No Stupid Questions

2300 readers

1 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.

ex. How do I change oil
ex. How to tie shoes
ex. Can you cry underwater?

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!

Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Kokomheart@lemmy.ca

otter@lemmy.ca

Filling the Solar System with AIR - What would happen? (hackertalks.com)

submitted 1 month ago by jet@hackertalks.com to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's suppose we could dump enough "breathable" air (whatever that means for humans) into the solar system that it filled the spaces between planets.

What would happen?

A - I imagine it would then become possible to fly airplanes between planets, perhaps balloons? Would space travel become easier or harder?

B - According to another lemmy post, we would start to hear sound waves from the sun (A constant jackhammer sound - delightful)

C - Each each planet become the center of some mega cyclone (like the Jupiter storms, but bigger)?

D - At some point the air above us wouldn't be pushing down onto the earth at sea level, could we survive the additional pressure?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Fermion@feddit.nl 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You say that air doesn't weigh much but 1 atmosphere of pressure is already 14.7 pounds pee square inch at sea level. That's enough to flatten a steel barrel if a vacuum is pulled inside it. The consequences of increased atmospheric pressure at the earths surface alone would be nothing short of a mass extinction event. Every planet would become a gas giant, and potentially even brown dwarfs if not stars in their own rights. I bet Saturn and Jupiter would ignite at the very least.

If we thought global warming was bad, the heating of the gas accretion combined with the insulating effects of a thicc atmosphere would likely completely eradicate all life.

On the plus side, it would be one hell of a show before all life burns out of existence.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago

Yeah, this question kinda undersells how it's sprinkling a couple aspirational rocks into an enormous cosmic gas cloud, rather than providing those rocks with a quaint environment. Even the provolone-slice model that's 1 AU thick is only lighter by two orders of magnitude. It's one million times the total mass of everything else in the solar system. Spreading it on as thickly as our soupy atmosphere, where even certain mammals can flap hard enough to hunt in midair, would have an impact on world events the way a period impacts a sentence.