Why God stopping the Sun in the sky is so stupid, no matter which way you look at it!

Joshua call on God and God stops the sun in the sky right?

Well considering God was only doing this such that Joshua could have light to continue his butchery of a fleeing people (man woman and child), this has to be the most inefficient use of military force ever.  The Earth rotates once a day (ish, it actually depends on how you define days, when the Sun is in the same place again (solar time) , or the stars (siderial time)).  Just to give that some perspective, the people at the Earth surface on the equator are travelling about 1000 miles per hour (1.4x the speed of sound in the frame of reference of the Earths center of mass), those at temperate latitudes are doing about half of that, and those at the poles are doing zero!  This means if God merely stops the Earth, the people on the surface will be doing about half the speed of sound relative to the surface.  Given that it generally hurt to fall over, hitting objects at the best part of the speed of sound is probably going to sting!

Just so you know, this is what it looks like for something to hit a wall at about the speed of sound!

 

However to truely ‘Stop the Sun in the sky’ you need to stop the Earth in it’s orbit.  Here the calculations are actually very easy.  The Earths orbit around the Sun in about 30 km/ second.  Given the speed of sound is about 1/3rd km per second, this means the Earths orbital velocity is some 90 times the speed of sound.  So in order to stop the Sun in the sky you need to reduce the Earth velocity by 90 times the speed of sound, which in a frictionless environment is the same energy it would take to accelerate the Earth from rest to 90x the speed of sound.

So how much energy would this take?

Well kinetic energy is given by 1/2 x mass x velocity^2 (thats velocity squared)

So lets take a unit mass (1kg), and accelerate from rest to 30 000 meters per second (30 km/s the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun)

KE = 0.5 x 1 x 30 000^2 joules (1/2 mv^2)

KE = 225 000 000 joules = 225 000 kJ

So how much explosive would be needed to accelerate a unit mass to his velocity.

Well wiki tells us that a killogram of TNT exploding releases 3 000 000 J of energy per kg,  = 3 000 kJ

That means it will take about (225 000/3 000) kg of TNT to accelerate a kg to the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun.  Give or take, it requires about a 100 times an objects mass in TNT to accelerate it to this orbital velocity.  So to stop the Earth in its orbit would require about 100 times its mass in high explosives.

Lets just take a look at this in terms of total war.  Historically it turns out bombing is not a very efficient way of killing people, such that in WW2 it would typically take about 1 ton of bombs to kill one person.  Some ball park numbers,

In the bombing of Berlin, some 60 000 tons of explosive were dropped, which killed some 20-50 000 people.  These are actually fairly typical numbers for WW2.

So modern(ish) warfare takes about a TON of explosive to kill one person.  That might sound inefficiency till you compare to to God!.

God expends 100x the mass of the Earth in high explosive (~100 x 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons)

So lets say God killed 10 000 people by doing this, this means that God expended about the same energy as 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons of high explosive per person killed. The biggest atom bomb ever was the Czar bomb at some 50 megatons (50 000 000 tons of TNT).  This means that Gods expenditure of energy here was about the same as 100 000 000 000  (ONE HUNDRED BILLION Czar bombs per person he killed).

So, lets see, God, determined to wipe out a fleeing people, first tries throwing rocks at them, and manages to kill some of them, and then when Joshua wants some extra daylight to continue with this religious genocide, God obliges by stopping the Earth in its orbit at an energetic cost of 100x the Earth mass in high explosive, when the same effect could have been had with a truck load of flares.  Given that people can be killed simply by simply stopping the electrical current that regulates the heart, stopping the Earth such that Joshua can continue to kill man, woman and child by stabbing them with sharp pieces of metal seems to be both EXCEPTIONALLY inefficient and psychologically VERY messed up.

 

 

Thunderf00t 2012: The Aspirations.

The Priorities :

Why Do People Laugh at Creationists.

Of the people I talked to at The Reason Rally, (of the stuff I’d done) this was mentioned more than anything else as the key factor in ‘saving the saved’.   Two more episodes were meant to be put out before the Reason Rally (they are all scripted, just need a couple of weeks to put them together), just all the distractions that WLCs DMCA abuse and Dawahfilms flagging harassment took up all my spare time.  The Reason Rally, above all else convinced me that this is an area to focus on.   I am hoping to get 1/3 to ½ the time devoted to this (probably means somewhat under half the videos will be WDPLAC).

 

“OMG, The Bible says WHAT?!”

The bible is batshit crazy.  Most Christian have never read it, and so Im going to make the media.  I may even start this up as a guest spot for people read their favorite crazy bible verses.  This may take the form of a ‘mid-week short’.

 

SCIENCE BITCHES, IT WORKS

I’ve already got permission to get the footage from within a nuclear reactor for an experiment (~June).  Last year I showed you how close the edge of the unknown was and even demonstrated, for the first time as far as I can tell, that gaseous potassium is evolved when the metal is thrown into water, and its GREEN!  This year I’m going to show you the REAL face of the unknown, and how it could affect your life.  Yup going to go inside a nuclear reactor to look at something a billion times smaller that your typical human!

 

Nailing the religious types in the 2012 elections.

I would have liked to have been more active here, but regrettably I got sidetracked into DMCA and flagging complaints.

 

Build the community. 

The secular atheist community on YT emerged strongly, quickly overtaking all the religious communities.  In order to maintain and take full advantage of this position we need to increase the number of people producing good media regularly. I will be moving towards facilitating that goal.  There will be two mechanisms, 1) A (biyearly?) competition for people who have produced at least 3 good videos in three months.  This way promotional effort is focused on those who are both committed to, and capable of producing the goods 2) donation of equipment (green screen, cameras, sound equipment etc) to active folks who are making quality content videos, but that have the amateur-ish look that doesn’t fly so well on youtube these days.  Basically, imagine if someone had supplied ZOMGitscriss with a camera, green screen and other kit early on how much this would have helped.

-Deploy the resources where they will have greatest benefit for the community.

 

Create a DVD.

This is another project I’ve been trying to get done for about a year, to create a dvd of the work, if not for sale, then simply so it can be hosted and torrented.  Indeed I had wanted to get a thousand or so pressed (several kgs) to give away at the Reason Rally.  Sadly again event overtook the aspirations.

This year I’m not going to get enough time to go touring, so sadly no touring or dark sky astro video.   I might yet be able to get a good timelapse of Mars though!  Hope for clear skies

Yup, it’s going to be a busy year!

 

-=Support via Paypal=-

 

I dub thee ‘Two Citations Craig’?

   It has been marvelously funny reading the comments defending ‘Two Citations’ Craig on my latest vid.  The superficial nature of these comments can maybe best highlighted by this hypothetical.

IF I had put up a video as ‘a professional scientist’ saying how Craig MIGHT be a good philosopher, but is merely a layman when it comes to science, and that as a professional scientist I find his arguments  very unsophisticated and frankly embarrassing. (all in an insipidly smug patronizing tone)

   Who seriously believes that these exact same people would have NOT gone absolutely ballistic highlighting the exact same problems with the vacuous nature of these arguments that I did.  Damn, I’m almost tempted to do it, yknow as one of those ‘Double-Check and Mate, sucker’ type moves.

   Anyways, it clearly got under the skin of these people to have it highlighted that their ‘leading academic’ has a pathetic citaion record. Nothing bites like the truth eh boys!.. Which leads to the obvious question:

OMG, WTF IS ON HIS HEAD!

YES its FULLY OPERATIONAL!

The headset has 4 basic components. High gain antennae, diversity receiver, base station recorder and video goggles, both taken off the same AV (audio/video) feed.

The plane has a hero HD camera on it, which records HD on its own, but also pipes AV through to the transmitter, which then goes down to the base station.

I had doubts about if it would fly or not. The plane is now over 1 000g (heavy for an easy star) and a lot of the new weight is ‘high’ on the plane. Weight above the center of gravity will destabilize the plane.

Thankfully it looks like it all works fine! W00T. Now to try it somewhere fun!