Except that both Earth and Venus would start pulling each other apart once they were within a few thousand miles of each other. Planets are not billiard balls.
No problem. You just shift Venus into position using one of ‘Doc’ Smith’s hyperspecial tubes; it pops out into real space at the exit of the tube.
I recall that the Lensmen used a variant of this to destroy the planet of the evil Eich.
Two planets with opposing velocities materialised on either side… they called it the ‘nutcracker’…
Since each planet is rotating on its axis, there would be a lot of English on the shot.
If it’s rotating, how can you guarantee it hitting England?!?
That’s something that bothers TF out of me with a lot of bad sci fi. When a nearby celestial object causes objects on Earth to get pulled into space (examples include Moonfall and 3 Body Problem). Gravity is a function of mass and distance. Any object massive enough and close enough to Earth (or an Earth-like planet) to pull objects into the sky is going to tear the planet apart.
In 3 Body, doesn’t that happen only in a (very fancy) video game?
ETA: A game that has people who instantly “dehydrate” in the sun and then rehydrate when tossed in water with no apparent harm.
Yes, in 3-Body Problem that happens in a virtual reality video game, not reality. It’s a poor example of the trope.
I haven’t read the books, but from my limited understanding when one of the Trisolaris planets got too close to a sun(s) it was pulled apart, you didn’t just have people falling upwards, which is much more in line with reality.
Spoiler alert:
Summary
As it happens, if they’re following the books, the Trisolarans can dehydrate, much like taridgrades here on Earth but they also aren’t much bigger than Earth tardigrades and not, like in the game, quasi-humans.
In the show they specifically state that they present themselves as humans in the game but that’s not their true appearance. Wade also makes a throwaway comment that they need to figure out if their ships are “the size of cities or of thimbles”.
So it sounds like due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire Trisolaran fleet has a high likelihood of being eaten by a small dog.
Well, that falls under the definition ‘pretty impressive antigravity effects’. Perhaps a planetary-mass black hole would be slightly less destructive, especially if it just travels past at orbital speed. An Earth-mass black hole would be about a centimetre across. A relatively narrow path of destruction, perhaps a new accretion disk around the black hole, and gone.
An Earth-mass black hole would still have the same gravity as Earth; it would have a 1-G pull at a distance of ~4000 miles. It’s just that a black hole you can get much closer to it so the gravitational effects become even stronger.
Plus, of course, the infamous spaghettification effect where you’re close enough to the black hole that the distance difference between your head and your feet is great enough that you get torn apart.
Precisely. An Earth-mass black hole could pass over the surface of Earth at a distance of 2000 miles, and its gravity would overcome Earth’s gravity over an entire hemisphere. Impressive antigravity effects indeed. The material pulled from the surface of Earth would form an impressive accretion disk around the black hole, although some of it would fall into the tiny event horizon and increase the blackhole’s mass.
True, but I thought the game was based on the actual environment of the Trisolaran’s planet. Sometimes it gets too hot. Sometimes it’s freezing cold. Sometimes the suns line up and the combined gravity pulls everyone and everything off the planet (which it wouldn’t because the planet would get pulled with you).
I saw nothing in the show to indicate that the VR game was any more realistic than, say, World of Warcraft or Guild Wars or Final Fantasy.
Since 3 Body Problem has been brought up and my wife and I just finished watching the series…
I have problems (no pun intended) with most of the physics as depicted in the series. Frankly, that aspect is crap. But the concept of the sophons probably bothers me the most. It apparently takes “millions of years” and a huge amount of energy for the aliens to “unfold” the dimensions of a single proton (though they apparently make two of them), modify it to be a super-computer, and then shrink it back to the size of a proton so it can be sent to Earth at near-light speeds. I get it. But how does a sophon have the ability to affect anything once it is on Earth? It’s a positively-charged elementary nuclear particle. It’s smaller than the wave-length of visible light. It has no means of self-propulsion. Does it have to “unfold” its higher dimensions to function? How does it do that by itself when it took such a long and elaborate process to do it originally? How can it even emit a single photon to interact with the macro world?
I just don’t get it.
You don’t get it because it is a steaming pile of crap.
Dang. Missed that thread entirely. They are correct.
Crud…I’m responsible, directly or indirectly, for the previous three posts. But I won’t let that deter me.
Just watched an episode of “Rebel Moon” and found it really bothered me that the blaster/ray-guns/phasers fire a beam that doesn’t usually align with the weapon’s axis. If you slow the action down, it becomes painfully obvious that the CGI people just drew a line from the front of each weapon to its intended target…wherever that may be. The protagonist can be pointing the weapon three meters to the left and slightly above her opponent and the visible beam obligingly veers over to wound the guy.
I know this is done in a lot of movies and series, but it is really, really noticeable in “Rebel Moon.”
I think, as alluded to in that linked thread, the depiction of scientists in fiction such as The Three-Body Problem is problematic and plays into a lot of misconceptions.
IRL scientists are delighted to discover a new phenomena, or just data that doesn’t fit the predictions. Depicting them as dismayed reminds me of the “Grandma finds simple remedy for arthritis; doctors are furious!” memes.
And how quickly some new observation makes scientists throw their hands up and declare “Everything that we thought we knew was wrong!”. “Everything that we thought we knew” was based on making accurate predictions and inferences. It’s not getting thrown away overnight due to finding something additional.
It plays into the “What the bleep do we know” narrative.
The GIJoe movie had very, very little to recommend it, but one particular nadir is when character literally says, “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in love.”