Assuming It Could Be done At All...

FOTSGreg · Mar 15, 2013

...just how big a hole could one blow in the surface/crust of the Earth and send off spinning through space without crushing the inhabitants of said section of the crust, disrupting it to rubble, or otherwise fracturing it into tiny pieces (forget about the planet itself)?

Cella · Mar 15, 2013

Potato!

FOTSGreg · Mar 15, 2013

Stupid friggn' iPad autocorrector.

G'dammit!

"adobe" should have been "Done". Could a mod correct that for me please?

FRAK!

FOTSGreg · Mar 15, 2013

Potato, you saucy wench, you.

Cella · Mar 15, 2013

FOTSGreg said:
Stupid friggn' iPad autocorrector.

G'dammit!

"adobe" should have been "Done". Could a mod correct that for me please?

FRAK!

You should be able to edit it yourself, Greg...? If you edit your first post, look up at the title and see if it'll let you.

I have no real input to the thread otherwise, so at least let me help out here...

milkweed · Mar 15, 2013

FOTSGreg said:
Stupid friggn' iPad autocorrector.

I do believe you can go to your post, click edit, and then click advanced after the box comes up and you should be able to change the thread title from there.

As an aside, have you read the iPad autocorrect website yet, if haven't you should... and you might want to go to the bathroom first because it's gut splitting funny!

blacbird · Mar 15, 2013

I understandeth this question not.

caw

Myrealana · Mar 16, 2013

I cannot conceive of some way of blowing a hole in the crust of the Earth without destroying everything in that area and a good radius around it.

The very idea that you could do something that catastrophic to a planet without worldwide death and destruction doesn't make sense.

King Neptune · Mar 16, 2013

It can't be adobe at all. But it would make an interesting premise for a story anyway. Slightly possible would be a collision with something that would break a planet into pieces but the pieces would not crumble. That could allow the chunks to move into slightly different orbits, and some people on some of the pieces could survive until their air dissipated.

Pthom · Mar 16, 2013

I fixed the title of the thread. While it is possible for ordinary members to edit any post they create, it is not possible for them to edit the title of a thread. Only moderators of the forum, or higher, can do that.

That done, the question is still enigmatic. Continental crust is some 30 km thick. The energy required to "blow a hole" in it is greater than anything experienced on Earth in a long, long time. Extinction event asteroids only "dent" the crust.

But if you mean what does it take to break off a piece of the crust and send it out of Earth's gravity well? Probably that extinction event asteroid could. But the pieces, I think, would be rather tiny, none large enough to "occupy" in any meaningful way, and even if so, the energies required would be ...well, what does "extinction event" mean to you?

FOTSGreg · Mar 16, 2013

No, no. The planet's gone, fragmented to little, itty bitty pieces (or at least disrupted enough that the chances for survival would be extraordinarily minimal). I'm thinking of a fragment of crust spun off from the remnants - super science, magic, whatever -

Essentially, would the gravitational stress of such an event basically mash everything on the surface to paste or is there a way for a large enough surviving piece to retain survivors?

FOTSGreg · Mar 16, 2013

Oh, and thanks for the title correction, Pthom.

veinglory · Mar 16, 2013

The fragment would have no atmosphere or gravity. To not smoosh everything you would need to extract the segment with some hand-wavey "forcefield" that provides these things.

milkweed · Mar 16, 2013

saw a docudrama say about 10-12 years ago on cable tv. It was about a proto earth and a second planet colliding and bascially becoming one, the left over debris became the moon. One of the comments that caught my attention in the docudrama was of some high brow scientist who stated that humanity could indeed survive such an event.

Things that make you go hmmmm... sure wish I could remember the title of that particular show but maybe someone else here will know the show title.

asnys · Mar 17, 2013

Wouldn't any impact large enough to shatter the planet also generate enough heat to melt the fragments?

If some superscience/magic somehow kept the fragment solid and at a liveable temperature and kept the air from bleeding away, I think the acceleration would probably not be survivable, but I'm not really sure. To get the whole Death Star thing, you need to impart enough kinetic energy to all the fragments to get them up to escape velocity; otherwise, their own gravity will pull them back together and they'll just reform. Escape velocity on Earth is 11.2 km/sec. If a fragment is accelerated to that speed in 1 sec, that works out to 1,142 G's. The highest survivable G-force I found in a few minutes of Googling is 100 G's. So this is probably not survivable even if the atmosphere and temperature issues are handwaved away. But if you have magic capable of dealing with those problems, it probably wouldn't have any trouble keeping the survivors from being squished to a thin film of putty too, so...

Pthom · Mar 18, 2013

At the energies necessary to fragment a rocky planet the size of Earth, rock becomes plastic (you can think of that as lava). I am extremely skeptical that any such event is survivable by anything larger than microbes.

FOTSGreg · Mar 18, 2013

Ayup, I was thinking the same thing Pthom and McLowell (and everyone else). It was something of a thought experiment (telling everyone just how demented my late night thoughts can be).

Not survivable. No how, no way, without essentially magic and I'm not goin' there.

1100g's instantaneous acceleration. Impressive.

Pthom · Mar 19, 2013

Magic is a perfectly acceptable solution...for the main forum.

Reziac · Apr 10, 2013

I'm wondering if stuff in a bubble of liquid might have the G forces sufficiently cushioned to make it ... marginally survivable.

So <gets out industrial-strength handwavium wand> let's say you've got gill-people sealed into one of those isolated-living experiments in self-sufficiency, and because nothing else can support the mass of their little sealed water-world, it's out in the deep ocean somewhere. Blow their bubbled habitat into space when the planet goes boom. Who's got the ~~magic~~ math for this one??

Pthom · Apr 10, 2013

Discussions involving handwavium belong in the main forum.

Thanks

Cornelius Gault · Apr 27, 2013

If that is part of your plot, you can invent your own "phlebotinium" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum) that would explain the phenomenon - time, force fields, strange new energy, scientific experiments, transportation, disintegration rays, etc. It's your world, you have a right to invent your own physics, to some extent, depending on how closely you want to stay to "real life".

In the same vein, your invention of this technique can fail in any number of ways, and you have a Phlebotinum Breakdown (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PhlebotinumBreakdown), in which you can invent the bad results of a failed experiment.

I have been reading a lot from this website (tvtropes.com) and have learned quite a bit about "tropes". Check it out - there are many ideas here.

Assuming It Could Be done At All...

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