Posted: Nov 09, 2011 10:27 am
If Melancholia would enter from the Kuyper belt, drifting in with low relative motion, it would fall in and probably miss the Sun the first tumble. It would fall in with a very high relative motion, and considering its albedo those in charge of the planet would already know a year in advance, and would have started emigrating. Earth would have become a tyranny, where those wanting to leave and those wanting to make sure humanity (and life) would survive would be conspiring at all costs to make sure something would survive. A lunar or asteroid base would seem the only sensible idea, but I wonder if a year would be enough - even with all the world cooperating, to get this show on the road. A permanent base in a year would be extremely difficult. Five years yes - we would have a permanent settlement, one year 'iffy.
If the planet would have this trajectory I'd regard it as suspicious. Rather contrived - an entire planet! - but I'd regard it as a termination act. Destroy Earth and life completely. It's too unlikely, like hitting bullseye ten times in a row.
The orbit makes some sense, but the final stage doesn't. The movie is a cinematic statement depicting the frivolous irrelevance of human morons, especially highly entitled and useless rich human morons, and the planet is just a storytelling tool explaining how disinterested the cosmos is in our very elite humans.
The final stage of the impact misses realism in three ways -
* the planet would not 'capture' Earth at this impact velocity. If it went too far it would just 'merely' inflict a degree of Earthquakes and tidal upheaval (several kilometres of sea crashing over all continents) and we'd probably see the continents crack with volcanoes everywhere. The idea of an Earth 'captured' in a gravity wake of a Melancholia is like an Earth 'dislodged' from something like a 'proper orbit. Oh so Keplerian. Reality is Earth is a coalescled glob of warm fudge that would ripple and quiver like jellified roadkill with every passing truck on the highway. Melancholia's first pass would have turned Earth in to a sea of bright Magma, and humans would have started dying a week earlier.
But that would have left the cinematic point unmade - Humans right now are acting as children at best, irrelevant and self-centered idiots at worst.
And death can come to a world as easily as it comes to a single human life.
The best message of Melancholia is that would have done almost nothing if it were to happen. We'd cry and scream but we'd all die, and so what? It would be sad but nothing would be there to later on reflect on this manifest sadness. The tragedy exists only in ourselves and after the momentary pain and terror the Cosmos would barrel on more or less unperturbed and unimpressed. In fact the Cosmos as such doesn't even do 'impressed'.
The tragedy is we may be doing the same as Melancholia - in a century there might not be much life on this planet left, and certainly no human life. Would it be a greater tragedy if we caused an extinction of this magnitude ourselves? If your answer is yes - why do we not give a damn about even 10% chance of this happening?
The answer is - because we as individuals die. Why care about the abstraction of extinction if we ourselves all die? It isn't anyone's problem that the species may die 50 years from now. In the future we're all dead.
If the planet would have this trajectory I'd regard it as suspicious. Rather contrived - an entire planet! - but I'd regard it as a termination act. Destroy Earth and life completely. It's too unlikely, like hitting bullseye ten times in a row.
The orbit makes some sense, but the final stage doesn't. The movie is a cinematic statement depicting the frivolous irrelevance of human morons, especially highly entitled and useless rich human morons, and the planet is just a storytelling tool explaining how disinterested the cosmos is in our very elite humans.
The final stage of the impact misses realism in three ways -
* the planet would not 'capture' Earth at this impact velocity. If it went too far it would just 'merely' inflict a degree of Earthquakes and tidal upheaval (several kilometres of sea crashing over all continents) and we'd probably see the continents crack with volcanoes everywhere. The idea of an Earth 'captured' in a gravity wake of a Melancholia is like an Earth 'dislodged' from something like a 'proper orbit. Oh so Keplerian. Reality is Earth is a coalescled glob of warm fudge that would ripple and quiver like jellified roadkill with every passing truck on the highway. Melancholia's first pass would have turned Earth in to a sea of bright Magma, and humans would have started dying a week earlier.
But that would have left the cinematic point unmade - Humans right now are acting as children at best, irrelevant and self-centered idiots at worst.
And death can come to a world as easily as it comes to a single human life.
The best message of Melancholia is that would have done almost nothing if it were to happen. We'd cry and scream but we'd all die, and so what? It would be sad but nothing would be there to later on reflect on this manifest sadness. The tragedy exists only in ourselves and after the momentary pain and terror the Cosmos would barrel on more or less unperturbed and unimpressed. In fact the Cosmos as such doesn't even do 'impressed'.
The tragedy is we may be doing the same as Melancholia - in a century there might not be much life on this planet left, and certainly no human life. Would it be a greater tragedy if we caused an extinction of this magnitude ourselves? If your answer is yes - why do we not give a damn about even 10% chance of this happening?
The answer is - because we as individuals die. Why care about the abstraction of extinction if we ourselves all die? It isn't anyone's problem that the species may die 50 years from now. In the future we're all dead.