(February 12, 2016 at 11:52 pm)Fireball Wrote:
The beauty of using an enclosing ellipsoid of revolution with the sun and the earth at the foci is that it would never make it so that the earth's centroid moved in any way, as it would be uniformly heated, thus no net force would be impressed. The originally posed system with a sphere and a tube WOULD impart a thrust on the Earth from the Sun's radiation, both from differential heating thrust and some amount of "solar sail" effect. I will say that it will be a first-order calculation, as a number of considerations would be neglected. I'll do the math for the energy delivered, but I won't add in the acceleration for the earth-moon system, for example. I don't have that kind of computational power available to me. I'll also provide a list of things that were not considered in this analysis. If somebody beats me to it, that's OK.
I am gonna go ahead and hypothesize that no one's going to beat you to it...
How will we know, when the morning comes, we are still human? - 2D
Don't worry, my friend. If this be the end, then so shall it be.
Don't worry, my friend. If this be the end, then so shall it be.