Re: AKICIF: Origin of film "Sunshine"

Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"City at World's End" by Edmond Hamilton. The sun has not gone
out but has weakened a lot in its old age; the magic of advanced
technology rejuvenates it, making the earth habitable once again.

Actually, no. What made earth uninhabitable was that its cities
were using heat from the planet's core, to power and warm their
cities. And that had cooled down.

That's almost plausible. If they relied on geothermal power, and
somehow had a way to tap large amounts of it (trillions of heat pipes
riddling the planet?) that could cool down the Earth's interior over a
few decades or centuries. While this wouldn't cause any harm to life
on Earth (except over geological time scales) it would of course put
an end to their supply of geothermal power.

Earth's internal heat isn't primordial, as many people think.
It's produced by radioactive decay. So it would get replenished
eventually, but, like fossil fuels, not soon enough.

The cityful of 20th-century people who had been forcibly
time-traveled into this far age dropped an A- or maybe H-bomb down
one of the shafts and rekindled the core.

That's not plausible, even if they could get a bomb into the core.
The core isn't a reactor. The only heat you'd get is from the bomb
detonation itself. A one megaton nuclear explosion can heat one cubic
kilometer of water by one degree celsius. Not really very impressive
on a planetary scale.

Mind you, I don't know if this is really physically feasible; nor
whether the sun would still be in the preliminary cooling-down
stage, not yet gone red giant, at the time the earth's core had
cooled to that extent.

The sun is very gradually heating up, not cooling down. This will
culminate in a few billion years with the sun becoming a red giant,
and possibly vaporizing our whole planet.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

Relevant Pages

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