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what really happened to the Titanic (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

Ladies, Gentlemen, Nuclear Engineers, Aliens bent on conquest and demi-gods or demons bent on wrath and destruction; Look, we have a job to do. The earth probably isn't going to shatter on its own. At least not with that attitude. We need teamwork. Collaboration. Hard math. Next, next-next-next-gen explosives and a lot of them.

We can do this!

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    The bigger problem is Earth is gooey at scale. Seriously, the mantle, which is most of Earth's mass, is gooey rock. "shattering" as if it were solid simply isn't going to happen. Most of the Earth is like thick caramel or worse as far as "shattering" is concerned.

    The best you could hope for is something like how the moon formed; an impact (very) roughly 10x less than the gravitational binding energy of the Earth itself (which is crazy in and of itself!). If you'll note, the Earth 'survived' that impact, but was forever changed in significant ways.

    What's even crazier, is that Earth had single celled organisms growing on it less than 500 million years later! For reference, the oldest mountain ranges are 2-3x older in relative terms.

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