Many thanks to Linda for supplying this transcript!
[0:00] “As You Remember It: The Lift-Off of APOLLO 11”: “T-minus 60 seconds and counting”
[0:02] Thunderf00t: You know, risk comes to us in many forms, and sometimes death doesn’t even bother to wear a mask. And sometimes, if you wanna achieve great things, you’ve just gotta accept that dance with death.
[0:19] This is the mighty Saturn V rocket. It weighed about 3,000 tons—almost all of which was fuel. And that fuel had about the same energy density as high explosives.
[0:32] clip: “20 seconds and counting”
[0:34] Thunderf00t: That is, this beast was a barely controlled, 3,000 ton BOMB. Let me just throw that into perspective for you.
[0:45] This, on the same scale, is the B-17 Flying Fortress. It was the mainstay heavy bomber of the United States in early WWII. And it could carry about three tons of bombs to a distant target. And about a 1,000 of these guys could lay waste to a city. A thousand bombers at say, three tons a piece—that’s 3,000 TONS of explosives. That’s about the same energetic content as the Saturn V rocket.
[1:15] clip: “T-minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal”
[1:18] Thunderf00t: And man, [dramatic music] as frail as you or I, ascended ALL the way to the top of this rocket, which was essentially a 3,000 ton BOMB
[1:30] clip: “12, 11, 10,”
[1:32] Thunderf00t: -enough energy to lay waste to a city
[1:36] clip: “9, ignition sequence start”
[1:39] Thunderf00t: -and fully aware, at exactly what they were sitting on
[1:43] clip: “6, 5,”
[1:45] Thunderf00t: -they said, ‘Let’s light this candle’
clip: “4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engine running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff! 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11 . . . Tower clear! Tower clear!”
[2:03] Thunderf00t: And even with all those insane risks, I would’ve still changed places with them in a heartbeat, for the wonders that they saw.
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.
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,
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.
The Moon, the Jovian (jupiter) system, and the Uranus system, all on the same scale (all photographed prime focus through an 11in f6.3 SCT) aug 10th 2011.
The moon, Jupiter and moons, and Uranus and moons, all to scale. Click to enlarge.
It’s all part of a larger project I’ve been working on of trying to get time-lapse of various extra-terrestrial bodies.
The real problem is the Earth is just spinning too bloody fast! Damn, there’s a reason why all those new telescopes are going out there in the Legrange points!
Initially I was having all sorts of trouble tracking the moon! Hmm that just shouldn’t be, it tracks everything else in the sky just fine. Then of course, the obvious dawns on me:- it’s tracking the stars and not the moon! The moon goes around the sky an extra time every 28 days! Thats about 12 degrees a day, or half a degree an hour! Given that the moons only about half a degree in diameter, no wonder it kept drifting out of the field! Okay, so I got intermediate time-lapse of the moon, that shows the project is possible. A failure, sure, but a very instructive failure.
After the moon I took some caps of Jupiter and moons, and Uranus and moons, great for putting them all into perspective. Then it dawns on me, that it might be possible to do a timelapse of Uranus’s moons too, that’d be really cool. So I set up the scope to take pictures every 5 minutes. The results weren’t that impressive (well it only ran for a few hours before dawn), but more interestingly is that you can actually see uranus move against the background stars over this period. It really threw me, because I was trying to line up the background stars, and it just wasn’t possible, then the obvious came to mind. Duhh, Uranus is moving! So yeah, inadvertently I’ve now found that you can watch the planets move in real time! Probably works best on the faint ones, like Uranus, as you can see more background stars!.
The stars in the background are fixed. The two picture of Uranus are taken a few hours apart, and while the moons (relatively close to the planet) don't move much, the planet conspicuously moves against the background stars!) (click to enlarge)
Thunderf00t 