Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes wild ideas for how to tinker with the universe and tests their effects against the laws of physics, from breaking the moon in half to causing doomsday events with gravitational waves. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or our podcast page.
The epic journey begins: In the season finale of Dead Planets Society, hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane send Earth on a space voyage that will take them on a journey across our solar system.
After all, sending Earth into space without its home planet would be a dark, cold journey that would wipe out all life on Earth. Then the journey would be pointless, since there would be no one to see the wonders of the universe. So we have to take the Sun with us. The rest of the planets are just a bonus.
Needless to say, moving the sun is no easy task, especially keeping the planets in orbit around it, which is why astrophysicist Jay Farihi of University College London joins us in this episode to help shed some light on the problem.
One possibility is to build a giant warp drive, a self-contained space-time bubble that travels by warping the space in front of it. But these hypothetical devices are notorious for potentially allowing faster-than-light travel, and the key to binding all planets to the sun is to travel slowly. Plus, we don’t know how to build one.
Another option would be to place a black hole just in front of the Sun, accelerating it slightly – the black hole would then have to move along with the Sun, or alternatively, a train of black holes could pass through the Solar System in a cosmic relay race.
While these options are particularly impractical, there are other more plausible ideas — not feasible, but at least more feasible than a solar-system-sized warp drive — that include a set of giant solar sails or placing an unbreakable straw inside the sun and releasing the high pressure inside with jets of plasma.
The universe is full of places our hosts would love to visit along with our newly navigable solar system, from star clusters to nebulae to supermassive black holes – all it takes is a few technological impossibilities to make it happen.
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(TagToTranslate) Astrophysics
