Stupid misprint: It was suppose to say “million”, not “billion”.
Kubrick insisted on shooting on location, and Saturn was just too far away.
“We have found a cheap and easy way to transform a glass of common water into an atomic device equal to the greatest bomb ever known to Man! Any questions?”
“Why??”
I don’t know, I think most conspiracy theories have some sort of answer to the ‘why’, however ridiculously implausible.
The Moon landing being a hoax? That’s an easy ‘why’; we wanted to win the space race against the USSR and keep them intimidated with our faked technological superiority.
9/11 an inside job? The ‘why’ is that the US government wanted an excuse to go to war with Middle eastern nations. Never mind having to believe that our own government would murder several thousand of its own citizens to do so.
The Earth is flat? OK, you got me there on the ‘why’. Scientists from the time of Aristotle have been saying the Earth was round based on empirical observation. Why would anybody lie about the Earth being flat if it actually were, and why would generations of people continuously lie about it over several thousand years?
Quite.
But the real reason behind all of them is simple: Their adherents are paranoid or have delusions of persecution so of course there are lots of plots out there whose sole motivation and purpose is to harm me and ordinary people like me. “Bad for me” is all the motivation any shadowy force could possibly need to justify the untold billions of dollars of secret expenses.
As to thermostats, etc., and using all very rounded numbers …
Jupiter is 2% the mass required to self-ignite as a star. Saturn is 0.5%.
If we magick away that trifling obstacle & light them off anyhow it goes something like this …
I figure energy output ought to be proportional to mass. (Warning: this is a highly suspect assumption.) Jupiter masses 0.1% = 1/1000 of the Sun. So Jupiter-star should have 1/1000 the energy output.
As stated upthread, Earth is always 93M = 1 AU miles from the sun. Earth-to-Jupiter varies between 350M and 600M miles. Or 4AU to 7AU.
Energy falls off at the square of the distance. So compared to the insolation from Sol, the injupiteration from Jupiter should be on the order of 1/16,000 to 1/48,000 as much. Meanwhile, over the 11 year sunspot cycle, Sol’s irradiance varies 0.1%.
Bottom line: the existence of Jupiter-star would a rounding error. Saturn being both smaller and farther away would have even less impact if lit up.
All the best CTs are both wildly expensive and utterly pointless.
I think the “why” is dangerous for almost any Non-political CT’er. For those sorts, just being in possession of “secret knowledge” is the drug to which they’re addicted. They don’t care why, it’s the ability to know they’re special and you’re NOT that is the main drive.
FOr Project Lucifer (and I’ve heard it come up in places that talk about stupid CTs/OOPart theory/etc) I find it in two flavors. The first, like flat earther’s, is all about knowing about secret plans, because someone is sharing secret knowledge that the rest of us plebs will never know. But they’re normally the minority.
The majority are all part of the vaguely political (not always RWNJ for the record!) CT theories that “they” (The US Gov’t, The Jews, The Oil Companies, etc) could do this thing that would magically make things better for the rest of us, but don’t want to because it would magically make things better for the rest of us.
IE the “they” are the enemy, and bringing up their unspeakable power proves how awesome they are for knowing the secret knowledge. Which excuses everything wrong in their lives, because they’re the tiny David fighting against the Great Goliath in the search for… whatever. Probably money and an unearned respect for their insanity.
In Stargate SG-1, turning Jupiter into a sun would feed the world population by producing longer periods of light to grow crops.
Flatearther: “Whaddaya mean, ‘why?’ Just look at those fields out there -flatter’n a pancake! Any fool can tell the Earth is flat! Heck, if it were some stupid ball all the people and stuff would fall off the other side!”
What if it’s Disc?
Inject stable muons into Saturn’s core and figure out how to prevent the “alpha sticking problem” where muons become attached to alpha particle (helium nuclei) products. Depending on of the core density and muon concentration this could potentially catalyze proton-proton and proton-deuteron fusion in the form of the original pre-Pons & Fleishmann “cold fusion”. If you can do this, there are some people in Sweden who’d like to take you to dinner. Bonus points if you do it in a cave with a box of scraps, and use it to power your flying armor suit.
As for the impact of a Saturn-Sun; Saturn has a surface area that is more than 150 times less than the Sun, and at closest approach to Earth is 8 times the distance. So even assuming the same radiation spectrum as the Sun (and no physical changes to diameter or density of Saturn), the total radiance of “Saturnlight” on Earth would be an increase of something less than 0.01% (a factor of 1x10-4). Although it would make Saturn a very bright point in contrast to the other planets, the total insolance would be about a thousand times less than a full moon, so it wouldn’t even create shadows visible to the human eye, much less impact the climate of the Earth.
Stranger
Thanks for that. Would Jupiter also not make much starlight in the Earth sky?
Though in the Arthur C Clarke story, I think the idea was that turning Jupiter into a star made some of its moons potentially habitable.
I have called the flat-earth the underpants gnomes of CTs.
- Convince the world earth is a globe
- ???
- Profit!
For a lot of them it ties back to the Bible being inerrant and it doesn’t say anything about a round earth but rather the corners of the world and the sky as a dome over it.
But you can’t call a secret conspiratorial project to blow up Saturn Project Lucifer. You need a random codename like Project Border Collie— keep them guessing. Bonus if it’s a weird name so you can surveil and potentially eliminate anyone searching for the phrase.
Indeed:
By the same logic, Jupiter would have ~0.06% of the insolation of sunlight. Still not enough to cast shadows.
Another thing that should be considered is that the Sun produces a near-blackbody spectrum because the high energy gamma rays that are emitted by the fusion processes are iteratively absorbed and reradiated as they pass through the opaque layers below the photosphere for many tens of thousands of years. Saturn is much less dense than the Sun (the mean density is less than water) and depending on how deep fusion is occurring the spectrum is likely to peak in the the far ultraviolet and maybe even emitting X-rays. The density of Jupiter is more comparable to the Sun but the radius is about a tenth of the Sun; the emission spectrum will likely be closer to that of the Sun but may still peak in the ultraviolet. So both may look more blue/violet, the details would depend upon the rates of fusion and resulting flux of photons. Neither would likely provide a suitable environment for life as we know it, but they’d basically look like very bright spots in the twilight or night sky, and might be visible during a clear day.
Stranger
I have nothing useful to say on the topic, but according to Wikipedia, today is Raël’s 78th birthday.
I don’t think Raëlians are interested in Project Lucifer, but I thought it was an interesting coincidence. (And of course, conspiracy theorists never believe in coincidences.)
I’d like to see the NASA funding meeting where they are like “yeah we are going need funding to create a entire freaking sun, you know for reasons. In the next financial quarter we estimate this will cost a BAZILLION dollars. Oh and we’ll need to keep it completely secret, so we’ve budgeted 10% of that to run the completely airtight cover up that includes every single media outlet except for one random crazy dude with a geocities site. But on the positive side we have a kickass codename!”
“Excuse me, citizen? Could you just step into this….oh wait. You said Border Collie, not Lolly. Never mind, carry on. I was never here.”
This is something I’ve seen over and over. Carl Sagan used to warn us about having so many people who don’t understand the basics of science and logic was leading us down this path.
Some idjit doesn’t understand a chunk of science. Solution? Find a CT that debunks science, really glom onto it and now that idjit “knows” they are smarter than scientists.
I remember seeing a clip of a flat-earther woman. She pointed out that if the Earth is flat then why don’t the people in Australia fall off? She then beamed a 1000 watt smug smile.
(And why is it Australia? Why don’t they point out that Canadians are equally at risk of falling off? N. American snobbism wins again.)
I feel this is it.
There are two ways to be smarter than other people.
One way is to spend years and years learning things. But that’s hard work. And even if you try, there’s always going to be other people who’ve learned more than you have.
The other way is to reject all knowledge as fake. That puts everyone who spent those years learning things at zero knowledge because everything they learned is wrong. Now you learn one thing, like that the world is secretly being run by a society of invisible werewolves. You now know more than everyone else.