this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Imagine seeing the moon just switch off
That would be a beautiful, terrifying sight. You could gaze up at the most amazing view of the stars as the whole world froze to death.
I wonder if you had the opportunity to do so leisurely.
A suddenly vanishing sun would also mean a spectularly high energy gravity wave hitting the earth. You might be dead before even realizing that anything is off...
Would that wave be that destructive? I can definitely see it screwing up the orbits of Jupiter's moons, maybe even our own moon, but would it be much worse than a small earthquake?
The Sun's gravity at Earth's distance is only 0.0059m/s². I'm not exactly certain about how the magnetude of a gravity wave relates to the magnetude of the static force, but even if the force fluctuates rapidly at ten times the static force, that's less than a hundredth of a g; enough to be perceivable but you wouldn't even loose your balance.
I wonder if the sudden change in direction would be the bigger problem, as we no longer had the sun to orbit around.
This is a good question for Randall Monroe, if he hasn’t already addressed it.
I thought the same after writing the gravity wave comment. Really not sure what the effects would be and the equations involved are far from intuitive...
Is Randall doing new What-If stuff? I have only seen old articles on his website recently.
There is a really great short story by Larry Niven based on a similar premise:
"Inconstant Moon"
There is also an "Outer Limits" episode based on this. I watched that before knowing the short story and it is one of only 2 or three OL episodes that I still have an active memory of...