigger a flare as large as a real one.  The
scales are just too huge -- we don't need to know how the bloody thing
works because we are too tiny and insignificant to affect its working.

Well, OK, maybe it might not be "safe" to introduce the whole Earth into
the Sun at once, but the Sun's mass is over 333,000 times that of the
Earth, so it would still be only the smallest "dent" and would
undoutably sink to the core and have its atoms reduced to their
component parts in (on stellar terms) a relatively short time.  I
haven't worked out the differences in density, but the Sun is over 108
times the diameter of the Earth, so in terms of surface area the Earth
would only appear as a tiny dot right up against it.  Like I said
before, I don't think you'd even see it as a Sun-spot from this orbit.

>From some web pages I'm sure you can find with Google:


      The Sun is a normal G2 star, one of more than 100 billion stars in
   our galaxy.

         diameter:    1,390,000 km.
         mass:        1.989e30 kg
         temperature: 5800 K (surface)
                      15,600,000 K (core)

      The Sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It
   contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System
   (Jupiter contains most of the rest).

      The Sun's energy output (3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion
   billion megawatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each
   second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about
   695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of
   energy in the form of gamma rays.



      Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the fifth largest:

         orbit:    149,600,000 km (1.00 AU) from Sun
         diameter: 12,756.3 km
         mass:     5.972e24 kg


Hmmmm.... I never thought of it this way before, but it seems we're only
about 100 times further from the Sun's core than its surface is!  ;-)
(assuming our orbit is calculated from its centre, not its surface)

Maybe someday if we learn some magical way to control matter and energy
without using pure brute force like we do now then we might be able to
do something good or bad to any star the size of our Sun, but if that
comes to pass the we really will be Masters Of The Universe!  Think of
the Star Wars "Death Star" -- but on a scale big enough to affect a real
star.  Not really bloody likely in any forseeable future though.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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