If I remember right, at the end of Larry Niven’s science fiction novel “World of Ptavvs” an alien who would be able to conquer earth due to his awesome mental powers is “frozen” in a statis suit and sent to the sun at the end of the novel. (It was either the sun or Jupiter, but I’m pretty sure it was the sun.)
No, it was one of the gas giants.
Larry Niven wrote a story called ‘Spirals’ in which the hero figure (when he eventually died) was buried by dropping his coffin into the sun.
The Iron Giant (in the 1968 book by Ted Hughes, not the recent movie inspired by it, which is different although still good) battles the space-bat-angel-dragon in feats of endurance, diving into the sun.
Yup, Kzanol ended up on Jupiter. Rough luck on whoever eventually fishes him out, because he was quite invulnerable inside his statis field and had already passed 1.5x10exp9 years on a continental shelf, and chances are technology would eventually progress to the point where even Jupiter could be explored.
In 2010 the black obelisk was hurled into Jupiter, turning it into a second Earth’s Sun.
Bart and Homer almost were launched into a sun when they boarded a rocket loaded with the likes of Paulie Shore, Tom Arnold, Rossie O’Donell and every other annoying celebrity. The rocket went into the sun but Bart and Homer couldn’t wait that long and ejected into deep space.
At the end of Heinlein’s classic short story “The Long Watch”, the hero’s coffin is sent into the Sun, along with an honor guard of several robotic drone ships. Solar immolation is a common theme, actually, in science fiction funeral and memorial services.
In Asimov (writing as Paul French)'s Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, Starr takes a shortcut across the Solar System by going “through the Sun”, with the aid of a top-of-the-line liquid-hull ship and a Clarkian-magic personal shield given him by the Old Martians. But he only passes through the corona, not the more dense regions.
And there was a pre-1900 story I read once, but can’t remember the title, where the Sun is sent into supernova by a comet colliding with it. I cringed all the while reading it, since in actuality, the Sun eats about a comet a day, and even back then, folks should have known that the Sun wouldn’t in the slightest notice a comet falling into it.
So have any nonfictional things ever been hurled into the sun? Space probes? Spent rocket stages? How hard would it be to crash something into the sun? Is there any real scientific reason to do it?
Getting things to go into the sun is decidedly non-trivial. You’ve got to give them a really big push toward the sun (or a very long soft push) to send them into an elliptical orbit with its apohelion at or below the sun’s surface. And you can’t take straightforward advantage of solar light pressure or anything like that, because it works against you. (I think you can “tack” with solar light pressure, just as you can sail at a close angle to the wind, but it requires good control over your solar sail, and it’s not terrifically efficient. )
In the fictional category, in the Robert Sheckley short story “The Leech” from the 1950s, they originally try to send the “bait” missile into the sun, with the Leech following, until they realize that that’s probably a stupid plan, and they redirect it.
Aside from ceremonial things like cremations, and things like close solar probes, I can’t really see any point in sending things into the sun. If you have garbage disposal in mind, it’s a ridiculously expensive way to do it. And you might want that stuff later (see Heinlein’s “Expanded Universe”). And in most cases, all you really want to do is get the stuff far away from people, somethuing you can achieve much more easily and cheaply by sending it into a different orbit, or attaching to a solar sail and letting it spiral outward by itself.
Most notably, Kosh’s ship flew itself into the sun after his death at the hands (claws?) of the Shadows.
In Airplane II the spaceship is headingh towards the Sun, but they manage to avoid it. The escape pod, however, crashes into the Sun due to premature ejection.
Fictional situation to the contrary: In a certain fantasy world whose name escapes me at the moment, the faeries are asked what they do with the changeling ‘mortal’ children. They flippantly answer that they drop them into the sun. This later turns out to be the case; the sun would’ve died out hundreds of years previously without ‘pure’ souls to feed it. Creepy, but, there you go…
Ray Bradbury’s short story “Rocket Man" tells about an astronaut whose ship crashes into the sun.
The son tells about it and the last line reads:
That story depressed the hell out of me when I was a kid.
Cyrano de Bergerac (yes, the guy with the nose and the sword) wrote a proto-SF novel where he visited the Sun. I suppose, if he had a bumpy landing (it’s been a while since I read it), that might count as crashing.
It actually has to go into the sun? Because in Day of Vengeance, Eclipso (possessing Jean Loring) is teleported to an undecaying orbit around the Sun (the light of which renders him/her/it powerless).
Rama (IIRC)?
Zim launched a chicken into the sun in one episode of Invader Zim, completely freaking out the second chicken who watched the whole thing on a video monitor through the transparent walls of his own launch capsule.
Not sure if Gundam Wing takes place on our Earth (the planet is named Earth, IIRC, and it is an alternate universe as far as Gundam continuity is concerned), but the Gundams are rescued from being fried in the Sun in Endless Waltz.
Only to be blown up at the end, because obviously they weren’t needed anymore.
:rolleyes:
Charlie Tan writes:
Nope. Rama went deep into the gravity well and came close to the sun, but IIRC it was trying to slingshot elsewhere. The exploration ship, too, came nearer the sun than people generally want to, but they didn’t go into the sun, and didn’t want to.
Something similar happened in The Web Between the Worlds in the backstory.
In one of the stories in the Man-Kzin Wars series, a ship inside a stasis field plows into a sun (not Earth’s) just to slow down. The stasis field keeps them alive, although afterwards they learn that the fields they were using didn’t have a 100% success rate.