Sunday, November 15, 2009

Why Mile Wide Motherships Don't Make Sense!

Finally! Someone agrees with me! I never thought these mega-ship from E-T to Independence Day made any sense what so ever!

so I was reading on the Dvice blog and here was an article giving out some excellent static on these uber mother ships.

First ummm we could see them coming! In V they just appear! Granted sometimes we get a little bit of a warning, but as inefficient as NASA's NEO project is, if it's a kilometer across and inside of Mar's orbit, pretty good chance NASA can see your ass.

Something this big entering the Earth's atmosphere would raise havoc with the weather! According to the article, ships this huge
  • would be enough to cause "mesoscale" weather effects
  • storm systems ... a hundred kilometers across, encompass anything from thunderstorms to tropical cyclones, and have "an equivalent energy of multiple nuclear bombs
And what about the energy needed to keep something that huge in the air. Orbit is one thing, these behemoths are WELL into the gravity well! The author computes that in real world energy output, to keep a 3 kilometer craft in the air would take about 368 quadrillion joules of energy. That's one and a half times the power of the most powerful atom bomb ever built! And that's not total....that's EVERY SECOND!

Oh and remember in some of these movies we manage to shoot some of these things down? umm what would a 3 kilometer asteroid do if it hit the Earth? Exactly...DUH!


Check out the complete article...pretty damn interesting!

10 comments:

Rosehippi said...

Wouldn't all that depend on your SOURCE of energy and type of technology such visitors might possess... after all we are like Bush Babies comparatively aren't we?

Beam Me Up said...

Rosehippi
Oh yes, I suspect so, but if the live in the same universe as we do, they are bound by the same laws. Matter anti-matter conversion would most certainly be the energy source of choice. Complete mass to energy conversion. It doesn't get any better. Even pushing matter across the event horizon isn't as efficient! But what happens when you dump giga-joules of energy into Earth's biosphere? As grossly inefficient as the 6 mile wide Chicxulub impactor was, it managed to wipe out 99% of land based life and disrupt the eco/bio-sphere for thousands of years. High school physics. Energy is used to do work and the by-product of work is heat.

Hundreds of these 3 kilo nasties hanging in our atmosphere is going wind up frying everything on earth and boiling off the oceans.

Floppy Bingo said...

It's a good thing they are fiction.

Beam Me Up said...

Floppy! Damn Straight under any case!!!!!

Jaxxer said...

Regarding this "Oh and remember in some of these movies we manage to shoot some of these things down? umm what would a 3 kilometer asteroid do if it hit the Earth? Exactly...DUH!"

You are forgetting one thing, Asteriods come screaming in at well over 17K mph, These ships if they are just hovering there, get shot down, they would fall like any other object at terminal velocity if it had time. It wont suddenly accelerate to thousands of miles an hour.

And why would such ship have any effect on weather, It would obviously contain all its energy in it own gravity field. or anti gravity field. Now if the ships where the size of small moons, then i could see them affecting the planet if they where too close.

one last thing. no matter what, with these stories. its possible because its in the script.

pjowens75 said...

This always bothers me: "if the live in the same universe as we do, they are bound by the same laws." Whose laws? The laws of the universe AS WE KNOW THEM. Don't you think that an entity that knows how to travel through space and park their big ass ships over our cities just might know a little more of those laws than we do? And don't you think they might giggle at us for thinking we know enough about the universe to even begin applying our laws to it? Wouldn't it make more sense to imagine them thinking "Humans, what a bunch of arrogant SOBs. Who needs 'em."

Beam Me Up said...

Jaxxer
Ummm I really have to ask...are you familiar with basic physics? Yes asteroids would indeed "scream in" and given that there is a thing called inertial yes, the ships would not instantly accelerate. But just for a moment think of yourself in an elevator. How long before you stop feeling like the elevator is no longer moving. Not very long at all and your subject to the same inertial laws as any other mass. Now consider terminal velocity. Is this going to be a problem for something this massive? So lets rule out atmospherics dampening. So the gravitation constant is 33.3fps/s. This is not gong to be a movie slow mo when these things come down! If these Ships are this huge and we can resolve them as a full disk, they are NOT hovering several hundred feet above the ground but quite possibly several hundred thousand feet. Now given that they will reach full speed in less than or about 30 seconds....you are talking about at the very least an impact solution of thousands of atomic weapons going off all at once! Mt St Helens when it blew its top moved what...a couple cubic miles of material into the air? It dropped the mean temp. noticeably for a couple of years. And these ships are a size magnitudes larger? And more than one?! Can you say global cooling or nuclear winter?

Beam Me Up said...

Pjowens
They are not OUR laws. Even if we have them completely wrong...How the universe works is not going to change. Newton observed his universe and set up "laws" on those observations. Einstein cam along and said that Newton was fundamentally wrong. ok... but on on a QUANTUM level. Newton still works, his laws didnt stop working why? Because they were observations on a macro level. And then even Albert was not about to consider that meant ftl was possible. Now at this point someone usually pulls out Dark matter and Energy. Yes they are Macro manifestation and may account for some incredible energies that seem to be expanding the universe possible faster than light. But remember so far these are thought experiments to plug some very troubling holes in quantum mechanics. Plus the universe was a much smaller place 13 billion years ago. Yes, the initial expansion. Because that what the edge of the universe is...

So, Its a matter of not how we perceive the universe but learning to understand what we already see. We may finally solve some very vexing problems tomorrow that may very well negate some of our very basic understanding of t he universe...but the universe will not be one iota different. I would hazard a guess that there still would not be any magic bullet pulled out of the universe's dark area that would permit an end run around universal basic laws.

Anonymous said...

Wait. Wait. ID4 is fiction? Whoaa ..

Beam Me Up said...

HE HE...Thanks Anon for putting us back on track! lol. Oh and shows how out of touch I am... I did not realize that ID4 was the working title!