In case you want to flee this wretched Earth, 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI... Astronomers have discovered 139 minor planets lurking at the edge of the Solar System after examining a dataset collected to study dark energy in the universe. Small worlds that circle our Sun in orbits further out than Neptune are labelled trans-Neptunian objects (TNO), with one being the relegated-planet Pluto. Eggheads, led …
Big, big bomb time? [Why do I have a vision of a girl saying this?]
Perhaps light off a really *huge* Tsar Bomba-style girl out in the distant Lagrange zone with hundreds of telescopes and probes looking all over the sky to catch light bounced off anything out there in the darkness? Due to signal-lag we would need to keep them running al day, every day for four years so we could map the Oort Cloud.
Maybe even use up our nuclear stockpile to do stereo imaging with many light sources?
We'd need cameras on Luna's Farside [sneaky!], in Earth's Trojans and in some other nice places, too, to capture as much data as possible. Maybe even to do interferometry.
Essentially, we'd be doing strobe photography of the System. Cool, yes?
Do you think your piddly ass little nuclear bomb is going to light up the Oort cloud better than the 2x10³ºKg continuous Fusion Bomb that we call The Sun? <rotflmao>
A nearby Nova or Supernova will help, but if it's near enough we'd all be dead anyways, so nobody to observe the nice reflected light. Cheaper and easier to send some accountants or Quantity Surveyors out there and let then do their thang! <LOL>
That's a brilliant idea. The only problem is, we don't have the technology.
Sure we can make something as bright or even brighter than the sun in term of brightness per unit area. However, even if we cover our whole planet with this light, it has to be 10 thousands brighter than the sun to get the same output as the sun since the sun is 10 thousands bigger in area. And then TNOs receive double brightness. I don't think it really helps. And the for all the energy of humankind has collected the entire human history, cannot light it up for a second. At the current rate of our entire population increasing energy consumption, sustaining it running is not achievable for thousands of years, even if we put all our energy harvested to it.
I am sure we have better ways to do it as well as better use of the energy now or later.
The potential is that there could be another asteroid belt further out. There have been suggestions for a long time that there's a larger object out there to explain some minor discrepancies in the inner orbits of planets, could there be just a couple of billion tones of small debris? A disturbance in the outer ring, or the formation of the outer ring, might explain the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago that reshaped the Earth.
This is going to be a very interesting research area for the next 20 years.
I'd guess not, you'd probably still say 8
Why, well it seems that 'Planet' is a protected title within this solar system, and when Pluto was found to be using it incorrectly, the title was stripped and Pluto became a TNO.
So, the other TNO's unfortunately do not have whatever qualifications or experience are necessary to be allowed to use the protected title of 'Planet'
The big 8 have really got a corner on that part of the market.
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