And now for the segue into a shower thought - so the first thing night side would notice is the Moon disappearing (if it's in the night sky), but after that, how long before effects begin to suggest something is seriously wrong on the day side. Something tells me it will be sooner than the morning.
I’d assume after 8 minutes the people on the day side would notice and all media would blow up, so hopefully you’d be asleep and wouldn’t have to worry :)
RandomVideos@programming.dev
on 07 Feb 19:15
nextcollapse
But all the solar panels will stop working so there will be no electricity. Batteries would run out and any other source of energy would be destroyed by people who started a cult worshipping the Sun hoping it would reappear
So no social media on the part of the Earth that would notice the disappearance of the sun. The other side wouldnt have any problems with electricity since they wouldnt have the Sun-worshipping cult
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world
on 07 Feb 19:37
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worry
I, for one, welcome the inexplicable annihilation of the sun
My guess is that bacteria down in the crust near thermal vents would live the longest. Thousnands of years if they are able to follow the heat down.
Figure bunkered people might make it a few months depending on their power source and ability to withstand dropping pressure. Not sure how long it would take for the atmosphere to freeze. Government bunker that is vacuum proof with a reactor might make it a decade.
ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Feb 14:17
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The first measurable thing that would happen is that we would stop orbiting the sun, since (counter to what my 12-year-old ufo-believing self thought) gravity also travels at the speed of light.
GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.world
on 07 Feb 18:32
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For further reading, see Galaxias by Stephen Baxter.
The speed of light is more than just the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Not particles, not gravitational waves (waves and particles are actually kinda equivalent anyway), not any kind of “information”.
Consequently, if two events occur in a way that a particle would have to travel faster than the speed of light to travel between them, then it’s impossible for one of those events to be caused by the other. They must be unrelated. So the soonest we will see any effect of the sun blipping out of existence, whatever the medium (light/gravity/??), is after 8 minutes.
Interestingly it’s not, but the thing is that you can’t actually use quantum entanglement to send information from one particle to the other, so it does not violate the principles of special relativity.
So usually this is explained with two scientists, Alice and Bob, on far away planets. They’re each in the possession of a particle that is entangled with the other, and in a superposition of state 1 and state 2. When Alice measures the state of her particle, it collapses into one of the states, say state 1. When Bob measures the state of his particle immediately after, before any particle travelling at light speed could get there, it will also be in state 1 (assuming they were entangled in such a way that the state will be the same).
Due to special relativity, for some observers it could actually have been Bob who measured the state of his particle first, before Alice did. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. They both got the same information: “state 1”, but since they can’t control what state the particle will collapse to, no information can be exchanged between Alice and Bob.
In quantum encryption, it is that bit of shared information that Alice and Bob can use as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages, but those messages are still sent the old fashioned way, using light waves traveling at light speed.
apotheotic@beehaw.org
on 07 Feb 21:58
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After 8 minutes, almost certainly
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 07 Feb 23:55
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Gravity isn’t a force, strictly speaking. Objects move along geodesics in spacetime (that’s basically a straight line along a curved surface), and gravity bends spacetime, and therefore also these geodesics, around massive objects. So you don’t actually get accelerated by gravity, that’s why you don’t feel anything during free fall. What we perceive as the force of gravity pushing us down, is the solid ground accelerating us upwards, when following the geodesic would have us fall instead.
So when the sun disappears, the geodesic that used to spiral around the sun suddenly straightens out, and the neutral movement, the new free fall, has the earth continuing in a straight line. You wouldn’t be able to feel that. What the other person said about tidal forces is true tho, it would likely cause worldwide tsunamis
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 07 Feb 19:38
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I wonder how long it would take before you would feel it becoming colder
Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net
on 07 Feb 19:53
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Forget colder, I kind of feel like we’re missing out on not hearing the sun thanks to space
So extremely cloudy mornings = no morning? lol just kidding.
potustheplant@feddit.nl
on 07 Feb 20:00
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The moon also doesn’t emit it’s own light. It would take longer for the moon to “disappear” than it would for the sun but it wouldn’t be the whole night.
I agree with you, but also… I’m not sure that I’d notice that I could see the moon a few minutes ago and now I can’t (unless I happened to be looking at it as it happened)… I feel like that is something that could be happening every single night and I’ve never noticed.
The sun disappearing is like… Super noticeable by comparison.
I live in the city and the moonlight is clearly noticeable so I guess it depends. I mean, a city can be considered as such with as little as 50k people so I guess that, statistically, the majority of people that live in a city would most certainly notice the lack of moonlight.
The moon is just a few light-seconds away from earth; that’s why they could have conversations with ground control during the moon landings. Moon will go dark a few seconds after the sun.
Yeah but how long is a bit? Also, without the gravity center of our solar system, how long would it take for all the planets to start drifting off into the void?
A bit - probably weeks to months. For the second question - 8 minutes for the Earth, since gravity propagates at the speed of light
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net
on 07 Feb 22:45
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A bit - probably weeks to months.
no lol
It goes from 85 to 58 in 12 hours right now in reality world
“A bit” = 1 day, and by the end of that day it’d be freezing (below freezing if you live in whiteistan)
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 08 Feb 12:46
nextcollapse
I honestly think you’re forgetting the atmosphere and like, physical ground under our feet. It doesn’t generally drop to 0C overnight unless it’s already pretty close to 0C because of the heat trapped in the atmosphere and emanating from the earth’s core. It’s going to be more like a week for most places.
burgersc12@mander.xyz
on 08 Feb 14:25
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And the sun doesn’t generally blink out of existence. Think about how much energy is on the other side of the earth, it’s not like the two sides of earth are separate they are one huge interconnected energy system. What happens on one side impacts the other, and the core doesn’t provide enough energy and the atmosphere is leaking heat constantly
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 08 Feb 16:26
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You are also forgetting the atmosphere and ground (and oceans, of course) - It being one huge interconnected energy system is exactly why I’m saying it would take longer. This guy’s calculations reckon we’d lose about 1 degree per 12 hours. January’s global average temperature was around 13°, so that’d be 6 and a half days. July last year it was 17°, so that’d be a whole 8 and a half days. It’s going to be more like a week.
The article is stupid imo. The earth cools down more than 1°F an hour when clouds appear, the sun disappearing is gonna cool down a bit more than a cloudy day. This is why I don’t get my weather forecasts from physicists. At least, that’s what seems right to me. We lose a ton of heat every night why wouldn’t losing the sun be similar lol
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 08 Feb 22:14
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The ENTIRE PLANET does not cool by more than a degree from a few clouds you absolute moron. We’re not talking about your local microclimate, we’re talking about the entire world. This is as dumb a response as saying it snowed recently, so global warming isn’t real.
The entire planet isn’t smothered in clouds, but your location could be. This was just a real world example of the air temperature being directly affected by a lack of sunlight. Edit: you know you might be right but I don’t wanna admit it. I was thinking in Fahrenheit. Although where I am the temps are already cold, so I might be a bit biased from that as well
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 10:03
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that article is the peak of liberal honkey reasoning, just ignores the fact that things are interdependent (sometimes in fucking hilarious ways like ignoring the sun), also casually ignores the culling of like…99.99999% of the global population, and 99.999999999999999% of its biomass
Here he forgets the entire solar system would default to another orbit, around the second biggest thing (with a lot of crashing involved, maybe around Jupiter?). Not that important to the central point though, but this alone could easily split our planet in two lmao
Socially, immediate collapse.
Current installed geothermal capacity of earth supports only 4.2 million people (Iceland makes up 200k of these).
Oil/gas/coal will support a few more but I’m too lazy to do the calcs, and it’s not gonna be anywhere near enough because you’d need so much more oil per person, since:
all your food’s light now has to come from oil
you need to heat your house everyday because weather is colder than antarctica
because no sun, there is almost no rain, almost all your food’s water has to come from desalination
people are still going to want meat, and it’s doubtful if even a single person on the planet would be able to
This would not 10x an individual’s oil needs, it would 1000x or 10,000x them, maybe more
Also the infrastructure needed to even do this would need to be built, which…it’s not, let’s be real. Therefore:
Every single government will genocide 99.99999999999% of their population minimum, except Iceland, because Iceland gets 70% of their energy from geothermal. So that means that Iceland could get away with killing off only 30% of their population, right? WRONG! Because Iceland geotherm supports 200k in a world where THE SUN EXISTS. All the food they eat, 90% of the temperature above -94F that they enjoy, all the water they drink, is basically 95% powered by the sun. So really Iceland would also have to kill off…maybe 99.9% of its population?
This culling will be done within the first week, after a few days of pretending that everything is under control. There would be lies down the chain of command, every higher-up lying to their immediate lower that they’ll make it, even the state governors might be lied to by the feds and end up tapping out right after us. They’ll just cut the heating and everybody dies in a week.
A scramble to immediately start dumping fossil fuels for heat retention and for horticulture lights. All the oil wells set alight
All resources become useless except for geothermal zones, geothermal infrastructure, and desalination infrastructure (and oil/gas/coal). Humans are dumb, and governments would have the huge problem of panicked frenzied people, who would make the situation worse than it has to be. The individuals in charge of the literal nuke buttons may go rogue and try to flee to Iceland or something.
There would be an immediate bargain between Saudi Arabia and other world leaders to allow at least the leaders and their families into the Gulf States, since these hold 55% of global desalination capacity. Same with Iceland for geothermal capacity.
Normal nuclear war is more predictable than this by orders of magnitude
Geothermal NOW supports only 4 million people. In a post-sun world it would support a small fraction of that.
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 11:08
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that article is the peak of liberal honkey reasoning
Every single government will genocide 99.99999999999% of their population
I’m gonna be real, I started thinking about responding to the tiny relevent bit at the start (it’s got a big picture to help you understand the interdependence you’re talking about), but your histrionics about justifying the hypothetical are pretty funny. Like sib nobody’s talking about how humanity would survive in the ridiculous hypothetical, we’re just talking about the physics of heat loss.
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 08:47
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I honestly think you’re forgetting the atmosphere and like, physical ground under our feet.
no im not, you’re forgetting that the sun exists
Max-Min temps (F) yesterday across 3 different continents:
Lucknow 82-53
Mandalay 90-67
Kisangani 91-76
Porto Velho 85-77
Temps drop by 22 F at night (avg) around the equator. Most tropical land reaches freezing in 1.5 days if the sun vanishes. Forget temperate.
Best case scenario is Tropical rainforest since water holds heat. Middle of Amazon gets “only” an 8 F (4.4 C) drop in 12 hours, so 3.3 days to reach freezing.
keep in mind that these temp drops occur right now, in reality meatspace, despite “the atmosphere and like, physical ground under our feet”. (both of these exist)
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 11:43
nextcollapse
Yeah, you’ll notice that your “massive” 22°F is the difference between direct sunlight and no sunlight. Do you think there’s another sun to take away after the first one, to get rid of even more sunlight and drop the temperature another 22°?
Why don’t you believe that physical materials are capable of holding heat energy? Why did you latch on to atmosphere and ground instead of the biggest energy store on the planet, the ocean (you don’t need to answer that we know it’s because those are the ones I named)? Why do you think that the temperature difference between day and night - sunlight and no sunlight - is the same as the general rate at which energy is lost from the planet? Have you not ever been outside at night to discover the largest part of the temperature drop happens as soon as the sun disappears?
You’re doing a very good job of the typical liberal application of raw, familiar logic to a new situation, but the only part of it you actually understand is that the sun supplies lots of energy, and haven’t made it any further than that.
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 12:20
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Actually, on second thoughts, this comment explicitly proves that you’re a reactionary hiding their lack of investigation behind accusations of immaterialism - just by applying your own logic to real world numbers, you’ve gone from a day to half a week. You have no place opining on this subject.
The irony of the guy replying to you with PHD in his username not understanding that the Sun blasts the Earth with an absolutely unreal amount of energy
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net
on 10 Feb 08:20
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there’s something about people who use lots of words that makes them particularly…yea
Expanding a little on the last part, Earth’s orbital velocity is about 29.8 km/s so that’s the speed at which we would suddenly be leaving the former location of the solar system in a direction that depends on what time of year it happened. Regardless of direction though, the escape velocity of the Milky Way around where we are is about 544 km/s so there’s no way we’d be leaving the galaxy. On the other hand the plane of the galaxy is only about 6 degrees off from the galactic center at the moment, so if this happened at the right time of year (don’t know when that is) we could launch somewhat towards the core. We would not however get very close to it because the sun’s own orbital velocity is about 230 km/s so we’d still be in close to the same galactic orbit overall, just potentially a bit more eccentric.
So… Solar system you get, but if I refer to it as a “system” now you get confused? I was struggling with a term that wasn’t just “all of the planets that used to be part of the solar system but since the sun is gone there is no longer a system”
Doesn’t the earth itself provide a significant amount of heat from the core? I’m sure I read somewhere that for something like every 10 meters down you dig, the temperature raises by 1° celcius. So maybe we’d not notice a temperature drop so quickly?
The surface would eventually freeze over. But some life would almost definitely survive deep underground and underwater, near geothermal vents not unlike those that hosted the first lifeforms on Earth. And, maybe, in some billions or trillions of years, Earth would stray near another star system, get captured by its gravity and slowly thaw out, restarting the evolution of life.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 07 Feb 23:10
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Would hydrothermal vents produce enough heat? Or would the oceans freeze over? And then would there just be thermal bubbles surrounding the vents in oceanic ice?
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
on 07 Feb 23:38
nextcollapse
The oceans would eventually freeze over, but the deep ocean could stay liquid for tens of millions of years. Ice is a pretty good insulator, and there is more than one moon in the solar system suspected to have liquid oceans under a layer of ice.
Not sure how quick exactly, but the earth doesn’t provide enough heat, not even close. Kurzgesagt has a video on a similar subject, without the trillions 1.7e17 Watts showering the earth every second we’d get awfully cold awfully quick. They are talking about slowly moving away from the sun, but they conclude it would get real icy
The core is still hot. If we bury ourselves deep underground, there is a chance the humanity could survive for thousands of years without a sun. If not humanity, then some sort of life will survive long enough for future archeologists to find it millions of years later.
But don’t quite me on this; I’m simply reciting from memory something I read in National Geographic or a similar publication 10-20 years ago. IDK how true this actually is.
burgersc12@mander.xyz
on 07 Feb 22:23
nextcollapse
Yeah, something will live, but I was more thinking surface life.
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 00:03
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LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 01:18
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We would need enough advance notice to prepare for massively farming mushrooms or something underground to eat. Canned food will run out in a few years, even military MREs have a shelf life. A few lucky people might survive a generation, but there’s a minimal breeding stock requirement to avoid degeneration from inbreeding. Extremely long odds, I think the human race would only survive this event in a sci-fi fantasy story.
ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 01:40
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I don’t know if I would call them the lucky ones.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 01:04
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Wherever you live on the Earth’s surface starts cooling every night and gets warmed up again the next day. It wouldn’t cool any faster if the sun went away, it would just keep cooling at the normal rate until everything was frozen. But I doubt it would take more than a week or two, depending on where you live.
Yeah, but that’s with petawatts being blasted on the other side of the earth every second, wouldn’t the loss of that make the whole system cool down faster, including the side the sun doesn’t touch? I’m thinking it’d be like having food on a hot plate, bottom is very hot, the top is less hot. But if you take the food off the plate the whole thing rapidly goes to room temp. I honestly have no idea, just conjecture tbh.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 09 Feb 21:50
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The only way to get the right answer would involve doing math and knowing enough climatology and geology to even know which math, so I dunno.
Well when temps are already ~ -1°C in your area you tend to freeze a bit quicker
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
on 07 Feb 20:16
nextcollapse
If it happens at night it will probably take 5 or 6 seconds longer for people to start seeing the first messages on the internet
jjagaimo@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Feb 20:59
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But not by much longer. People on the other side of the world or connected to satellites monitoring sunspots would notice pretty much immediately after the light ceases to reach the earth and would tell everyone else over the internet
affiliate@lemmy.world
on 07 Feb 21:20
nextcollapse
yeah but everybody else would be sleeping so it would still take longer
And even if you’re not connected at the moment, the moon will go dark.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 00:53
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Good one! If the moon wasn’t visible at the time and you were just sitting outside say at midnight, I wonder if you would notice anything different.
ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 01:38
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It would turn pitch black. So dark the stars far away would be the brightest when compared to everything else. It would be scary.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 01:47
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According to astronomers the sun doesn’t have a measurable effect on the night sky when it’s more than 18 degrees below the horizon. So I doubt naked-eye observers would notice.
Ok, first thing, did you not understand the image is a joke? Secondly, you have failed so badly at trying to use logic. And you’d notice it everywhere on the earth, both because of the moon and also just light scattering, it would become darker than ever before. And as said, most people would be asleep on the dark side, which is obvious. And it’s not like the astronomers etc. have some kind of worldwide siren to get everyone’s attention, most people wouldn’t notice it for a while, even if they posted about it online.
Galapagon@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Feb 05:54
nextcollapse
No dude, it’s only a difference of 1.3 seconds, faster then the Internet unfortunately.
This is the cutting-edge of my understanding so if I’m wrong somebody call me out, but I think because gravity is warping space-time and not actually pulling anything, we wouldn’t feel an inertia change. Our inertia would be maintained, but the space-time we’re going through would suddenly be shaped different, so we’d follow a new path
Etterra@discuss.online
on 07 Feb 23:51
nextcollapse
So would all the other planets, so there’d be a non-zero chance we’d smack into one of them. Most likely though we’d become a very, very cold rogue planet.
AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
on 08 Feb 00:16
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How do you figure? Space is fucking huge. I don’t see how any planets could collide.
The part you’re missing is that earth isn’t a point in space. That’s why there’s tides caused by the sun (which are different than tides caused by the moon)
A person wouldn’t feel the difference, but the tides would slosh back when the solar gravity stops effecting them.
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 07 Feb 23:16
nextcollapse
yes, after 8 minutes
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Feb 02:25
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I know gravity moves at the speed of light. I’m just referring to the slight pull of the gravity and the sudden shift to traveling straight off instead of a circle.
All of that will only happen after 8 minutes, see this comment.
Earth has a circular orbit because space-time is curved by the mass of the sun. (Think of a large bowling ball on a trampoline, you can make a small ball travel in circles around it, and if there was no friction, it would go on indefinitely.) When the sun’s mass suddenly disappears (by pure magic, as this would violate many laws of physics), spacetime would flatten out, at the speed of light.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Feb 19:12
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What part of “I know gravity travels at the speed of light” do you not understand, to make you think you’re explaining something to me?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Feb 00:58
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I really doubt we would notice, because if so we would already be feeling different during day and night. The sun pulls us toward the sky during the daytime and toward the ground at night. Also toward the east at sunrise and the west at sunset. But none of this seems noticeable.
The real question is if the earth becomes a rogue planet or if Jupiter captures most/all of the remaining solar system. Jupiter is technically a failed star, so could it finally get it’s glowup from being the sun’s understudy and keep us all together until we fall into the gravitational well of a new star?
If the sun just disappears, I doubt even having another sun would keep everything from flying off to fuck knows where. Jupiter, by comparison, is beyond hope. The Barycenter is far from Jupiter.
A person can’t inform others faster than the speed of light.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Feb 02:27
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But collectively nine women can have a baby in one month.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
on 09 Feb 02:31
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this guy money balls
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Feb 04:24
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Fraction of a second for transmitting information from one side of earth to other side. And teacher only said 8 minutes and the seconds are ommitted as there is always an error margin since distance from sun is not constant.
Also i assume signals are always sent from other side of the earth
I believe we’d still be warm for those 8 minutes. We have an 8 minute grace period before having to do anything, then enough time to add sweaters faster than earth cools.
teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 08 Feb 16:48
nextcollapse
it’s because light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to us. and since gravity also travels at the speed of light our orbit would only change after 8 minutes.
It’s sweaters all the way down. You have time to order from China shipped by boat before -32C happens. You’re just being a “save the sun” hippy climate alarmist /s. Energy company shareholders would benefit from high demand, so saving the sun is just selfish of you :P
Yep, it is. We’d stay in our orbit of the sun for 8 minutes after it vanished too
colmear@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Feb 21:05
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From what I know, particles that have a mass greater than 0 move below the speed of light and can never reach it. Particles that have no mass (every force is transferred via particles) move at the speed of light. So there is no way to have anything that is faster than the speed of light, not even forces.
threaded - newest
And now for the segue into a shower thought - so the first thing night side would notice is the Moon disappearing (if it's in the night sky), but after that, how long before effects begin to suggest something is seriously wrong on the day side. Something tells me it will be sooner than the morning.
I’d assume after 8 minutes the people on the day side would notice and all media would blow up, so hopefully you’d be asleep and wouldn’t have to worry :)
But all the solar panels will stop working so there will be no electricity. Batteries would run out and any other source of energy would be destroyed by people who started a cult worshipping the Sun hoping it would reappear
So no social media on the part of the Earth that would notice the disappearance of the sun. The other side wouldnt have any problems with electricity since they wouldnt have the Sun-worshipping cult
I, for one, welcome the inexplicable annihilation of the sun
Yeah! Fuck you, Ra! I got sunburned on Lake Powell!
Cool writing prompt: Elusive Dawn
The ocean would revolt.
I wonder how long till everyone was dead. And what would be the last living species.
My guess is that bacteria down in the crust near thermal vents would live the longest. Thousnands of years if they are able to follow the heat down.
Figure bunkered people might make it a few months depending on their power source and ability to withstand dropping pressure. Not sure how long it would take for the atmosphere to freeze. Government bunker that is vacuum proof with a reactor might make it a decade.
The first measurable thing that would happen is that we would stop orbiting the sun, since (counter to what my 12-year-old ufo-believing self thought) gravity also travels at the speed of light.
For further reading, see Galaxias by Stephen Baxter.
The telephone: “Am I a joke to you?”
Who would leave their sound on in the middle of the night?
I wonder if we would feel the sudden disappearance of the centripetal force of the sun’s gravity.
After 8 minutes
scienceprimer.com/lunar-and-solar-tides
Yes, the tidal effect of the sun would disappear, and that would probably make the oceans all fucky suddenly (after an 8 minutes lag).
Does gravity travel at the speed of light?
Yes. General relativity.
Of course. It can’t travel faster
The gravity does not travel, the gravity is.
If it didn’t travel, it wouldn’t take 8 minutes to stop right?
If the mass vanishes, then the gravity would also vanish, at the same time.
But vanishing is magic, it goes against the laws of physics, so you could apply any fictional logic
False. If the mass vanished via magic, the effect would ripple out at the speed of light. Source, gravity waves which move at the speed of light.
Changes in the gravitational field definitely travel, and do so at the speed of light.
Look up LIGO
The speed of light is more than just the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Not particles, not gravitational waves (waves and particles are actually kinda equivalent anyway), not any kind of “information”.
Consequently, if two events occur in a way that a particle would have to travel faster than the speed of light to travel between them, then it’s impossible for one of those events to be caused by the other. They must be unrelated. So the soonest we will see any effect of the sun blipping out of existence, whatever the medium (light/gravity/??), is after 8 minutes.
What about quantum entanglement? Is that also limited to the speed of light?
Interestingly it’s not, but the thing is that you can’t actually use quantum entanglement to send information from one particle to the other, so it does not violate the principles of special relativity.
So usually this is explained with two scientists, Alice and Bob, on far away planets. They’re each in the possession of a particle that is entangled with the other, and in a superposition of state 1 and state 2. When Alice measures the state of her particle, it collapses into one of the states, say state 1. When Bob measures the state of his particle immediately after, before any particle travelling at light speed could get there, it will also be in state 1 (assuming they were entangled in such a way that the state will be the same).
Due to special relativity, for some observers it could actually have been Bob who measured the state of his particle first, before Alice did. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. They both got the same information: “state 1”, but since they can’t control what state the particle will collapse to, no information can be exchanged between Alice and Bob.
In quantum encryption, it is that bit of shared information that Alice and Bob can use as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages, but those messages are still sent the old fashioned way, using light waves traveling at light speed.
After 8 minutes, almost certainly
Gravity isn’t a force, strictly speaking. Objects move along geodesics in spacetime (that’s basically a straight line along a curved surface), and gravity bends spacetime, and therefore also these geodesics, around massive objects. So you don’t actually get accelerated by gravity, that’s why you don’t feel anything during free fall. What we perceive as the force of gravity pushing us down, is the solid ground accelerating us upwards, when following the geodesic would have us fall instead.
So when the sun disappears, the geodesic that used to spiral around the sun suddenly straightens out, and the neutral movement, the new free fall, has the earth continuing in a straight line. You wouldn’t be able to feel that. What the other person said about tidal forces is true tho, it would likely cause worldwide tsunamis
I wonder how long it would take before you would feel it becoming colder
Forget colder, I kind of feel like we’re missing out on not hearing the sun thanks to space
If you ever experienced a solar eclipse, you will feel drastically how much the temperature changes.
Even the difference between standing in shade and standing in direct sunlight on a sunny day is noticeable.
Wouldn’t the planet rapidly start to cool? I think we’d be dead by morning
False; no sun = no morning!
So extremely cloudy mornings = no morning? lol just kidding.
The moon also doesn’t emit it’s own light. It would take longer for the moon to “disappear” than it would for the sun but it wouldn’t be the whole night.
I agree with you, but also… I’m not sure that I’d notice that I could see the moon a few minutes ago and now I can’t (unless I happened to be looking at it as it happened)… I feel like that is something that could be happening every single night and I’ve never noticed.
The sun disappearing is like… Super noticeable by comparison.
You would notice the lack of light. The night isn’t pitch black xD
Most cities have brighter light pollution than the moon can provide.
Maybe if I lived in the countryside, here in a city, I only really notice the moon if I’m looking for it (which I do often, I love seeing our moon).
I live in the city and the moonlight is clearly noticeable so I guess it depends. I mean, a city can be considered as such with as little as 50k people so I guess that, statistically, the majority of people that live in a city would most certainly notice the lack of moonlight.
The moon is just a few light-seconds away from earth; that’s why they could have conversations with ground control during the moon landings. Moon will go dark a few seconds after the sun.
Atmosphere would hold the heat for a bit, the real issues will begin with food shortages because the crops won’t grow
Yeah but how long is a bit? Also, without the gravity center of our solar system, how long would it take for all the planets to start drifting off into the void?
A bit - probably weeks to months. For the second question - 8 minutes for the Earth, since gravity propagates at the speed of light
no lol
It goes from 85 to 58 in 12 hours right now in reality world
“A bit” = 1 day, and by the end of that day it’d be freezing (below freezing if you live in whiteistan)
I honestly think you’re forgetting the atmosphere and like, physical ground under our feet. It doesn’t generally drop to 0C overnight unless it’s already pretty close to 0C because of the heat trapped in the atmosphere and emanating from the earth’s core. It’s going to be more like a week for most places.
And the sun doesn’t generally blink out of existence. Think about how much energy is on the other side of the earth, it’s not like the two sides of earth are separate they are one huge interconnected energy system. What happens on one side impacts the other, and the core doesn’t provide enough energy and the atmosphere is leaking heat constantly
You are also forgetting the atmosphere and ground (and oceans, of course) - It being one huge interconnected energy system is exactly why I’m saying it would take longer. This guy’s calculations reckon we’d lose about 1 degree per 12 hours. January’s global average temperature was around 13°, so that’d be 6 and a half days. July last year it was 17°, so that’d be a whole 8 and a half days. It’s going to be more like a week.
Dig three feet down and tell me how warm the earth is…
Read the article before trying to be a fucking smartarse. It gives specific numbers for geothermal radiation.
The article is stupid imo. The earth cools down more than 1°F an hour when clouds appear, the sun disappearing is gonna cool down a bit more than a cloudy day. This is why I don’t get my weather forecasts from physicists. At least, that’s what seems right to me. We lose a ton of heat every night why wouldn’t losing the sun be similar lol
The ENTIRE PLANET does not cool by more than a degree from a few clouds you absolute moron. We’re not talking about your local microclimate, we’re talking about the entire world. This is as dumb a response as saying it snowed recently, so global warming isn’t real.
The entire planet isn’t smothered in clouds, but your location could be. This was just a real world example of the air temperature being directly affected by a lack of sunlight. Edit: you know you might be right but I don’t wanna admit it. I was thinking in Fahrenheit. Although where I am the temps are already cold, so I might be a bit biased from that as well
that article is the peak of liberal honkey reasoning, just ignores the fact that things are interdependent (sometimes in fucking hilarious ways like ignoring the sun), also casually ignores the culling of like…99.99999% of the global population, and 99.999999999999999% of its biomass
<img alt="" src="https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4e67aad2-3347-471a-9d90-b45146cf9209.png">
Here he forgets the entire solar system would default to another orbit, around the second biggest thing (with a lot of crashing involved, maybe around Jupiter?). Not that important to the central point though, but this alone could easily split our planet in two lmao
Socially, immediate collapse.
Current installed geothermal capacity of earth supports only 4.2 million people (Iceland makes up 200k of these).
Oil/gas/coal will support a few more but I’m too lazy to do the calcs, and it’s not gonna be anywhere near enough because you’d need so much more oil per person, since:
This would not 10x an individual’s oil needs, it would 1000x or 10,000x them, maybe more
Also the infrastructure needed to even do this would need to be built, which…it’s not, let’s be real. Therefore:
Every single government will genocide 99.99999999999% of their population minimum, except Iceland, because Iceland gets 70% of their energy from geothermal. So that means that Iceland could get away with killing off only 30% of their population, right? WRONG! Because Iceland geotherm supports 200k in a world where THE SUN EXISTS. All the food they eat, 90% of the temperature above -94F that they enjoy, all the water they drink, is basically 95% powered by the sun. So really Iceland would also have to kill off…maybe 99.9% of its population?
This culling will be done within the first week, after a few days of pretending that everything is under control. There would be lies down the chain of command, every higher-up lying to their immediate lower that they’ll make it, even the state governors might be lied to by the feds and end up tapping out right after us. They’ll just cut the heating and everybody dies in a week.
A scramble to immediately start dumping fossil fuels for heat retention and for horticulture lights. All the oil wells set alight
All resources become useless except for geothermal zones, geothermal infrastructure, and desalination infrastructure (and oil/gas/coal). Humans are dumb, and governments would have the huge problem of panicked frenzied people, who would make the situation worse than it has to be. The individuals in charge of the literal nuke buttons may go rogue and try to flee to Iceland or something.
There would be an immediate bargain between Saudi Arabia and other world leaders to allow at least the leaders and their families into the Gulf States, since these hold 55% of global desalination capacity. Same with Iceland for geothermal capacity.
Normal nuclear war is more predictable than this by orders of magnitude
There is a VERY good chance (imo like 90%) that humanity literally goes extinct, because the supply chain intelligence to make plant-grow-lights, and the intel to keep the geotherm/oil/desal gets killed in the process, meaning not a single human can survive. One rogue guy can just bomb the infrastructure in Saudi/UAE/Iceland and other relevant places, and that’s extinction.
<img alt="" src="https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/055eab72-44a6-42e4-aa6c-f46a54526446.png"> <img alt="" src="https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/be1ea30e-531d-4f8e-851c-e747aa292dc0.png">
Geothermal NOW supports only 4 million people. In a post-sun world it would support a small fraction of that.
I’m gonna be real, I started thinking about responding to the tiny relevent bit at the start (it’s got a big picture to help you understand the interdependence you’re talking about), but your histrionics about justifying the hypothetical are pretty funny. Like sib nobody’s talking about how humanity would survive in the ridiculous hypothetical, we’re just talking about the physics of heat loss.
no im not, you’re forgetting that the sun exists
Max-Min temps (F) yesterday across 3 different continents:
Lucknow 82-53
Mandalay 90-67
Kisangani 91-76
Porto Velho 85-77
Temps drop by 22 F at night (avg) around the equator. Most tropical land reaches freezing in 1.5 days if the sun vanishes. Forget temperate.
Best case scenario is Tropical rainforest since water holds heat. Middle of Amazon gets “only” an 8 F (4.4 C) drop in 12 hours, so 3.3 days to reach freezing.
keep in mind that these temp drops occur right now, in reality meatspace, despite “the atmosphere and like, physical ground under our feet”. (both of these exist)
Yeah, you’ll notice that your “massive” 22°F is the difference between direct sunlight and no sunlight. Do you think there’s another sun to take away after the first one, to get rid of even more sunlight and drop the temperature another 22°?
Why don’t you believe that physical materials are capable of holding heat energy? Why did you latch on to atmosphere and ground instead of the biggest energy store on the planet, the ocean (you don’t need to answer that we know it’s because those are the ones I named)? Why do you think that the temperature difference between day and night - sunlight and no sunlight - is the same as the general rate at which energy is lost from the planet? Have you not ever been outside at night to discover the largest part of the temperature drop happens as soon as the sun disappears?
You’re doing a very good job of the typical liberal application of raw, familiar logic to a new situation, but the only part of it you actually understand is that the sun supplies lots of energy, and haven’t made it any further than that.
Actually, on second thoughts, this comment explicitly proves that you’re a reactionary hiding their lack of investigation behind accusations of immaterialism - just by applying your own logic to real world numbers, you’ve gone from a day to half a week. You have no place opining on this subject.
The irony of the guy replying to you with PHD in his username not understanding that the Sun blasts the Earth with an absolutely unreal amount of energy
there’s something about people who use lots of words that makes them particularly…yea
it’s a new level of ignoring material conditions
Expanding a little on the last part, Earth’s orbital velocity is about 29.8 km/s so that’s the speed at which we would suddenly be leaving the former location of the solar system in a direction that depends on what time of year it happened. Regardless of direction though, the escape velocity of the Milky Way around where we are is about 544 km/s so there’s no way we’d be leaving the galaxy. On the other hand the plane of the galaxy is only about 6 degrees off from the galactic center at the moment, so if this happened at the right time of year (don’t know when that is) we could launch somewhat towards the core. We would not however get very close to it because the sun’s own orbital velocity is about 230 km/s so we’d still be in close to the same galactic orbit overall, just potentially a bit more eccentric.
Do you think Jupiter would take over as our center of the solar system? Hopefully it doesn’t sling us into deep space or another planet
It wouldn’t sling us into deep space because we are in deep space and will continue to be in deep space.
I meant like away from the rest of our planets. Space= above earth. Deep space= beyond solar system. No one considers earth space
Other planets would just fly off depending on where they were in their orbit relative to us.
But saying we’re flying off to deep space makes no sense because the solar system is the area around the sun. No sun = no distinction.
Dude… Are you trying to be overly pedantic? I am talking about our system as a whole sans sun
I’m trying to explain how that concept makes zero sense.
Well, I’m not any more, doubt you’ll get it at this point, but that was the gist of my previous replies.
So… Solar system you get, but if I refer to it as a “system” now you get confused? I was struggling with a term that wasn’t just “all of the planets that used to be part of the solar system but since the sun is gone there is no longer a system”
Doesn’t the earth itself provide a significant amount of heat from the core? I’m sure I read somewhere that for something like every 10 meters down you dig, the temperature raises by 1° celcius. So maybe we’d not notice a temperature drop so quickly?
The surface would eventually freeze over. But some life would almost definitely survive deep underground and underwater, near geothermal vents not unlike those that hosted the first lifeforms on Earth. And, maybe, in some billions or trillions of years, Earth would stray near another star system, get captured by its gravity and slowly thaw out, restarting the evolution of life.
Would hydrothermal vents produce enough heat? Or would the oceans freeze over? And then would there just be thermal bubbles surrounding the vents in oceanic ice?
The oceans would eventually freeze over, but the deep ocean could stay liquid for tens of millions of years. Ice is a pretty good insulator, and there is more than one moon in the solar system suspected to have liquid oceans under a layer of ice.
Even if they were to, there is still the deep biosphere
Fucking fascinating. Thanks for the share
Not sure how quick exactly, but the earth doesn’t provide enough heat, not even close. Kurzgesagt has a video on a similar subject, without the
trillions1.7e17 Watts showering the earth every second we’d get awfully cold awfully quick. They are talking about slowly moving away from the sun, but they conclude it would get real icyThe core is still hot. If we bury ourselves deep underground, there is a chance the humanity could survive for thousands of years without a sun. If not humanity, then some sort of life will survive long enough for future archeologists to find it millions of years later.
But don’t quite me on this; I’m simply reciting from memory something I read in National Geographic or a similar publication 10-20 years ago. IDK how true this actually is.
Yeah, something will live, but I was more thinking surface life.
Fuck you I’m going underground
We would need enough advance notice to prepare for massively farming mushrooms or something underground to eat. Canned food will run out in a few years, even military MREs have a shelf life. A few lucky people might survive a generation, but there’s a minimal breeding stock requirement to avoid degeneration from inbreeding. Extremely long odds, I think the human race would only survive this event in a sci-fi fantasy story.
I don’t know if I would call them the lucky ones.
Wherever you live on the Earth’s surface starts cooling every night and gets warmed up again the next day. It wouldn’t cool any faster if the sun went away, it would just keep cooling at the normal rate until everything was frozen. But I doubt it would take more than a week or two, depending on where you live.
Yeah, but that’s with petawatts being blasted on the other side of the earth every second, wouldn’t the loss of that make the whole system cool down faster, including the side the sun doesn’t touch? I’m thinking it’d be like having food on a hot plate, bottom is very hot, the top is less hot. But if you take the food off the plate the whole thing rapidly goes to room temp. I honestly have no idea, just conjecture tbh.
The only way to get the right answer would involve doing math and knowing enough climatology and geology to even know which math, so I dunno.
Someone posted a link above, claims it’d take about a week to hit 0°C
Cool, I will take a look. Intuitively that seems about right to me. I was just saying the world definitely wouldn’t freeze overnight.
Well when temps are already ~ -1°C in your area you tend to freeze a bit quicker
If it happens at night it will probably take 5 or 6 seconds longer for people to start seeing the first messages on the internet
But not by much longer. People on the other side of the world or connected to satellites monitoring sunspots would notice pretty much immediately after the light ceases to reach the earth and would tell everyone else over the internet
yeah but everybody else would be sleeping so it would still take longer
And even if you’re not connected at the moment, the moon will go dark.
Good one! If the moon wasn’t visible at the time and you were just sitting outside say at midnight, I wonder if you would notice anything different.
It would turn pitch black. So dark the stars far away would be the brightest when compared to everything else. It would be scary.
According to astronomers the sun doesn’t have a measurable effect on the night sky when it’s more than 18 degrees below the horizon. So I doubt naked-eye observers would notice.
Certainly not with all the light pollution.
Most of us sleep at night and don’t check our info-hose feeds until we wake up.
What’s sleep?
looks at time that says 23:27
Sleep is for people who don’t know how to write code!
Ok, first thing, did you not understand the image is a joke? Secondly, you have failed so badly at trying to use logic. And you’d notice it everywhere on the earth, both because of the moon and also just light scattering, it would become darker than ever before. And as said, most people would be asleep on the dark side, which is obvious. And it’s not like the astronomers etc. have some kind of worldwide siren to get everyone’s attention, most people wouldn’t notice it for a while, even if they posted about it online.
No dude, it’s only a difference of 1.3 seconds, faster then the Internet unfortunately.
the other side of the world wouldn’t notice there suddenly being no light anymore if there wasn’t light in the first place.
they would notice that the moon disappeared though
Only if you believe in magic box or “radio”
But will we feel the shift in gravity/inertia as the planet starts moving straight?
This is the cutting-edge of my understanding so if I’m wrong somebody call me out, but I think because gravity is warping space-time and not actually pulling anything, we wouldn’t feel an inertia change. Our inertia would be maintained, but the space-time we’re going through would suddenly be shaped different, so we’d follow a new path
So would all the other planets, so there’d be a non-zero chance we’d smack into one of them. Most likely though we’d become a very, very cold rogue planet.
How do you figure? Space is fucking huge. I don’t see how any planets could collide.
The part you’re missing is that earth isn’t a point in space. That’s why there’s tides caused by the sun (which are different than tides caused by the moon)
A person wouldn’t feel the difference, but the tides would slosh back when the solar gravity stops effecting them.
yes, after 8 minutes
I know gravity moves at the speed of light. I’m just referring to the slight pull of the gravity and the sudden shift to traveling straight off instead of a circle.
All of that will only happen after 8 minutes, see this comment.
Earth has a circular orbit because space-time is curved by the mass of the sun. (Think of a large bowling ball on a trampoline, you can make a small ball travel in circles around it, and if there was no friction, it would go on indefinitely.) When the sun’s mass suddenly disappears (by pure magic, as this would violate many laws of physics), spacetime would flatten out, at the speed of light.
What part of “I know gravity travels at the speed of light” do you not understand, to make you think you’re explaining something to me?
the fact that you don’t understand how the pull of gravity wouldn’t disappear immediately
Lol. You’re a damned idiot. I’m not really sure you can “learn” basic reading comprehension, but maybe you’ll manage it someday.
yes I am the idiot
I really doubt we would notice, because if so we would already be feeling different during day and night. The sun pulls us toward the sky during the daytime and toward the ground at night. Also toward the east at sunrise and the west at sunset. But none of this seems noticeable.
We are in “free fall” around the Sun so that’s why we don’t feel its pull of gravity.
You would similarly feel weightless if you were in an orbit around Earth.
The real question is if the earth becomes a rogue planet or if Jupiter captures most/all of the remaining solar system. Jupiter is technically a failed star, so could it finally get it’s glowup from being the sun’s understudy and keep us all together until we fall into the gravitational well of a new star?
If the sun just disappears, I doubt even having another sun would keep everything from flying off to fuck knows where. Jupiter, by comparison, is beyond hope. The Barycenter is far from Jupiter.
Only two ways to find out. Time to fire up universe sandbox, cause I’m fresh out of the ability to delete the sun in the production environment.
i mean, if the moon is up there, the light first has to bounce off of the moon, and then back to earth, so yes, it would most definitely take longer…
That’s a second, more or less.
that is still one second longer so.
This reminds me of Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven! Time for a reread.
That’s boring.
Can we just have the reverse, like a “When Day Breaks” scenario? At least its fun.
In a sane world this would earn you a dunce hat. In this one it will earn you a position in the gubmint.
Is a position on the gubmint good or bad?
Well, the U.S. government is the greatest freakshow on the planet right now.
Would you like to be in it? If so, a position can be yours for as low as $2.5m. Hurry up while vacancies last.
xkcd.com/1391/
That’s a good way to infinite wishes.
Teacher: I meant the global we. So it would average out to 8 minutes.
Someone at day will inform sun is missing to the people on night
A person can’t inform others faster than the speed of light.
But collectively nine women can have a baby in one month.
this guy money balls
Fraction of a second for transmitting information from one side of earth to other side. And teacher only said 8 minutes and the seconds are ommitted as there is always an error margin since distance from sun is not constant.
Also i assume signals are always sent from other side of the earth
I believe we’d still be warm for those 8 minutes. We have an 8 minute grace period before having to do anything, then enough time to add sweaters faster than earth cools.
it’s because light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to us. and since gravity also travels at the speed of light our orbit would only change after 8 minutes.
I was forced to calculate the black body temperature and radiation for the Earth, back in college by hand.
I decided for fun to zero out the sun from the equation to see what would happen.
My math came out to about -32°C average surface temperature.
Earth would become an ice planet.
I think you’d uh, need a bit more than a sweater in those conditions 😅
It’s sweaters all the way down. You have time to order from China shipped by boat before -32C happens. You’re just being a “save the sun” hippy climate alarmist /s. Energy company shareholders would benefit from high demand, so saving the sun is just selfish of you :P
We’re for the jobs the fossil fuels will provide.
I’m just imagining you shuffling out wearing six layers of different colored sweaters on the frozen tundra surface, lmao
I still like Bill Cosby. Fortunate that my mom always thought I should like sweaters and gifted me some.
So.
The Antarctic. Roughly. Everywhere. Including the equator cuz that’s not a thing anymore.
Are there any places that would be “warm” for any reason if you recall?
Like, I assume the oceans would survive until the core stops and the planet truly dies?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_planet
Lel
… so yes, the oceans could remain warm enough to harbor life still.
Throw in a “rawr :3” while you’re at it
People live in those temperatures in places like remote Russia, right?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon
What about gravity? I know I read something about this once, but is gravity also limited to the speed of light?
Yep, it is. We’d stay in our orbit of the sun for 8 minutes after it vanished too
From what I know, particles that have a mass greater than 0 move below the speed of light and can never reach it. Particles that have no mass (every force is transferred via particles) move at the speed of light. So there is no way to have anything that is faster than the speed of light, not even forces.
But do we know that gravity is a force transfered by a particle yet?
Well we’ve detected gravitational waves arriving at the same time as the light associated with 2 black holes rapidly circling eachother.
But is a particle necessary for that?
Yeah, we’ll feel it after 8 minutes all right :-)
Gravity travels at the speed of light.
Does it? In my experience alcohol can delay gravity