Why? It’s the Earth’s gravity that holds the atmosphere here, not the Sun’s.
Why would the atmosphere be flung anywhere? What extra energy are you pumping into the system to help it escape earth’s gravity. Heck the lack of heat should actually help to minimize the loss of hydrogen and helium into space.
On what basis would you make this claim? No population has ever existed which lives predominately underground, and no modern industrial, power generation, or hydroponics equipment has demonstrated anything like the kind of robustness to survive even more than a few dozen years without major overhaul or replacement. And in this scenario, humanity would have a few days at most after the disappearance of the Sun to make arrangements before the Earth’s surface became uninhabitable as heat in the atmosphere and upper surface of the oceans is radiated back out to space.
With regard to atmosphere, there would be an immediate impulse from the loss of the Sun’s gravity that may cause a brief disruption, but there would not be a sustained acceleration. The Earth would retained its protective blanket of nitrogen and oxygen until it began to freeze, likely within a couple of weeks if not sooner, depending on the transmissibility of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere. After that, it would be a barren rock with just a tenuous atmosphere of the light, low temperature gases with a thin crust of liquid and then frozen oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water ice.
Stranger
Yes of course. Brain idiocy, quick fingers.
This is what happens when you check SD before morning pee, let alone coffee and cigarette, and decide to have a thought.
Nobody’s had to.
The video linked above says it would take a week for the average temp to reach freezing, and -70C after one year.
Clearly, there would be a massive die-off. But it’s just (barely) possible that a lucky few might be able to put together some kind of survival station.
However, you’re right that unless we’re prepared for it, it’s hard to see how anyone could manage it. My guess is that as soon as everyone realizes what’s happened, it’ll be a free-for-all, and previous wealth will be pretty much meaningless. It would be difficult to build a survival station in those circumstances.
So, unless someone has already presaged the disaster and built a sun-free survival station, we might just be out of luck. Then again, it’s easy to underestimate the power of the survival instinct.
Regardless, Rotorua NZ might be one of the nicer places to be. Just about everyone has geothermal heating and hot tub.
Where would you want to be when the time comes?
I was arguing against the claim that at the exact point the air freezes, humans will be extinct.
I used the word could because I am making no claim of my own.
Well, there’s little reason for us in the current world to make machinery robust enough to last centuries. Because even if it didn’t wear out in that time, we’d likely want to upgrade or enhance it within decades.
But in most industries, where there is a need for longevity, as one of the top requirements, robustness can be improved by an order of magnitude or more. IMO this wouldn’t be different.
But secondly, I’m talking about sustaining a small population, say a few thousand. For that, you don’t even need power generation to sustain them for thousands of years; a means of storing fuel is sufficient. And/or you can have redundancy, so you are using gubbins1 to generate power now, and there are 50 more gubbins encased in amber, or whatever, in case gubbins1 becomes unrepairable.
I don’t know what a “gubbins” is or why you would encase one “in amber, or whater” but the largest and longest a truely self-sustained habitat has been practically (if imperfectly) demonstrated was eight people for two years (Biosphere2), which largely proved to be an object lesson of just how difficult system dynamics are in a closed environment. Even an order of magnitude improvement in system robustness would not sustain a population of a few thousand people for centuries or millenia, notwithstanding having to replace all of the energy provided by the Sun with some artificial source. This claim, which you are making despite protest to the contrary, is not feasible with any extant technology or substantiated with any compable existance or credible analysis.
Stranger
I think Mijin is describing a City Of Ember type scenario - an enclave with stored power and spare parts to keep going as long as possible (but not indefinitely).
I think it most likely that if the sun disappeared, humanity would destroy itself in the mad scramble for resources enough to stay alive for another day, and even if a sufficiently-stocked bunker was prepared, something unforeseen would go wrong a few months or years down the line and everyone in there would perish. Technically possible, but in practice, unlikely to succeed.
The longest “an enclave with stored power and spare parts” could conceivable survive is a few months inest case scenario. The notion of a sealed habitat with thousands of people surviving for millenia is the stuff of science fiction with no practical basis in reality with any extant technology.
Stranger
Like I said it (the Sun disappearing with a short time frame) would have to breach some nice property of the physical description. That could be breaching the local conservation of energy. My point is though that whatever condition breached would somehow affect your ability to predict the outcome (in the case of the local conservation of energy it would breach some fundamental assumptions of general relativity).
However what the local conservation of energy in GR doesn’t allow you to do is to sum the energy over massive bodies such as the Sun-Earth system and expect it to be conserved, unless special conditions exist. The energy of gravitational waves doesn’t count towards the local conservation of energy because it cannot be described locally.
Is not gravity an inseparable property of the sun’s matter? So if you ‘blink out’ the sun would you also need to ‘blink’ out the gravity simultaneously?
Now if you had a wormhole with one end placed in the sun and another end someplace far far away such that the mass was spilling through? well IDK.
The amber thing was joking, obviously. I’m talking about putting spare equipment into long-term storage.
Well in this sense what I just described is not a closed system; I mentioned for example just storing enough fuel upfront for the habitat.
Remember, I’m not saying this is what will happen, or even that it’s likely. I was replying to an absolute prediction of, paraphrasing “…then the last of the humans die as the air freezes”.
Well, it’s one of those hypotheticals where we need to either ignore some known physics or postulate new physical phenomena, so whether we can draw that conclusion is basically a matter of personal choice. Most people’s interpretation of the OP though is that general relativity and causality need to be preserved, so blinking out 1AU of gravity waves instantly is a no-no.
Wait a sec, if we instantaneously blink out the sun we have already violated it, then we can also account for blinking out the effect of gravity instantaneously, and that would not even be a second instance of violation, but just part of the first one.
So if the blinking out is instant then the gravity would also be instant, if the blinking out is propagated at the SoL then we may expect gravity to do the same.
I refer you to the sentence before the one you quoted.
Basically, Have it your way[sup]TM[/sup]
Just saying most other people here have gone with a different interpretation, and have largely been consistent with each other. But your’s is just as wrong/right as any other.
If one assumes magic, then one can assume anything, since it’s not clear what the rules of the magic are. This is why I prefer to keep my fantasies non-magical. For instance, we could instead of instantly vanishing the Sun, instead divide it into two pieces, connect the pieces with an incredible spring, and set the pieces bouncing back and forth towards and away from each other. This would obviously not be as dramatic as vanishing the whole thing, but it would still produce changes in the gravitational field. How long would it take for those changes to be felt? A little over 8 minutes, the same as for changes in light.
I said exactly that in the part you didn’t quote.
Hmm…like a suspended slinky? But that has nothing to do with the/a field, only the internal material processes and forces of a spring. Or does that work out the same way?
It’s not so much that I’m proud I thought of that in OP, but that the TM got to see it happen in real time. As it is born, Leo’s thoughts on a half shell.
ETA: to Chronos above.
Actually I came on to mention in the survival/extinction debate the following example, which frankly I’m surprised hasn’t been adduced yet (if adduced is the word I want): The Mole People. But after generations we, like them, may develop a fatal aversion to the Sun.
Then where would we be?
It does have something to do with the field, in that the gravitational field of two masses held a distance apart is different from the gravitational field of the same two masses close together. It’s a small and subtle difference, of course, but unfortunately that’s the most overt change we can make to a gravitational field without invoking magic.
Mars is eager to go on a voyagé through space.
Mars need swimmin’.
There is no conceivable way of “putting spare equipment into long-term storage” and expect it to be operable for centuries or millennia. Lubricants will disconsolidate and solidify; metal surfaces will corrode or bond together, polymers will sublimate and break down; fuels will evaporate or absorb water, et cetera. And the notion that you will be able to provision for thousands of people for centuries without having to recycle is absurd, nor can you expect to be able to recycle for hundreds (or even dozens) of years without access to external resources and energy sources is not even remotely realistic. We often take for granted how much of the energy that drives our world–that is to say, the solar energy which grows crops and the hydrological cycle that purifies and moves water over thousands of miles–but to replace this source of energy in a closed system is almost inconceivable without at least having achieved efficient controlled nuclear fusion, which is twenty-five years away and has been so for about the last fifty years.
Setting aside the social difficulties of maintaining order in this constrained group of people for centuries, just the physical maintenance and logistics make this problem irresolvable with extant technology.
Stranger