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Space Burial
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A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:5, Informative)
The amount of mass falling onto the earth from space is measured in the hundreds of tons per day.
Do the math.
A quarter ounce or less... (Score:5, Informative)
Other services mention only a "symbolic portion", and its questionable whether they even exist. The only non-"Earthview" activity was purchasing a capsule on a NASA mission that was headed to the moon. I presume their deep space service would be offered the same way...
Re:Cemeteries are landfills (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There were already remains in orbit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:5, Informative)
I could sit here half the night listing reasons why launching dead granny dust into space is a pretty daft idea, but worries about unbalancing the earth's orbit or running out of carbon wouldn't be among them.
If you took all the people in the world and packed them into a box, like sardines, without cremating, that box would have to be about 3/4 mile per side.
That's it. All of humanity. All of humanity's mass. Poof it out into space and the earth wouldn't so much as bobble, or care.
KFG
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:5, Informative)
mass of Earth:
5.9742 x 10^24 kilograms. That's
5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
mass of average person:
about 100 kilograms
number of bodies needed to change the Earth's weight by 1%:
597,420,000,000,000,000,000
Population of Earth:
about 6,000,000,000
Weight of Apollo 11:
about 30,000 kg
Number of Apollo 11's needed to change Earth's weight by 1%
1,991,400,000,000,000,000
In conclusion, the Earth is really big.
Re:a bit cheap (Score:1, Informative)
Sounds like the old Twilight episode (Score:2, Informative)
For a few more dollars, you could be embalmed in your favorite fantasy [tzworld.com].
Burn on the Sun? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:5, Informative)
1 person is 10 cubic feet of space (5x2x1)
there are 6E9 people in the world
10 cuft/person x 6E9 people = 6E10 cuft
a box, 3/4 mile cube, holds 3960x3960x3960 cuft...
that comes to 6.2E10 cubic feet.
or, in laymans terms, enough.
Original poster was correct, by your own figures. By his, he's at worst rather generous with the box.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Take down a space station (Score:5, Informative)
"A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter -- each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope."
Of them, "8,927 are man-made objects which are officially tracked."
Yes and no (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
Yes, it is: to go into an orbit that will intersect the sun you have to kill nearly all your current velocity with respect to the sun. IIRC for the Earth that's about 25 miles per second (plus a bit extra to get you out of Earth's gravity well), which is more than three times as fast this "put your ashes in orbit" mission.
This is the part you just made up:
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
There is a reason why light-sail designs call for square miles of material thinner than paper: because unless you've got that much surface area to weight, neither sunlight nor solar wind will change your course very much.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
That pressure will increase with the inverse square of your distance from the sun, as does the force of gravity pulling you towards the sun. If you were on course to begin with, you won't be blown off it, certainly not enough to miss a million mile wide target.
Re:Just Drop Into the Sun from Sail Ship (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:3, Informative)
That doesn't sound right, so I've done my own quick calculation in metric. I'm assuming that the average size of a person is 50cm by 30cm (~1 foot 8 inches by 1 foot), that there are about 6 billion people, and that all of them are standing up in the box. These assumptions should be near enough, and make it easy to do without a calculator.
This is a lot more that 3/4 mile per side - more like 19 miles per side.
Learn yourselfs some Fizix boys! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Special 'Delivery' Instructions (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only so much carbon... (Score:3, Informative)
The calculations are correct. Amazing, eh?
Re:Special 'Delivery' Instructions (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yes and no (Score:3, Informative)
If you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, gravity will smack you back into the Earth shortly thereafter, unless you're under constant acceleration (which requires extra deltaV, which I loosely called "extra speed"). If you travel at 25 miles per second away from the Earth under no acceleration, you will of course eventually get out of its gravity well, but by the time you do you will have slowed down slightly.
Second of all, there is a much easier way. You just aim yourself at a planet and slingshot yourself off it to gain some pretty good speed. Then, you fly by another planet and use its gravity well not to change the magnitude of your velocity (although you'll do that too), but to change the direction you're travelling. If you do this right, you can be going straight towards the Sun at a very high rate of speed and with no component of your velocity that is perpendicular to the line between you and the Sun.
You're right; I stand corrected. The guy who replied to you and said You don't gain energy (or velocity) by slingshotting off another planet. The energy you gain going in is the same as the energy 'given back' when you go out. wasn't thinking about different frames of reference: in the frame of reference of the planet you pass your energy is unchanged, but in the frame of reference of the Sun you've gained or lost energy: if your new velocity minus your old velocity is in the direction the planet is orbiting, then some of the planets' momentum is transferred to you; if the opposite is true then some of your momentum is transferred to the planet.
There's a limit to how tight a turn you could make around any particular planet, so I'm not sure if you could kill all your radial velocity from a Hohmann orbit to Venus (or even if you could kill enough to send you to Mercury and from there into the Sun), but you could definitely swing around Jupiter straight into the Sun, and that's at least more fuel-efficient than the direct flight I was assuming.
Re:Take down a space station (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.seds.org/pub/info/newsletters/spacev
NASA to Test Laser "Broom" to Clean Space Junk
NASA plans to test a laser system in 2003 that may help clear
low-Earth orbit of debris that could pose a risk to the shuttle and
space station.
New Scientist magazine reported in its current issue that a
shuttle flight in 2003 will test Project Orion, a groundbased laser
system that would act as a "broom", sweeping out small debris from
orbit.
During the mission the shuttle will release small instrumented
objects designed to simulate space debris. The objects will be
equipped with GPS receivers so that their positions can be tracked as
they are illuminated by a groundbased megawatt-power laser. The laser
will vaporize part of the object's surface, creating a small amount of
thrust that slows the object down and eventually causes it to reenter
the Earth's atmosphere.
If successful, the system could be used to clear out low-Earth
orbit of small pieces of orbital debris that, because of their high
velocities, can cause significant damage if they strike a spacecraft.
"With a laser system we could clear from orbit all the debris between
1 and 10 centimeters [0.4 to 4 inches] in size within two years," said
Jonathan Campbell, head of the Project Orion effort at NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center.
That size range is significant because debris of that size
poses the greatest risk. Shielding on spacecraft can protect them
from objects smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in.), while those larger than 10
cm (4 in.) across can be tracked from the ground and spacecraft moved
to avoid them. Between 1 and 10 cm, though, are objects too small to
be tracked from the ground and too large to be effectively shielded
against.
Campbell and others involved with Project Orion (first
described in SpaceViews in 1997) are optimistic that lasers can clear
low-Earth orbits effectively and at a relatively modest cost. "We now
know we can decelerate and de-orbit the debris with the types of laser
that are available to us," based on a series of recent tests on the
ground, he said.
A two-year effort to clear debris from orbit would cost about
$200 million, Campbell estimated. By comparison, the cost of a single
space shuttle mission has been estimated to be as much as a half-
billion dollars.
Re:Your easy answer is, alas, too easy. (Score:2, Informative)
I'm amazed no one has posted a challenge to this assertion. Few historians accept this justification of history's worst act of terror uncritically. The Japanese were trying to surrender anyway.
This article [doug-long.com] is a good starting point for anyone interested in the facts of the matter.
Meteor Shower (Score:2, Informative)
Little kids would then sing songs like, "Twinkle Twinkle Grandpa Jones, Watch The Sky Burn His Bones....."
slingshot... (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, to prove it, you need a lot of calculations in center of mass systems, ect. (Was the nastiest stuff in the "newton"-part of theoretical physics I, lagrange was much more easy).
In end effect, you can reduce the kinetic energy of the planet on its way around the sun and transfer it to yourself by placing yourself in a "low part" of the combined cravitational and ratational potential behind the planet in its rotation.
While you are there (during the slingshot), you are "pulled" by the planet and gain speed (and the correct integreation shows that there is a net gain)
How about diamonds... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yes and no (Score:3, Informative)
IANAP (physicist), but I will be in two years.
Not if you keep making mistakes like that. Escape velocity is defined as the velocity needed to escape from a gravity well with no additional energy input. True, IF I move a meter per second radially away from the earth, and IF I continue to apply force to overcome gravity, THEN I will escape from the earth (in the limit), HOWEVER that is not "escape velocity" since I am continuing to oppose the force of gravity.
However, IF I want to take a "running start" at it, and then coast, I need to be moving at roughly 7 miles per second to have enough kinetic energy to be able to convert it to the potential energy of being "infinitely far" from the earth (escape conditions).
Re:slingshot... (Score:2, Informative)
Flybys work like this: The planet you are approaching is orbiting the sun at some velocity (about 30 km/s for the Earth). As you approach, you enter the planet's "sphere of influence," meaning the distance at which the effect of the planet's gravity on you is stronger than the effect of the Sun's gravity. Your velocity when you enter the SOI determines the curve of the hyperbolic orbit around the planet. You fly around the planet and exit the SOI at a different angle than when you started. Your exit velocity will be the sum of your hyperbolic velocity (with respect to the planet) and the planet's velocity (with respect to the Sun). Picture throwing a ball off a moving train, and measuring the speed of that ball from the ground, not moving. Throw the ball forward at speed x with respect to the train, and it's moving faster than the train with respect to the ground, and vice versa. You can tailor your exit and entry angles as to adjust your overall velocity (since entry and exit velocity with respect to the planet are both the same).
Of course, the same thing happens around the sun, but since we never leave the Sun's SOI (with the possible exception of deep space probes) we can't adjust our velocity with respect to it. In other words, in order for a spacecraft to "slingshot around the Sun" it would have to have started on an orbit around the center of the Galaxy and entered the Sun's SOI, nearly perpendicular to the Sun's galactic orbit, and exit the Sun's SOI moving forward along the Sun's galactic orbit.
All of the above assumes a completely unpowered orbital trajectory. If the spacecraft were to fire engines at any point, the story would change dramatically.
By the way, I'm an Aerospace Engineering graduate student with experience in orbital mechanics courses.