You know how in cartoons one character will hit another character and the character will fly into the moon or space? Well, I want to know if this would be possible in real life. Could a person really hit someone in a way that the person hit could fly to the moon? I think any punch with sufficient force would more likely destroy the person being hit or the person hitting would have their hand fly right through the person being hit. So providing the person hitting can create an incredibly forceful punch, could the person send someone flying into the moon?
Instantaneously(or nearly so) imparting sufficient energy to any object to get it out of earth’s atmosphere would vapourise it.
And the recoil of punching that hard would send the puncher flying backwards with equal force.
The military has experimented with using very large guns to launch payloads into orbit. That’s the closest thing to punching someone into space you’ll find in real life. That method can’t be used for launching manned craft, or anything even remotely fragile, due to the extremely high G forces needed to accelerate the payload to orbital velocity in a space of a few hundred feet.
You also can’t put something into orbit with just a single blow starting at ground level. You can put something into an escape trajectory that leaves the planet entierly, but for a stable orbit that doesn’t intersect the ground you’ll need a rocket or second blast to circularize the orbit once the payload reaches its maximum altitude.
sigh
You were the person asking about the feasibility of Superman turning back time by flying round the earth. Gonk?
Yeah, well, the Rachel Summers Phoenix punched Nova to the moon. Nova was pretty impressed.
I stop laughing at this line!! The OP is so absurd and your response was so sublime. Wonderful!
Er…I CAN’T stop laughing at this line.
It helps to imagine the reverse action, a person falling from space to the ground and stopping suddenly on impact. Let’s set aside atmospheric effects for a moment and consider the no-air to slow or burn up case.
The person on impact quickly becomes a very nice flash and a decent size hole in the ground. Ergo, reversing the process would have to impart so much energy that you wouldn’t want to be standing within 100yds of them.
Now bring the atmosphere back in. A falling person hits thin upper atmosphere and would turn into a crisp. The rising person would be going faster initially and be in dense air. Crisp would be an understatement at the speeds we’re talking about (assuming they could survive the initial blast).
Note that the guns mentioned in AndrewL’s post accelerate over the length of the barrel. Ditto rail guns. Much lower g forces (like 20 or so.) But they still must be streamlined and shielded to avoid burning up and plans are to place them at high elevations to reduce overall drag.
“It wud be possibul if you hit the person rooollly, roooolly hard”
[sub]Well according to a 3 year old that I asked, anyway[/sub]
Escape velocity is about 25,000 miles an hour from the surface of the earth. Assuming no air resistance, and that a punch lasts for 1/10 of a second, you’d need to accelerate the guy at 111760 m/s^2. (This is actually getting into relativistic equations, but I don’t feel like doing that.) I was playing around with how much power that would take, and didn’t finish, because it just got silly.
Goku could probably do it.
The punch, not the calculation.
Oh, not hardly. But it is easier if you think of how much energy you have to impart. That’s equal to the potential energy at the surface - GMm/R, or 2.9828×10[sup]13[/sup] J (assuming m = 78.2436 kg). Power = energy / time, so the total power is 2.9828×10[sup]14[/sup] W, or 4.0000×10[sup]11[/sup] horsepower. (Would you look at that? It worked out so nicely.)
For some reason I was thinking that level of acceleration would get you to 1/3 the speed of light in 1 second, instead of 1/3000th c. Freakin’ powers of 10. Forget I said anything about that.
It could work, if you got one of those humungous boxing gloves, I think the Acme Co. still makes them.
People can be punched hard enough that they go back in time. Mark Twain wrote a book about it. Interesting stuff…
Jules Verne wrote about shooting someone to the moon in From the Earth to the Moon. It woulsdn’t vaporize the capsule )in fact, that’s one of the points argued in the book). It would turn everyone inside into red jelly. I suspect that Verne was aware of that, but chose to overlook it so that he’d have a decent story. His calculations and research is, in the main, pretty good. By the time he got to the second sequel,m The Purchase of the North Pole, he realized that his calculations revealed how absurdly unreal his proposed scheme was, so he said so in the book.
Edward Everett Hale had an artificial satellite launched into orbit with a catapult in The Brick Moon, the first story about an artificial satellite (according to Sam Moscowitz). I copied the story from its original source. It’s pretty impressive – the satellite is launched into a geosynch earth orbit as a navigation aid, and it’s made of ceramic to avoid heating problems on launch (!). In the sequel, he even has a manned satellite.