From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 08:57:18 MDT
On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 11:00:57AM -0700, Party of Citizens wrote:
> Now that is foresight! Now that we've solved the all-important
> ant-power problem, any guestimates as to how much rocket power it
> would take to move Pluto out of orbit and take it for a spin?
Pluto weights around 1.27e22 kg and has a velocity of 4.74 km/sec.
So we need a comparable amount of kinetic energy to get it to move
as we want. 0.5 mv^2 gives 1.43e27 J of energy. Since the
expression "take it for a spin" assumes that it can be done in a
short while, say an hour, we need 3.96e25 W of energy.
That is 2.65e28 antpowers. Assuming that an ant weighs 1e-5
kilograms, the total weight of the ants needed to push Pluto is
2.65e23 kg - about 21 times the mass of the planet. Too bad, it
would have made a wonderful sight to have an ant-powered mobile
planet.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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