Earth vs an Adamantium Spear the length of Jupiter's Diameter

[Sharpandpointies]

I hear you - I'm not saying it would be easy, just that it would be far from impossible given the incalculable amount of resources that would be thrown at the problem. This isn't NASA spending years negotiating the very lowest bidder for a rocket, and building it for a few million. This is "We're going to spend hundreds of billions or trillions to make dozens or hundreds of rockets with the range required and deliver existing warheads and filler" (to provide mass to shift the trajectory).

But you gotta build all of those hundreds of rockets (including working them out almost from scratch, because we've never lofted stuff this big this far with this accuracy). And they need to be outfitted with precisely calibrated guidance packages that can maintain their calibration over likely a month of travel time or whatever. This isn't even considering this is going to be done without testing, because if you take even a short amount of time to pressure-test all of this stuff, too late, SCHTONK. Etc.

We have 1.3 years.

I feel it's kind of a 'maybe we win the lottery' situation.

Mileage, it may vary. ^_^

[Cthulhu_of_R'lyeh]

In theory you could wait until it's about to impact and then wake me, Cthulhu, the Dread Lord, up.

The adamantium rod would then be forced by cosmic necessity to impale me thru the face and put me back to sleep... so earth is saved, blah blah, and you get your space needle. I get one hell of a image boost, drive a few million artists mad, to create hauntingly magnificent works of art... and then get to go back to watching cat videos.

It's a win win.

[big_adventure]

But you gotta build all of those hundreds of rockets (including working them out almost from scratch, because we've never lofted stuff this big this far with this accuracy). And they need to be outfitted with precisely calibrated guidance packages that can maintain their calibration over likely a month of travel time or whatever. This isn't even considering this is going to be done without testing, because if you take even a short amount of time to pressure-test all of this stuff, too late, SCHTONK. Etc.

We have 1.3 years.

I feel it's kind of a 'maybe we win the lottery' situation.

Mileage, it may vary. ^_^

But we HAVE lofted this big a stuff much, much further. We don't need one rocket to carry a hundred warheads. Modern fusion warheads are tiny. Nothing like little boy and fat man and certainly miles from Tsar Bomba. A 475kt W88 weighs 175kg and is 170cm by 60cm. Making a hundred "known quantity" rockets will work just fine thanks, and will reduce the risk of catastrophic failure in any case.

[Beadle]

Terms like 'kiloton' and 'megaton' were coined to describe a weapon's blast energy in equivalent weights of TNT. Of course, being constants, they should be simple enough to convert to standard force or energy units, but they do not directly or instinctively relate to kgs or newtons as a measure of force.

Ah, you’re right. I was having a brain fart.

Nevertheless, the scaling still applies.

[Sharpandpointies]

But we HAVE lofted this big a stuff much, much further. We don't need one rocket to carry a hundred warheads. Modern fusion warheads are tiny. Nothing like little boy and fat man and certainly miles from Tsar Bomba. A 475kt W88 weighs 175kg and is 170cm by 60cm. Making a hundred "known quantity" rockets will work just fine thanks, and will reduce the risk of catastrophic failure in any case.

We've lofted big stuff further, but not accurately. And such things have depended on planetary gravity to help with 'getting them there in the correct fashion'. Yeah, we've gotten stuff to Mars; Mars is BIG, and if we're a mile off-course approaching it, not so much a problem. I'll note that such stuff was also travelling SLOWLY - they take seven months or something to get there.

Everything further, like sending stuff out to the asteroid belt to try to take samples from specific asteroids? That depended on the probe getting there really slowly, including using a gravity assist from Mars, so it would have a load of fuel for precise docking adjustments later on. Check out NASA's mission DAWN for an example of that.

You do not want to take seven months+ AFTER putting all of this crap together to send something up to hit the thing, because between that and 'putting stuff together', we won't need the big rockets any more, it'll already be in our backyard. I know we're talking about converging vectors, but still.

We have never fired this stuff, this far, this accurately, at this needed velocity. In Rumbles terms, we have no feats for it - we have feats for 'shooting rovers at a planet', not 'firing stuff at something that's as thin as a telephone pole where we actually need to get fairly close to it with these nukes to actually DO anything' (again, no shockwave from air, nukes aren't going to have the same effect as they do in the atmosphere, it's all going to be about particles and heat).

How many rockets can we make in a few months? How accurate will they be at a gazillion KM distance with a gigantic time lag on adjusting them against a target that is, essentially, really small, when they have to be flying really fast to get there and intercept (no slow spirals with this one, that spear is on an intercept trajectory with Earth, as unnatural as that might be)? I can't speak to that myself, but I can say it feels out of what we have done before.

Arguably we can keep just shoot rockets at it as fast as we make them, so there's that. It'll be closer and closer, but still, maybe.

I mean, if we're talking about the rockets that basically sent our landers to Mars, they're...big. And accuracy? Okay, we've landed four landers on Mars. So after three actual 'trials' (the first three landers) we managed to get the accuracy down to a 12 mile by 4 mile ellipse (I know, lander accuracy is not the same as using it as a weapon, but it at least tells us something, and we've never tried for weapon-level accuracy at that range either, so, first time for everything). Amusing, at the foot of Mt. Sharp.

My confidence in us hitting a moving target heading at us like a spear, close enough that the nukes go off in a way that actually changes the angle sufficiently that - in the amount of time it takes for us to get these hundred rockets or whatever up and running, and actually get them to the target - the Jupiter-spear misses us...is not great. This is a tech thing we haven't done before, not at this range, this fast, this accurately. We aren't really taking time for test shots, because if each test shot takes months to arrive, we're losing our window.

Granted, I'm not a Rocket Scientist from NASA. So maybe there's tons of stuff I'm 100% sure I'm missing. Maybe if we sent this question to the guy who runs XKCD - who is an actual rocket scientist from NASA, or was - he could include it in his next book on bizarre questions, and I would trust his answers on it (the guy does insane amount of research and calls up experts worldwide to help him answer the silly questions people send him).

I'm just looking at this and thinking '1.3 years is not enough to do this, because we don't actually have 1.3 years, we have less than that if we want to make this thing miss us.'

Again, mileage, and short someone bringing in the rocket scientists to actually tell us technological limitations and such, I think we're definitely in that territory. ^_^

[big_adventure]

We've lofted big stuff further, but not accurately. And such things have depended on planetary gravity to help with 'getting them there in the correct fashion'. Yeah, we've gotten stuff to Mars; Mars is BIG, and if we're a mile off-course approaching it, not so much a problem. I'll note that such stuff was also travelling SLOWLY - they take seven months or something to get there.

Everything further, like sending stuff out to the asteroid belt to try to take samples from specific asteroids? That depended on the probe getting there really slowly, including using a gravity assist from Mars, so it would have a load of fuel for precise docking adjustments later on. Check out NASA's mission DAWN for an example of that.

You do not want to take seven months+ AFTER putting all of this crap together to send something up to hit the thing, because between that and 'putting stuff together', we won't need the big rockets any more, it'll already be in our backyard. I know we're talking about converging vectors, but still.

We have never fired this stuff, this far, this accurately, at this needed velocity. In Rumbles terms, we have no feats for it - we have feats for 'shooting rovers at a planet', not 'firing stuff at something that's as thin as a telephone pole where we actually need to get fairly close to it with these nukes to actually DO anything' (again, no shockwave from air, nukes aren't going to have the same effect as they do in the atmosphere, it's all going to be about particles and heat).

How many rockets can we make in a few months? How accurate will they be at a gazillion KM distance with a gigantic time lag on adjusting them against a target that is, essentially, really small, when they have to be flying really fast to get there and intercept (no slow spirals with this one, that spear is on an intercept trajectory with Earth, as unnatural as that might be)? I can't speak to that myself, but I can say it feels out of what we have done before.

Arguably we can keep just shoot rockets at it as fast as we make them, so there's that. It'll be closer and closer, but still, maybe.

I mean, if we're talking about the rockets that basically sent our landers to Mars, they're...big. And accuracy? Okay, we've landed four landers on Mars. So after three actual 'trials' (the first three landers) we managed to get the accuracy down to a 12 mile by 4 mile ellipse (I know, lander accuracy is not the same as using it as a weapon, but it at least tells us something, and we've never tried for weapon-level accuracy at that range either, so, first time for everything). Amusing, at the foot of Mt. Sharp.

My confidence in us hitting a moving target heading at us like a spear, close enough that the nukes go off in a way that actually changes the angle sufficiently that - in the amount of time it takes for us to get these hundred rockets or whatever up and running, and actually get them to the target - the Jupiter-spear misses us...is not great. This is a tech thing we haven't done before, not at this range, this fast, this accurately. We aren't really taking time for test shots, because if each test shot takes months to arrive, we're losing our window.

Granted, I'm not a Rocket Scientist from NASA. So maybe there's tons of stuff I'm 100% sure I'm missing. Maybe if we sent this question to the guy who runs XKCD - who is an actual rocket scientist from NASA, or was - he could include it in his next book on bizarre questions, and I would trust his answers on it (the guy does insane amount of research and calls up experts worldwide to help him answer the silly questions people send him).

I'm just looking at this and thinking '1.3 years is not enough to do this, because we don't actually have 1.3 years, we have less than that if we want to make this thing miss us.'

Again, mileage, and short someone bringing in the rocket scientists to actually tell us technological limitations and such, I think we're definitely in that territory. ^_^

Everything you say, I agree with, to a point. The point where we diverge is that those projects were done for peanuts. Shoestring budgets. As well, we don't need to get closer than a couple of miles if we detonate a hundred nukes with filler packed around them to divert the projectile by a fraction of a degree. I'm again not saying it would be easy, but it's the kind of thing that is much easier with hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars thrown at it, rather than tens of millions. NASA's entire budget, including for its entire staff, all of its many facilities, all of its ongoing projects, all of everything, is 23 billion dollars a year. Multiply that by 50 or so, in the case of "the world is gonna end." And that's just from the States. You can get a lot of stuff done with that kind of cash.

[Shellhead]

According to NASA, our hypothetical nukes would need to directly hit a target in vacuum. "First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely. Second, thermal radiation, as usually defined, also disappears. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself." The radiation dosage from the nuke would be greater, but that doesn't do any good against this spear or any other inanimate object.

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

[Nik Hasta]

what you want to do... is build like a series of ram rockets made of the hardest stuff we have... to... T-bone an unbreakable spear travelling at 10 miles/sec and... thereby divert it... a bit...

I don't think this is a goer lads.

[big_adventure]

According to NASA, our hypothetical nukes would need to directly hit a target in vacuum. "First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely. Second, thermal radiation, as usually defined, also disappears. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself." The radiation dosage from the nuke would be greater, but that doesn't do any good against this spear or any other inanimate object.

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

That's what I was saying by having the warheads packed in filler of some sort. That's the mass that the explosion can project out as a shockwave. I don't know the best thing to use, but whatever it is, it's going to be instantly gas or plasma, so massively increased in volume as well as pushed outwards by the charge - there would be two expansive forces acting on it.

[Sharpandpointies]

That's what I was saying by having the warheads packed in filler of some sort. That's the mass that the explosion can project out as a shockwave. I don't know the best thing to use, but whatever it is, it's going to be instantly gas or plasma, so massively increased in volume as well as pushed outwards by the charge - there would be two expansive forces acting on it.

Volume is unimportant. What's important is mass. If you convert 1 ton of packed filler to 1 ton of gas, it's still 1 ton of gas. It's the mass that provides the force, not the volume.

And this thing is the width of a telephone pole.

Say a nuke explodes 0.5 Km from the side of this thing (getting it within 0.5 Km seems pretty damned impressive at the ranges we're talking, especially given 'Mars lander ellipse using planetary gravity to assist bringing us in', but let's go with that by saying we have some kind of super-tech targeting system or the like that we come up with by dumping craptons of money at the problem...which is supposition, but why not here?). Let's say it has ten tons of packed filler around the warhead to create an expanding sphere of gas or plasma or whatever. Ten tons seems...like a lot, considering that every ton you put in means you need X tons more FUEL to get the darned rocket to reach the velocities you need, which means a bigger rocket, which means more fuel, which means...there's a diminishing return, here, as noted by the writer of XKCD when he discussed lifting yourself off the ground using multiple AK-47's with firing downward from a fixed platform.

Yeah, he worked that out (with all kinds of different possible choices, over pages and pages). ^_^

Anyway, let's say 10 tons, exploding 0.5 Km away.

Now that 10 tons is going to be dispersed into a rapidly expanding sphere. By the time it reaches the Darned Adamantium Noodle (henceforth referred to as the DAN™), how much of that mass is actually going to impact on the length of the DAN? We'd have to actually go into some serious calculations to figure this out, since the explosion will continue expanding with the gas - still spreading out, still more diffuse - spreading further along the length of the DAN, and we're getting into some pretty impressive Integration to figure it all out (constantly reducing density of expanding gas/whatever cloud versus the ever-increasing length of DAN it encounters).

However, the DAN is still a telephone pole in width slowly becoming an increasingly larger thread slicing into an ever-propagating, ever-thinning SPHERICAL (not circular, this is in three dimensions) blast. Picture a piano wire slicing into an ever-thinning (somehow) orange. How much of the orange's mass is the piano wire actually encountering?

A miniscule amount. Like, ridiculously miniscule, since as the sphere expands its density continues to dramatically decrease.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more to it than this (and I'm totally disinterested in working out the numbers, here, because I got sick of Calculus two-and-a-half decades ago and reaaaaaally hated Integration), but this is a starting point.

More importantly, all of the brilliant NASA scientists haven't come up with this plan (the filler on the nuke) to overcome the issue of 'direct contact needed'. I, myself, had thought that there would be some pressure from particles and so forth, but you'd need to be REALLY close or else 'inverse square of distance' means you get almost nothing. But if the NASA scientists - who know a crapton more than me, let's face it - say 'nope, need direct contact for nuke to do anything to advancing stellar object', I'm not going to argue with them.

...thinking like that got us in the situation where a large percent of people value youtube over epidemiologists and their expertise. :) NOT that I'm saying anything of the sort is happening here.

Anywhoo, the NASA scientists say 'Direct contact' and haven't come up with the 'filler' idea to 'create' a blast, I'm pretty okay saying 'that's probably not feasible'.

On the subject of 'more money'.

I agree that more money would happen. And a lot of the time, more money really helps make things move quickly. But there's still testing. Dead-ends. Working on something we've NEVER done before, starting on a basis of technology that is incapable of doing that thing. More money doesn't make brains work better, and it doesn't necessarily cut the time necessary to test and make sure we have the proper system. And here, we have 1.3 years. Less, actually.

EASIER, I agree. But is easier enough, given the hurdles?

I'm no expert, myself, so I can't say. My opinion is 'probably not, that seems like a lot in 1.3 years'. Less than 1.3, due to 'DAN will hit critical point where we CAN'T budge it enough' before that, and also 'before anything cooperative starts, fair bit of arguing about what's to be done' (even if that's only a month of crabbing between world governments, we're now down to 1.2 years, and I feel a month isn't an outrageous kind of estimation given what we see normally...might be optimistic, really). I'm having difficulties wrapping my head around the idea of world governments and big corporations springing into collective action on day one. Or day twenty.

Why not try, I mean we might win the lottery.

But I wouldn't at all be optimistic.

Edit:

[DAN] SCHTONK

[Sharpandpointies]

what you want to do... is build like a series of ram rockets made of the hardest stuff we have... to... T-bone an unbreakable spear travelling at 10 miles/sec and... thereby divert it... a bit...

I don't think this is a goer lads.

Nik does the TL;DR version.

[big_adventure]

Volume is unimportant. What's important is mass. If you convert 1 ton of packed filler to 1 ton of gas, it's still 1 ton of gas. It's the mass that provides the force, not the volume.

And this thing is the width of a telephone pole.

Say a nuke explodes 0.5 Km from the side of this thing (getting it within 0.5 Km seems pretty damned impressive at the ranges we're talking, especially given 'Mars lander ellipse using planetary gravity to assist bringing us in', but let's go with that by saying we have some kind of super-tech targeting system or the like that we come up with by dumping craptons of money at the problem...which is supposition, but why not here?). Let's say it has ten tons of packed filler around the warhead to create an expanding sphere of gas or plasma or whatever. Ten tons seems...like a lot, considering that every ton you put in means you need X tons more FUEL to get the darned rocket to reach the velocities you need, which means a bigger rocket, which means more fuel, which means...there's a diminishing return, here, as noted by the writer of XKCD when he discussed lifting yourself off the ground using multiple AK-47's with firing downward from a fixed platform.

Yeah, he worked that out (with all kinds of different possible choices, over pages and pages). ^_^

Anyway, let's say 10 tons, exploding 0.5 Km away.

Now that 10 tons is going to be dispersed into a rapidly expanding sphere. By the time it reaches the Darned Adamantium Noodle (henceforth referred to as the DAN™), how much of that mass is actually going to impact on the length of the DAN? We'd have to actually go into some serious calculations to figure this out, since the explosion will continue expanding with the gas - still spreading out, still more diffuse - spreading further along the length of the DAN, and we're getting into some pretty impressive Integration to figure it all out (constantly reducing density of expanding gas/whatever cloud versus the ever-increasing length of DAN it encounters).

However, the DAN is still a telephone pole in width slowly becoming an increasingly larger thread slicing into an ever-propagating, ever-thinning SPHERICAL (not circular, this is in three dimensions) blast. Picture a piano wire slicing into an ever-thinning (somehow) orange. How much of the orange's mass is the piano wire actually encountering?

A miniscule amount. Like, ridiculously miniscule, since as the sphere expands its density continues to dramatically decrease.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more to it than this (and I'm totally disinterested in working out the numbers, here, because I got sick of Calculus two-and-a-half decades ago and reaaaaaally hated Integration), but this is a starting point.

More importantly, all of the brilliant NASA scientists haven't come up with this plan (the filler on the nuke) to overcome the issue of 'direct contact needed'. I, myself, had thought that there would be some pressure from particles and so forth, but you'd need to be REALLY close or else 'inverse square of distance' means you get almost nothing. But if the NASA scientists - who know a crapton more than me, let's face it - say 'nope, need direct contact for nuke to do anything to advancing stellar object', I'm not going to argue with them.

...thinking like that got us in the situation where a large percent of people value youtube over epidemiologists and their expertise. NOT that I'm saying anything of the sort is happening here.

Anywhoo, the NASA scientists say 'Direct contact' and haven't come up with the 'filler' idea to 'create' a blast, I'm pretty okay saying 'that's probably not feasible'.

On the subject of 'more money'.

I agree that more money would happen. And a lot of the time, more money really helps make things move quickly. But there's still testing. Dead-ends. Working on something we've NEVER done before, starting on a basis of technology that is incapable of doing that thing. More money doesn't make brains work better, and it doesn't necessarily cut the time necessary to test and make sure we have the proper system. And here, we have 1.3 years. Less, actually.

EASIER, I agree. But is easier enough, given the hurdles?

I'm no expert, myself, so I can't say. My opinion is 'probably not, that seems like a lot in 1.3 years'. Less than 1.3, due to 'DAN will hit critical point where we CAN'T budge it enough' before that, and also 'before anything cooperative starts, fair bit of arguing about what's to be done' (even if that's only a month of crabbing between world governments, we're now down to 1.2 years, and I feel a month isn't an outrageous kind of estimation given what we see normally...might be optimistic, really). I'm having difficulties wrapping my head around the idea of world governments and big corporations springing into collective action on day one. Or day twenty.

Why not try, I mean we might win the lottery.

But I wouldn't at all be optimistic.

Edit:

[DAN] SCHTONK

We'll have to disagree on the "time to act" part of the equation, number one, and number two, the US ALONE could pay a trillion casually, literally 50 times the existing NASA budget and, long term, it's a rounding error. Most countries would stand up to be counted, certainly for the coup it would engender in case of success, and if you fail, well, there was no reason to hang onto the money, because everybody be dead.

The "rapidly expanding sphere" ignores shaping the charges and the fillers, something which is a very known commodity. You also don't need a significant amount of mass to transmit force: the mass is going to be accelerated to ludicrous (tm) speed. That mass will impact DAN. It won't do much, but it doesn't have to do much. If you intercept the thing a hundred million KM away, you only need to divert the pole by about 0,0007 degrees to ensure that it misses. It would pass close, but it would miss, and it wouldn't have remotely enough gravity to do serious damage.

A very important reason why NASA and others don't have a plan for this kind of thing in place is the lack of funding for such a thing. You need massive computing resources, designers, engineers, theoreticians, mock-ups, pilots and manufacturing. That all costs cash that current budgets simply don't support. Suddenly start writing checks, however, and you'd see this stuff start happening. Some of those steps would be skipped or brute-forced by chucking cash at them.

I'm not saying it's a guaranteed win, but I do think it's a significantly better shot then you do (given that you think it's no shot at all... yeah, tallest midget and whatnot). YMMV as a certain wise man once (or repeatedly) said.

[The MunchKING]

Well since we're already bringing in fantastical elements, all we need is someone who can open portals at least one and a half telephone poles in diameter, so they can put a portal in front of it, and the other end some where else. Probably the other side of earth so it can merrily go on its journey until it get pulled in by the sun's gravity or something.

I wanted to think of a portal user from HALST or PADT that could do it for that old school YvtW feel, but all the ones I remember are porters or walkers, no-one really used portals.

[Sharpandpointies]

We'll have to disagree on the "time to act" part of the equation, number one, and number two, the US ALONE could pay a trillion casually, literally 50 times the existing NASA budget and, long term, it's a rounding error. Most countries would stand up to be counted, certainly for the coup it would engender in case of success, and if you fail, well, there was no reason to hang onto the money, because everybody be dead.

The "rapidly expanding sphere" ignores shaping the charges and the fillers, something which is a very known commodity. You also don't need a significant amount of mass to transmit force: the mass is going to be accelerated to ludicrous (tm) speed. That mass will impact DAN. It won't do much, but it doesn't have to do much. If you intercept the thing a hundred million KM away, you only need to divert the pole by about 0,0007 degrees to ensure that it misses. It would pass close, but it would miss, and it wouldn't have remotely enough gravity to do serious damage.

A very important reason why NASA and others don't have a plan for this kind of thing in place is the lack of funding for such a thing. You need massive computing resources, designers, engineers, theoreticians, mock-ups, pilots and manufacturing. That all costs cash that current budgets simply don't support. Suddenly start writing checks, however, and you'd see this stuff start happening. Some of those steps would be skipped or brute-forced by chucking cash at them.

I'm not saying it's a guaranteed win, but I do think it's a significantly better shot then you do (given that you think it's no shot at all... yeah, tallest midget and whatnot). YMMV as a certain wise man once (or repeatedly) said.

Most of that is fair enough, and open to supposition from both directions whether we'd get stuff like nuclear shaped charges working in time. Don't think we'll get any further, really.

Interesting discussion, anyway.

[bruceleegreyhulk]

Darn it where's magneto when you need him.