Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Carl on March 17, 2005, 09:03:11 am
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4357613.stm
:shaking:
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So then, it will slowly suck Earth into it, growing bigger and then finally consuming everything in our solar system? Great. :no:
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I'm somewhat amused that they're not sure - "What do you mean, you think you have a black hole in your office?!"
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sounds like something humans would do.
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did they shut it off?:nervous:
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It lasted billionth of a second and then disappeared again. As long as you're careful with them quantum black holes are actually quite a good energy source. Feed them matter and they spit out gamma rays. Much better than anti-matter because you only need one black hole. No need to go through a produce-destroy cycle (Which suffers from the fact that it takes more energy to make anti-matter than we get out of it anyway).
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Look at it this way, if they ever screw up and we end up in a black hole we'll never know.
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kara, that may be true, but it's a good way of storing and transporting energy from one place to another.
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How wide must a black hole's event horizon be for it being a threat? I have a feeling that small black holes vanish pretty quickly.
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it's not about volume, it's about mass (although the two are directly linked) it needs to have enough mass to have gravity suficent to pull in nearby matter at a rate faster than it evaporates, a black hole with the mass of one atom isn't going to last very long.
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Yep. This thing is tiny. The world isn't going to go spinning into oblivion from it any time soon.
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wohoooooooot everlasting power source ... if we get to make a bigger PS :) just feed it matter and you get powah as long as you can contain the PS :)
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now if we start getting into makeing mini black holes we realy need to be doing it on the moon or something, so we don't end up with our planet crushed into a marble sized speck.
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bob .... if we make a big blob .... it wont matter if its on jupiter since it will still anahilate earth with it massive gravimetric shear
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Originally posted by Janos
How wide must a black hole's event horizon be for it being a threat?
anything greater than zero. what really matters is how much matter is nearby (and how close it is) during it's lifetime.
a black hole with the mass of a bowling ball will have the same gravity as a bowling ball: not much. however, the difference is that since the black hole is a point source of gravity, if you put your hand inside the radius of a bowling ball away from it, instead of the gravity pull your hand outward like a bowling ball would if you put your hand in it, the black hole's effect will increase exponentially as your hand gets closer to the center. If it gets close enough, it'll gobble it up. of course, your whole hand won't be able to fit in such a tiny space, but the atoms in your hand that are close enough will. this then increases the mass, which increases the gravity, which increases the effective range, which means it'll eat more, which increases the mass, ad infinitum.
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oh dont foget the temporal displacement
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Originally posted by Ashrak
bob .... if we make a big blob .... it wont matter if its on jupiter since it will still anahilate earth with it massive gravimetric shear
yes becase it'll magicly make more mass than the moon has
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Bob is right, if we do it on the moon, we might loose the moon and have a black hole with the moons mass in its place, but the only true effect is that it looks like the moon is gone.
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Yep. Wouldn't even change things like the tides etc most likely.
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pardon my stupidity ... but dont black holes .... like move?
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Yeah...but so does the moon.
If the moon was sucked up by a tiny black hole, it would probably circle Earth exactly like the moon does now.
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and keep sucking up whatever gets close dus get bigger etc? :)
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Does the moon collide with the earth?
No.
Then a black hole with the mass of the moon will act the exact same as the moon.
Mass!=volume. For stuff like orbits, only mass matters. Yeah, and volume once you start having things so close that the surfaces intersect, but that's very rare. If the mass stays constant, then the orbit remains constant. (Not completely true, but in this case, yes).
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Originally posted by Ashrak
and keep sucking up whatever gets close dus get bigger etc? :)
yes, but no more than the moon would.
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Originally posted by Ashrak
and keep sucking up whatever gets close dus get bigger etc? :)
The moon is in a vacuum. What exactly is it going to suck up? I don't think that solar wind is going to result in any enormous changes in mass on anything other than a geological scale.
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(http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/clangers/images/clangers1.jpg)
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I'm sure some smart ass would try to use such a black hole to dump various kinds of waste...
The human civilization can surely kill itself by confusing a black hole with an unlimited recicle bin ;)
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On the bright side, if this is true then the "naked singularity" theory has been proven false. Meaning that when the black hole exposes its singularity after it has evaporated the universe gets fried.
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What?
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Soooo... who's read Hyperion?
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So you're telling me that if the moon was replaced by a black hole with the same mass as the moon, nothing would really change?
Science may be on your side, but my common sense rebels against such a conclusion. Its just so...wierd.
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
Soooo... who's read Hyperion?
First thought that crossed my mind when I saw this thread.
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Originally posted by Rictor
So you're telling me that if the moon was replaced by a black hole with the same mass as the moon, nothing would really change?
Science may be on your side, but my common sense rebels against such a conclusion. Its just so...wierd.
Absolutely no difference except that it would be darker at night. :)
Every other effect the moon has on the Earth is a due to gravity. Gravity is a function of mass and the distance from the center of that mass. Since neither of those two have changed you couldn't possibly notice any change unless you went closer to the new centre of mass than the radius of the moon. Only then you would start to notice a difference.
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Well that, and no more werewolves. Which I think everyone can agree would be a big relief.
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I prefer not living a few million k from a singularity though, I sleep easier at night knowing it's the moon and not singularity, in fact ;)
It's all very clever and groundbreaking, but other than a way of rendering material beyond the realms of recycling and remove it from Earths resources permanently, what purpose does it serve?
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It could be the ultimate military weapon. Why bomb a country when you can just suck it out of existance? XD
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Well, wasn't the point of the 'Gay Gas' to make it suck itself out of existence? :nervous:
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Originally posted by Rictor
So you're telling me that if the moon was replaced by a black hole with the same mass as the moon, nothing would really change?
Science may be on your side, but my common sense rebels against such a conclusion. Its just so...wierd.
There was a short story written about this not too long ago (1999). Next time you're in the library, look for "How We Lost the Moon" by Paul J. McAuley in any of the recent science fiction collections. It's quite entertaining... reads rather like Douglas Adams. :)
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Originally posted by karajorma
It lasted billionth of a second and then disappeared again. As long as you're careful with them quantum black holes are actually quite a good energy source. Feed them matter and they spit out gamma rays. Much better than anti-matter because you only need one black hole. No need to go through a produce-destroy cycle (Which suffers from the fact that it takes more energy to make anti-matter than we get out of it anyway).
Actually it was a million, billion, billionth of a second, that's a REALLY short time.
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Anyone read "The Compleat McAndrew" by Charles Sheffield? Rather interesting way to use black holes in that book....
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I'm trying to think up a practical use for this but can't.
Fireworks maybe?
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famous last words in science
hmmm. uh.. oh
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Originally posted by karajorma
Absolutely no difference except that it would be darker at night. :)
Every other effect the moon has on the Earth is a due to gravity. Gravity is a function of mass and the distance from the center of that mass. Since neither of those two have changed you couldn't possibly notice any change unless you went closer to the new centre of mass than the radius of the moon. Only then you would start to notice a difference.
Yup. It's all about F=G(m1*m2)/d^2. :)
Along these lines, the idea of the gravity of any object, including the Earth, "pulling" something into it is really a misnomer. Gravity doesn't work that way. The only way an object can be "sucked into" any celestial body is if their paths of motion intersect. Provided an object is moving faster than Earth's escape velocity, flying close to Earth will produce nothing more than an unbound orbit, the so-called "slingshot effect" that has been used to allow space probes to reach distant planets in less time. In the case of a black hole, provided you're outside that event horizon and moving faster than the escape velocity, you can orbit it for eternity. Heck, the center of our own galaxy is a supermassive black hole, and it's not exactly sucking us all into it, is it? :p
This "microsingularity" is really cool stuff; it has a ton of potential in the realm of quantum physics. It'll be interesting to hear about what else they find out about it.
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now I just wish they'd hurry up and try to determine the mass of that damned Higgs Bosen particle, that's when all sorts of neat stuff will start to happen...
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Oh, you havent' heard?
They did, its a little over 2 pounds.
Turns out they just had to put it on a scale, rather that doing all sorts of fancy tests and ****.
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Black Hole in a Can.
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you don't know what the Higgs Bosen particle is do you?
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of course I do!
what do you take me for, some sort of common peasant?
Voila! ("http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/hst/2000/activ/higgs/higgs.htm")
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no, not boson, Bosen....
errrehh...god damnit, I've draged this out too long, now it isn't funny... thanks alot Rictor, you killed my joke... my suble reference to obscure sci-fi ruined, yeah sure other people make some hhgttg reference, everyone laughs, all your base, gold, but I try a little Lexx and flop, no funny here, why do I even bother!
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Well ****, I'm on the next rocket off this planet. Lets hope this doesn't summon the Combine.
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I'm sorry I killed your joke. I'll make it up to you later ;7 ;7
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Originally posted by karajorma
The moon is in a vacuum. What exactly is it going to suck up? I don't think that solar wind is going to result in any enormous changes in mass on anything other than a geological scale.
What about space dust, asteroids but, more importantly, light?
The physics of a black hole have always been said to be weird. I'm pretty sure it would change a whole lot of things if you switched the moon with a black hole of equivalent mass. Like hell it would nicely orbit around the earth like the moon does. Anyway, I regard this as the same as antimatter in particle accelerators: funny, they do that from time to time, it's probaly very interesting when you're in that field, but it's only just that: a tiny, super-short lived thing which the very existence can be proven by some after-effetcs records. We're far from the doomsday weapon :p
Btw, I've read Hyperion a few years ago, but I don't remember anything about blackholes, my most vivid memories are of a chick with skinfitting liquid metal armor :p
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Originally posted by Nico
What about space dust, asteroids but, more importantly, light?
I didn't say that the moon wouldn't get heavier. Just that it's not going to get heavier much quicker than it currently does. As for light well from E=mc^2 it's obvious that you need a hell of a lot of light to make even the smallest amount of mass.
BTW just out of interest what happens if two black holes collide into each other? Do you just get one bigger black hole?
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Originally posted by karajorma
I didn't say that the moon wouldn't get heavier. Just that it's not going to get heavier much quicker than it currently does. As for light well from E=mc^2 it's obvious that you need a hell of a lot of light to make even the smallest amount of mass.
BTW just out of interest what happens if two black holes collide into each other? Do you just get one bigger black hole?
well im sorry but what about all the other **** in space .... the stellar matter that the sun spits out and oh ... the sun makes a helliva lot of light :)
2 black holes collide into eachother hmm betcha they will be binary black holes :)
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That's called solar wind. I already mentioned it. The moon is getting heavier right now. My point is simply that if you replace the moon with a black hole it's going to take a long time for any difference in the rate at which that mass is increasing to have any effect in the slightest.
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Originally posted by karajorma
BTW just out of interest what happens if two black holes collide into each other? Do you just get one bigger black hole?
Dunno, but I've read somethng interesting that Einstein, I think, wrote, about blackholes being one of the only instances where 1+1 is inferior to 2 when you add their mass. Makes you wonder if a black hole eating up the moon would actually end up having the same mass, btw.
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Part of the matter would be converted in energy, hence the total is inferior than the sum of the parts in terms of mass.
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yeah, it would actualy sudgest that it would gain mass slower.
now if you got close to it you'd be prety screwed, it's a little ball of death with a fairly decent force of attraction, think about the sort of navigational hazerd that would be, small black about the size of a pea everything within a million miles is drawen to it, and if you don't pay atention and you fly into it, you and your ship suddenly vanish, if someone was watchng maybe they'd see s small explosion or your ship getting riped apart, but if you were close enough to touch it the gravitational effects would be very intinse.
but we being all these millions of miles away here on earth wouldn't notice a thing.
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Originally posted by Ashrak
well im sorry but what about all the other **** in space .... the stellar matter that the sun spits out and oh ... the sun makes a helliva lot of light :)
I don't think you quite understand how much light we're talking about here. If you took the light coming from one 60 watt light bulb and shined it into a black hole, it would take 27 million years to increase it's mass by one gram. and that's not counting the mass that gets lost by the whole 1+1 < 2 thing.
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Originally posted by Bobboau
yeah, it would actualy sudgest that it would gain mass slower.
now if you got close to it you'd be prety screwed, it's a little ball of death with a fairly decent force of attraction, think about the sort of navigational hazerd that would be, small black about the size of a pea everything within a million miles is drawen to it, and if you don't pay atention and you fly into it, you and your ship suddenly vanish, if someone was watchng maybe they'd see s small explosion or your ship getting riped apart, but if you were close enough to touch it the gravitational effects would be very intinse.
but we being all these millions of miles away here on earth wouldn't notice a thing.
Would they even see that? (I'm wondering if the black-hole would simply suck up the light before it could reach the observer...)
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well what bugs me is the fact that it spits out gamma rays when it touches matter ... so when a moon goes we all get fryed by gamma fiered from the black hole which is sucking up the moon and wouldnt it take 100's of years to suck up all the stuff .... the bigger the mass the slower time moves iirc?
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If a black hole sucked up the moon, it wouldn't be the same size, probably still tiny in volume. Ecllipses would be quite interesting to see, as light would be bent and sucked up rather than blocked.
Not sure on the amount of gamma radiation that it gives off, but still thats what the Earth atmosphere is for. :D
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The thing is, you could give Tony Blair a sense of responsibility to his electrorate for one ten billionth of a second, but would it make any difference?
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Originally posted by Carl
I don't think you quite understand how much light we're talking about here. If you took the light coming from one 60 watt light bulb and shined it into a black hole, it would take 27 million years to increase it's mass by one gram. and that's not counting the mass that gets lost by the whole 1+1 < 2 thing.
Photons have inertial mass but no gravitational mass (http://www.tardyon.de/mirror/hooft/hooft.htm), so I doubt a black hole can gain gravitational mass by sucking up photons.
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Only if Blair spits out hawking radiation meanwhile.
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Well, what was that movie where they killed the bad guy by wishing she had a heart? I think it was Krull?
Either way, I think the outcome would be something like that ;)
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Originally posted by Flipside
Well, what was that movie where they killed the bad guy by wishing she had a heart? I think it was Krull?
I curse you for bringing back memories of a movie, that I hoped I had buried deep in my subconciousness....
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It's best that you let it out now and deal with the pain, else you get a strange urge to kick people for no reason as you get older ;)
It's like those other sources of shame, Labyrinth, He-Man and, of course, the deepest of them all, The Care Bear Movie....
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Originally posted by Flipside
The Care Bear Movie....
AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Actually, I think I still have a blue Care Bear up in the loft - we keep it chained to the wall and feed it fish-heads.
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hehehehe, you should try and convert it to the Dark Side ;)
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Originally posted by Flipside
hehehehe, you should try and convert it to the Dark Side ;)
I'm wondering if I can get it to attack me at full-moon.
Then I could become a Were-Care-Bear.
(boom *tish*!)
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Btw, I've read Hyperion a few years ago, but I don't remember anything about blackholes, my most vivid memories are of a chick with skinfitting liquid metal armor
In Hyperion, the Earth, known as Old Earth, was destroyed when a contained singularity grew out of control and began gradually eating the planet over many years. The event was known as the Big Mistake.
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
Big Mistake.
No ****, Sherlock?
:D
However, I grow interested in this 'chick with skinfitting liquid metal armor'..........
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If you're interested I would highly recommend those books. Their scope is beautifully immense and is conveyed with great poetic prowess, and they're filled to the brim with allegory that inspires a sense of awe I've never found in anything else I've read. They're almost too intricate to digest.
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Actually, given the fact that Luna is actually getting farther from Earth, and the whole 1+1<2 thing associated with black holes, we'd probably end up losing the Moon Black Hole. Hopefully it wouldn't hit Jupiter or the Sun...
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why would it matter if it hit jupiter?
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Jupiter has quite a bit of mass, and quite a few moons. Probably wouldn't be a good thing. Also the fact that it would go through the asteroid belt, and possibly hit Mars along the way.
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Well, admittedly, theres a lot more space out there than planet, but nonetheless, turning your satellite into a singularity is, regardless of the energy gain, something that is usually dreamed up by degree students round a bong one evening.
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Originally posted by Flipside
Labyrinth
You don't like Labyrinth! Jim Hensen puppets, David Bowie score, choreography by TNG's Beverly Crusher and a jailbait Jennifer Connelly? What's wrong with you man!
You'll be telling me you didn't like The Princess Bride next or something.
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Well, I will actually admit to watching it occasionally still, but Dark Crystal was just so much better :)
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That was a cool film too. :)
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Dark Crystal, Princess Bride and Labyrinth were some of my favorite flicks when I was young. The one word I can say about them was that they were "Magical". As if they werent really movies to me as much as good magical moments. Especially labyrinth. That film made a Bowie fan. Not anymore, but atleast I dont hate his music. Man... Now I gotta go dig up my old VHS and watch em again. :D
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Originally posted by Grey Wolf
Jupiter has quite a bit of mass, and quite a few moons. Probably wouldn't be a good thing.
But as we've explained a bunch of time already, it won't change anything.
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A few clarifications from a nerdy astronomy student :p:
Bobbaou, you said that the Moon is "millions" of miles away from the Earth; in fact, the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is around 240,000 miles.
Grey Wolf, it's true that the Moon is moving slowly away from the Earth due to tidal friction on Earth, but the rate it's moving away is so slow, it would take millions of years for anything really noticeable. As a comparison, that same tidal friction force slowed down Earth's day from an initial time of 5 to 6 hours to the modern-day 24, but it took 4 or 5 billion years to do so. I'm not entirely positive, but another possibility would be that the Moon and Earth would settle into a stable system, where the same side of the Earth faces the Moon at all times just as the Moon does to Earth right now. Pluto and Charon are in such an orbital system. However, I'm not sure if this would happen before the Moon escaped from orbit, seeing as how it's only about 1/80 the mass of the Earth.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. :p
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Uggh, there's a thread like this on another forum. Some of the more... right wing people there are screaming about how dangerous and unethical this is, and how everyone talking about it not being as dangerous as it sounds is full of hubris.
...and when I read my posts there explaining things I'm sounding like Dr. Mackay :p
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Carl: If it managed to get the cumulative mass of Jupiter, Mars, a few moons, and some asteroids, not to mention the different orbit, would cause some effects due to gravitational pull, with (I'm guessing) could cause some slight changes in the orbits of the surviving planets.
Mongoose: My post was more along the lines of what the effect of a black hole with less mass than the moon, due to the expulsion of matter/energy in the form of Hawking radiation, would have as it would throw off the already slightly unstable spatial relation between Earth and Luna.
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It's unethical to make a black hole....?
"AND THOUGH SHALT NOT DISCUSS QUANTUM PHYSICS!"
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It is if it's big enough to do anything.
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If it were used as a weapon. BLACK HOLE GUN BABY!
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I don't even want to figure out how that would work.
As a weapon, you could put it next to your enemy, and it would eat him, but i doubt you could shoot it out of a gun.
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Hey, a man can dream.
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(http://games.gamemarshal.com/Armed%20%26%20Dangerous/screenshots/tn_roman_and_captains_versus_blackhole.jpg)
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I wouldn't consider it unethical, just, well, a bit daft. As I said before, from a scientific point of view, it's a great breakthrough, but the very very best thing about just about every suspected singularity in the known universe is that it is a very long way away. I like them there. We can't even clone a sodding sheep properly, I certainly wouldn't let us loose with the Quantum Mechanics' equivalent of an angle grinder.
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On a vaguely related note, anyone here see the episode of Dilbert where the Gruntmeister 6000 produced a black hole?
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Carl has.
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I thought Bob the Bastard destroyed it?
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Why does this discussion on black holes make me want to buy D3 again and play online???
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They rebuilt it later. I believe the rebuilt one was taken by the trashman and Steven Hawkings.
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Originally posted by Mongoose
A few clarifications from a nerdy astronomy student :p:
Bobbaou, you said that the Moon is "millions" of miles away from the Earth; in fact, the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is around 240,000 miles.
:rolleyes:
you know what i meant ...
don't make me sick my apathy bear on you.
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Originally posted by Deepblue
Why does this discussion on black holes make me want to buy D3 again and play online???
Maybe because of a little thing called the Blackshark Missile? ;7 Seriously, though, follow up on that impulse; we need all the pilots we can get. :)
Unless, of course, you're referring to the joke that is Doom 3; in that case, from what I've heard, don't waste your money. :p
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So now about temproal displacement..
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would only happen within about an inch of the thing.
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
If you're interested I would highly recommend those books. Their scope is beautifully immense and is conveyed with great poetic prowess, and they're filled to the brim with allegory that inspires a sense of awe I've never found in anything else I've read. They're almost too intricate to digest.
Whats the name of the book again? And the author? I was looking for some new books to read. :thepimp:
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In order: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. They're by Dan Simmons. I've only read the first two so far but I plan on continuing.
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On a side note, if you get rid of Jupiter, you are asking for trouble. Right now Jupiter acts as a giant comet magnet. Take Jupiter out of the equation, and lots of rocks out there start to get into our inner system and it´s only a matter of time before one reaches Earth again.
Anyway, anyone remember an old movie about a black hole, where a ship encounters this massive other ship trapped in a black hole´s pull, inhabited by a mad scientist and his robot? I can´t remember the english title. "Black Abyss" maybe?
In the end, the huge ship gets destroyed by the gravity forces, and they escape into the hole, emerging in a new universe. Coolest movie í ever saw when i was a kid. Anyone knows wich movie i mean? What was it called?
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Actually, it was called, rather unimagiinatively "Black Hole".
And it was by Disney, so I'd suggest you not ruin your fond childhood memories.
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Originally posted by Stunaep
Actually, it was called, rather unimagiinatively "Black Hole".
And it was by Disney, so I'd suggest you not ruin your fond childhood memories.
Yeah, i just did a search on it, and found the original title. The translation into portuguese was off by a mile.
It´s all coming back to me, the struggle between the small cute robot Vincent against the big red and evil Maximillian! By todays standards, that movie was crap. But for a young boy watching it for the first time, it was awesome!
And the ship was (and still is) a very cool design.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6305342776.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg (http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6305342776.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg)
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I remember that movie. I thought it was scary when I saw it. :p
It's very different from Disney's other movies.
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except, of course, this:
(http://www.delos.fantascienza.com/delos55/img/robot/cinema/vincent.jpg)
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Looks like TRON-esque stuff
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It´s R2D2´s baby brother!
:D
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You know, R2 and Amidala were VERY close (he was always in her room when she was asleep....) Whose to say her constant undressing didn't drive him "bonkers" and he tasered her and then... (censored)
"inconcievable!" (Princess Bride voice)
Man VIncent was so unlikeable, but Max. God I loved the big red guy (even if he was a bit of a psycho). I also liked STARR that dude who was king of the laser gun range. Rememebr him?
I tried to convert the cygnus but it fialed (probably intersecting polys) Atra made it..
Anyway they tried to get rid of Godzilla in G vs Megagaurius (the black hole cannon was code named D.T. Dimensional Tide) They fired it about 3 or 4 times... Check it out for cheesy black holes fired by satelite into the Earth...
BTW are we turninginto Romulans now? All are space craft powered by Micro Singularities?
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Originally posted by Getter Robo G
You know, R2 and Amidala were VERY close (he was always in her room when she was asleep....) Whose to say her constant undressing didn't drive him "bonkers" and he tasered her and then... (censored)
"inconcievable!" (Princess Bride voice)
oh man nws tags that turned me on and now my roof is all dirty
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Originally posted by Stunaep
except, of course, this:
(http://www.delos.fantascienza.com/delos55/img/robot/cinema/vincent.jpg)
I have a (clockwork) toy one of those somewhere........
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Vincent and Bob were some of the coolest robots ever though, especially since Vincent could kick arse with twin arm-mounted laser cannon ;)