Build fast!
No sun
- Thread starter Deckerd
- Start date
Would you like me to make a simulation of the orbits? Choose a date-and-time you want the sun to disappear at, and I shall make it so.
For the night sky, you won't see the planets anymore, but of course you will still see the stars. The moon will be completely invisible, but it will block out a disc, as a 'black hole' in the starscape.
Plants would die first. Give it a month for that to happen. But it will be a combination of frost death and dark death. Then large herbivore mammals like elephants and cows would die without food, if they haven't already frozen solid after 1 month. I expect the equatorial surface temperatures would plummet to -50'C within a month. Humans might do ok at first. We do store up food, and we have a limited supply of fuel (firewood) that could keep us going for a month or two? Rats would fair well too I think, being able to burrow below our warmed homes. And ants and cockroaches have good survival. After humans die, the rats will feed on us. They'll last a couple of days longer until our fires die down and the house goes cold, and they freeze.
As for the oceans freezing, the initial cooling will be fairly quick. You know how sea temperature drops a couple of degrees at night. I imagine an ice crust would begin to form on the ocean within a month. This will prevent surface convection and trap a lot of heat in. The crust will slowly thicken, and as it does it becomes a better insulator able to trap in more heat. Remember that 4'C is the densest water. It will sink to the ocean floor, and icy 0'C water will be higher up against the ice crust.
Balance this against geothermal energy from the core of the earth, and the ocean depths probably wouldn't ever freeze solid.
In the sea, Plankton would stop growing and whales would die pretty quickly. As the ocean crusts over (2 months), most fish would swim to deeper warmer waters. When fish die, their bodies sink to the ocean bed which the deep sea life could feed on for several years. (There will be a lot of dead fish for them.) That deep sea life would be the last life to die. Maybe 10 years altogether?
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Underground bunker networks already exist and no doubt some are fully functional with hydroponics etc and im sure in an emergency those bunkers could be loaded with resources that can be used steadily to upgrade the bunker by the inhabitants.
Essentially you'd have an isolated ecosystem in those bunkers because there would be no life/resources outside because of the hard pernicious frost. (Where I will reign of course 
)
In projects to date at creating artificial ecosystems, we've had very poor success with sustainability. Hydroponics isn't a miracle science either; it's far from perfected. Hydroponic plants can and do get sick, and can and do produce sickly/infertile offspring. It's not sustainable.
)In projects to date at creating artificial ecosystems, we've had very poor success with sustainability. Hydroponics isn't a miracle science either; it's far from perfected. Hydroponic plants can and do get sick, and can and do produce sickly/infertile offspring. It's not sustainable.
There is a way to do a rough check. If anyone has a copy of a GCM code on their computer, see if you can zero the incoming solar flux and then see what happens.
Punctuation can be your friend.
It's good to have at least one.
Back on-topic - I saw a simple analogy to palnetary system dynamics demonstrated on a science show this weekend. Tie a rock to a string and swing it around your head (the scientist was showing how the mass of the rock made his body oscilate in sympathetic rythm, showing how we detect a planet around a distant star).
For the purposes of our discussin of removing the sun suddenly, try the same excercise with 8 rocks of varying sizes on 8 strings of varying lengths. Get 'em swinging around your head for a bit. Then let go of them all at once.
That's what would happen to our solar system of the mass of the sun suddenly vanished.
For the purposes of our discussin of removing the sun suddenly, try the same excercise with 8 rocks of varying sizes on 8 strings of varying lengths. Get 'em swinging around your head for a bit. Then let go of them all at once.
That's what would happen to our solar system of the mass of the sun suddenly vanished.
Uh ... don't do this. Really.
Neptune will wrap its string around your neck rather tightly and you'll let go of all the strings in a panic. Aunt Beth, who had been looking on in horror at your attempt, will get hit in the face with Uranus. Saturn will smash a hole in the fish tank, pouring a deluge of water out on to the floor and leaving a bunch of flip-flopping victims splashing in the debris. Jupiter will kill the cat outright ... but that's okay, she had it coming after peeing on your bed again last night. Mars will bounce harmlessly off the wall before landing on the remote control and miraculously changing the channel from ESPN to History, which -- by a peculiar coincidence -- will be airing a segment on the bola ... at least for an instant. Venus will punch through the window and strike the neighbor's boy in delightful, if unintentional, retribution for the lit paper bag filled with dog poop he just left on your doorstep as a prank. Mercury will hit the valve on the propane tank you've been storing by the front door, nudging it at just the right angle to open the valve and begin spewing a steady jet of flammable gas into your living room. What the hell were you doing storing propane in the living room, you jerk?
Any way, I didn't forget Earth. Remember that show on the History channel about bolas? Well, the instant after Mars triggered that, Earth ricocheted off a different wall and smashed your prized giant plasma TV. Littering the floor with glass shards, and leaving the still-activated unit sparking on the wall.
Pity about the increasing presence of propane gas.
That sounds entirely took much like the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Worst Day of Your Life.
Yes, but look at the bright side. If you did this before 2006, you would have nine strings, not eight. Who knows what kind of damage Pluto would have caused?
Very deep sea life would probably thrive for a LONG, LONG, time... after all, people theorize that there could be dark and cold seas under one of Jupiter's moons, and if that is the case, I would not rule out finding primordial fish or something, like we have on Earth, that live so deep, in such darkness, that they have adapted to the cold and absence of sunlight.
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