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.