A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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Wouldn't shooting them into Jupiter be the easiest?
I'm sure I've read a few things about what an impact that big bugger has on trajectories in our solar system.
Intuitively I feel like a push towards Jupiter would be easier than a push to get all the way out of the solar system avoiding Jupiter.
I think I'd rather be launched into the sun over Jupiter. The sun you die pretty quickly as you get closer to it. I can't imagine there's much that could stop heat once you get past Mercury. Jupiter though? Jupiter is fucking spooky. Its core is hot like any molten core, but there's no crust. You'd fall through the sky and just keep falling for hundreds of miles. You'd eventually die from the heat like you would with the sun, but you wouldn't be able to see anything. At some point all you can see is goop. It's like being underwater in the Mariana Trench, but the water is nitrogen, metallic hydrogen, and liquid silicone.
If the idea is to be rid of the person completely, we don't need to fire them into the sun. Or launch them out of the solar system. They don't even need to reach earth escape velocity.
Just launch them at the sun. Use whatever method you like. Just get them high enough that after gravity starts to overpower acceleration, there is no chance for survival. Boom! No more person. For the most part.
Just launch lots of tiny bits of processed earth at them super fast. More propellant efficient and you don't have to worry that they might have packed a parachute.
You'd still be moving some 30km/s around the sun, and need to decelerate from that speed.
Does the velocity of the earth around the sun enter into it if the projectile doesn't come anywhere close to leaving earth's gravitational pull? When I said "at the sun" it was just a direction. A gesture towards the spirit of the original "into the sun." They won't reach it. They'll just be a splat mark [insert parabola math here]-ish meters away.
New slogan: Launch all billionaires straight up into the air using one of those circus cannons
Launch them into Betelgeuse instead. It's a bigger target anyway.
If we're going for a bigger target, let's go all out and aim for Stephenson 2-18. Go big or go home!
how much to put them into a space suit and a car, strap them to a rocket and then fire them into orbit around Mars ?
More than Elon had, apparently.
Can a solar sail be used to put a craft into the sun?
That's an interesting question. A regular sail can sail into the wind, but they have a triangular sail, and a keel with water resistance. I don't think any of those things exist in space, so I'm going to guess no. Perhaps some sort of high efficiency propellant keel could make it possible?
My intuition would say no, but to be honest, I don't understand the physics of either solar or watercraft sails.
Exceptions do apply, things like near-immortal beings or cursed objects may require the destructive power of a Sun and no less
You could always put them in a co-orbit with earth or something and then just use solar sails to provide the delta-v
But I also like the idea of certain peeps having time to understand the error of their ways before slowly falling into the sun faster and faster.
And before some one says “well, there’s still plenty of time for that with a rocket…”
Naw. We’re talking about a truly idiotic person. It’s gonna take them a while,