Re: PLUTO, Our Future Home

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 08:57:18 MDT

  • Next message: Robert J. Bradbury: "RE: PLUTO, Our Future Home"

    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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