I just want to jump on the bandwagon and say that the whole XKCD "What If?" Series is Phenomenal. I'm quite fond of the one about a mole (quantity) of moles (rodents).

(February 11, 2016 at 10:06 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Even if you manage to boil the earth into vapor, the vaporous earth would still remain gravitationally bound, the RMS velocity of silicon vapor being below the escape velocity of the mass of earth out to the edge of such an rock gas ball.   This was worked out in the Thea collision model, where after the collision with Thea that formed the moon, the earth and Porto-moon was thought to have been encased by a single gravitationally bound, vigorously connecting rock vapor atmosphere that exchanged material between molten surfaces of earth and moon.

The grVitational binding energy of the mass of the earth, and moon, appears to be the threshold to overcome to completely obliterate all traces of the earth with solar energy, not the heat of vaporization of the material of the earth.

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.

(February 12, 2016 at 11:52 pm)Fireball Wrote:

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(February 11, 2016 at 10:06 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Even if you manage to boil the earth into vapor, the vaporous earth would still remain gravitationally bound, the RMS velocity of silicon vapor being below the escape velocity of the mass of earth out to the edge of such an rock gas ball.   This was worked out in the Thea collision model, where after the collision with Thea that formed the moon, the earth and Porto-moon was thought to have been encased by a single gravitationally bound, vigorously connecting rock vapor atmosphere that exchanged material between molten surfaces of earth and moon.

The grVitational binding energy of the mass of the earth, and moon, appears to be the threshold to overcome to completely obliterate all traces of the earth with solar energy, not the heat of vaporization of the material of the earth.

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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...

Whadaya know- it worked.

"A few representative kill-death rays have been drawn"

(February 13, 2016 at 11:42 pm)vorlon13 Wrote:

Hm. My brain tells me that my rooster is more important "because mayo"....

...I haz a weird brain.

maybe display it this way, all scientifical, and as a warning to others?

(February 20, 2016 at 12:58 am)Alex K Wrote: "A few representative kill-death rays have been drawn"

I'm thinking that if one was to make that ellipsoid one foot wide instead of a body of revolution that it would make a really neat saw. Though with the earth rotating, it would be able to cleave it in half.

Here's some Science Porn, get your groove on SH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3FVOIfXW64