this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Definitely easier to read thx

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

Maybe it desintegrated and thus vanished from the consecutive frame?

Atomic blasts are kind of powerful versus an iron lid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago

Man. I haven't seen an ifunny logo in so long. Are people still on it?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Nope, it would just have bursted due to thermal schock and pressure. Escape velocity, what are you dreaming, is the lid made of tungsten?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is the origin apparently.

RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection." Ogle: "How fast did it go?" RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space." Ogle: And how fast is it going?" This last question was more of a shout. Bill liked to have a direct answer to each one of his questions. RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Parker Solar Probe moves 120 miles per second as it passes around the Sun. That's nearly half a million miles per hour!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago

Parker Solar Probe: 191 km per second.

Nuclear Manhole Cover: 55 km per second

Voyager 1: 17 km per second

Voyager 2: 15 km per second

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Ummm, not sure where they got these numbers from but Earth's escape velocity is not 7000mph and escaping the sun's gravitational pull (leaving the solar system from Earth) is not 30,000mph. Respectively the numbers are approximately 25,000mph and 94,000mph. You're welcome.

[–] stephen01king 1 points 13 hours ago

94000mph is relative to the sun's surface. Relative to the Earth's surface, it is around 37000mph, which means they were still wrong.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago

Gotta love Tumblr. Just massive amounts of disinformation and bullshit all the time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's 11.2 km/s and 42.1 km/s.

Also, even if the manhole cover was going at above 12 km/s the trajectory has to be right for that to result in orbit. Most paths it would take would result in it going up and then coming back down again. Similarly, if somehow it did manage more than 50 km/s and wasn't destroyed in the atmosphere, it might have the velocity to escape the sun's gravity, but probably wouldn't be on the right path to do it. Most likely it would fall into the sun.

So, assuming the 125,000 mph (55 km/s) velocity is correct, the most likely outcome is that it was a reverse-meteor, something that burned up going up through the atmosphere, not down. And even if it did have enough speed to get out of the atmosphere, and there was enough of it left, it most likely fell right back down through the atmosphere somewhere else, either burning up on re-entry or hitting the ground (or the water) somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Ignoring that it burned up and ignoring losses due to drag if it somehow didn't. Isn't the point of escape velocity that it explicitly won't come back down.iar least not on earth. Your trajectory won't matter as you have enough velocity to escape the gravity of earth and will orbit the sun. Further if you managed the solar system escape velocity you will end up orbiting the galactic core. Trajectory doesn't matter if you have escape velocity. Correct trajectory just minimizes the delta v needed to reach that escape velocity.

At least that's all my recollection.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Escape velocity means you could stay in orbit. It doesn't guarantee anything if you launch at the wrong angle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 31 minutes ago

That is not the definition of escape velocity. Escape velocity is the minimum velocity to escape a body's gravity well entirely. Orbital is much lower

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Exactly. It's the minimum speed required to get into orbit assuming you get the direction correct. If you launch vertically, you'll almost certainly come back down, no matter how far out into space you go. The only consideration is that if you go far enough out you might be influenced by the gravity of something else like the moon which could change your trajectory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 30 minutes ago

That is not the definition of escape velocity. Escape velocity is the minimum velocity to escape a body's gravity well entirely. Orbital is much lower

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Surprised no one has posted this but Kyle hill made a video on it

[–] [email protected] 136 points 2 days ago (7 children)

This reminds me of that quote from Mass Effect:

"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (...) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!"

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 2 days ago (5 children)

There is one detail wrong in the first post; that is not the lids speed but rather it's minimum speed.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

Unfortunately they got almost everything else wrong though. Mainly - the cover actually almost certainly just vaporiserd.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Notice, children, how the common apostrophe from lid's migrated all the way to its.

Isn't nature amazing?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

How to solve the Three Body Problem.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (25 children)

Ive seen this claim a dozen times. It’s a disc shape. How this thing isn’t going to start flipping and curving its trajectory, or just plain old running out of energy due to air resistance, and not making it out of earth’s atmosphere is beyond me.

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[–] sp3tr4l 39 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Responding to the last comment in the image:

You could literally just do reverse Starship Troopers, the movie at least.

You're a bunch of aliens and blam out of no where the nuclear launched manhole obliterates a holy site on your homeworld, your scientists track the trajectory back to Earth, conclude they must have launched it intentionally, and then launch an interstellar jihad against totally unaware Earthlings.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said ”I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy – now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (5 children)

That reminds drag of Halo, though significantly more silly.

In Halo, the Covenant are on an interstellar crusade for holy artifacts left behind by the Forerunners. When they discovered the planet Harvest, inhabited by humans, they saw tons of artifacts on their scanners. So naturally, they landed on the planet and started blasting the humans to steal the artifacts. But the more humans they killed, the more artifacts disappeared from their monitors. The humans must be destroying the artifacts out of petty spite! What heresy!

The Prophet of Truth is curious about what kind of artifacts the humans have, so he goes to talk to an ancient Forerunner AI they have in storage, Mendicant Bias. Truth shows Bias the symbol that they keep seeing on human worlds. Bias says "You fool, you've got it upside down. Turn it around, see? It says Reclaimer. It means a person the Forerunners have chosen to inherit their empire. You've just been killing these humans? No wonder the reclaimers keep disappearing, you're the one who's doing it!"

So Truth realises that he's been ordering his troops to kill what should rightfully be considered demigods by his religion, and who he should be worshipping. And he realises that if he reveals this information to the people, he and the other Prophets will lose all their political power since there are Actual Fucking Gods walking around. So naturally, Truth declares a Holy Genocide against humanity so that nobody will ever figure out that he's guilty of Deicide and that their entire religious political structure is a lie.

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