Life, Universe and everything within

Soy sauce under a microscope. Bizarre.

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wow that´s crazy.... you sure that´s soy sauce? A bunch of squares :)
 
Anyone ever thought about this little thing, read it a week ago or so and it´s quite cool :)

Basically when a scientist is studying atoms it´s essentially atoms trying to understand themselves.

It´s very beautiful i think and very neat :)

You can say the same about the Universe trying to understand itself.
 
I'm trying to think of it in a small scale.. maybe think of a hula hoop which you hold around a big spherical object. Perhaps that would mimic the continuous bridge.. so if I were to hold the hula hoop with my hand and then let it go, then the top would hit the ground, thus increasing the arc at the bottom? I dunno.. its nearly three in the morning :)
 
I'd say it's more like this: Take a giant hula hoop, put a whole bunch of people inside it, and get them all to face the outside and grab the hoop. Then they all try and pull the hoop inwards at the same time, with the same amount of force. Like this:

c9BWbxc.jpg


If the pillarless bridge was around the whole globe it would most likely stay hovering in the air, assuming that the bridge was made out of infinitely strong material. Gravity would keep pulling the mass towards the centre of the planet, and since the gravitational force would be acting more or less equally across the whole structure, it wouldn't go one way or the other. It's the same principle that is applied to the earth's crust, and the reason why planets are spherical. Think of what might happen if Saturn's rings suddenly solidified into one single solid mass going the whole way round the planet. It would stay exactly where it is.

Realistically, the bridge would probably crush itself, break up and fall to the surface in smaller pieces, as the gravitational force overwhelms the structure and tries to pull it inwards. Like our hypothetical giant hula hoop breaking from the stress of all the people inside it trying to pull it inward.

Interesting thought experiment nonetheless... Hampus Andersson, maybe you could try sending that question in to the author of the xkcd webcomic? He does a whole blog series on stuff like this at http://what-if.xkcd.com/. All of those articles are worth a read, and your question is definitely within the scope of it. He'll do a far better job of trying to work out this problem than I have.
 
What would happen if you flew a Cessna on other solar system bodies? The answer is here:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
"Venus: Unfortunately, X-Plane is not capable of simulating the hellish environment near the surface of Venus. But physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.

The atmosphere on Venus is over 60 times denser than Earth’s, which is thick enough that a Cessna moving at running speed would rise into the air. Unfortunately, the air it’s rising into is hot enough to melt lead. The paint would start melting off in seconds, the plane’s components would fail rapidly, and the plane would glide gently into the ground as it came apart under the heat stress.

A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)

The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.

Venus is a terrible place. "

:roflmao:
 
Could not find any good thread to ask this but here it is,

Imagine building a bridge around the whole world and then knock out all the pillars at the exact same time.
What would happen to the bridge?

Although the theoretical net force is zero and it should stay floating there, the position is unstable (like leaving a pencil standing up), and in practice it would fall to ground somewhere and collapse.

This is regardless of you building it inside the atmosphere (by far the worst case) or outside of it (at least you would enjoy the bridge for a while).

You can read books from the Ringworld series (from Larry Niven, do not confuse with the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett) where the action happens on a big version of this concept. After the publication of the first book some scientists pointed out that the construction is unstable, so in the following books the author wrote about some thrusters that correct deviations of the ring and keep it centered.

The Dyson sphere, making a full shell around a planet/star, is also unstable.
 
Although the theoretical net force is zero and it should stay floating there, the position is unstable (like leaving a pencil standing up), and in practice it would fall to ground somewhere and collapse.
Yea i would imagine it spinning out of control but i can´t see how it will impact the earth if the forces applied to it is identical all the way around.
And assuming gravity is the same all around the earth and the earth is a perfect sphere for the arguments sake.
 

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