💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 05 › 31 › into-the-sun.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:21:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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This, alas, while perhaps being a psychologically satisfactory outcome to those held in low regard by the one who wants to depose of the others into (or near enough to) the Sun, the task of getting stuff to the Sun is non-trivial. Now, I am not a rocket scientist, nor have I ever played Kerbal Space Program, but the gist of the problem is the Earth falls (and, luckily for us, so far) continues to miss the Sun at some velocity, roughly 7,170 rods/microfortnight. That's fast! The velocity covers something like 200 cricket fields set end-to-end per second, though why there are cricket fields set out end-to-end in space is left as an exercise to the reader.
$ units
618 units, 67 prefixes
You have: rods/microfortnight
You want: km/hour
* 14.967857
/ 0.066809831
You have: rods/microfortnight
You want: miles/hour
* 9.3005952
/ 0.10752
So anything launched with feeble amounts of energy from this benighted rock will likewise continue to miss the Sun. Tyranny of the rocket equation and all that. The usual trick is to bleed off velocity with lots of fly-bys of various inner planets over the course of years, at which point you may have already forgotten who you were shooting into the Sun, and why. (Also, it's expensive.) Far easier would be to salt their fields, because as we all know Carthage must be destroyed.
The discussion was about (among other and less mentionable things) "brotonic torpedoes" that would shoot techbros at your enemies, a fate worse than Tribbles, especially if they bring PowerPoint decks and mandatory all-hands meetings. Someone, for some reason, suggested shooting the techbros into the Sun, to which reasonable objections (viz., the above) may be made.