After the second bombs


Something that has always made me wonder, what were the second bombs supposed to do? Were they just to stop the Earth getting nearer to the sun? If they were and they succeeded, then it still would not be pleasant on Earth, everybody would still die from lack of water. If the bombs were intended to push the Earth away from the sun, how would they be able to stop it going too far, and the Earth turning into an ice planet? More bombs to slow it down?

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Very good questions...ones I have no answers for. I wish I knew.

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Maybe it's time for a sequel,'The Day The Earth Froze It's Arse Off' :)

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Isn't that 'The Day After Tomorrow'? :)

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Could well be, but like most sequels it doesn't measure up to the original!

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This movie pretends to employ realistic science but there are some problems with it. Just saw this film last night. They said the bombs would be corrective and detonated in Siberia. It seems they're supposed to restore the original position of the earth, just as you turn a steering wheel right and than an equivalent number of degrees left to straighten out the vehicle. In a very simplistic sense, this works. My question was why nobody noticed that the solar ecliptic had been displaced, which would have told them early in the game that the earth's tilt had shifted. The sun and all the stars and the moon would all be "out of place." The unpredicted solar eclipse that occurs early in the film doesn't seem to tip off anyone to the greater issue at hand.

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[deleted]

<<My question was why nobody noticed that the solar ecliptic had been displaced, which would have told them early in the game that the earth's tilt had shifted. The sun and all the stars and the moon would all be "out of place.">>

It still seems like a reasonable question to ask about a film that works hard to be plausible.

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Because in the 60's the average Joe did not have the knowledge, but I agree amateur astronomers should have realized something was up, I guess when they asked for confirmation they were persuaded to stay quiet.....

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Of course, the story of a nuclear bomb tilting the earth as well as sending it closer to the sun is scientific nonsense.

But, we suspend our understanding in order to allow ourselves to "get into" the film.

As you intimate, there would have to be at least three bomb detonations. First ones cause the problem. Second ones to send earth away from the sun and put the tilt right in order to get the equator back into the right place. That's required simply to reverse in all respects the effects of the first detonations. Third would simply arrest outward motion away from the sun but not tilt the earth. Unless you decided to put the tilt right on the third detonations rather than the second.

If the UK had it's way it no doubt would re-tilt so that we were left with a Mediterranean climate.

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That's the conundrum, they can't work out whether it's going to work or not.

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It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!

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Whilst much of the science in the film is flat wrong and even nonsensical, the idea that bombs could send Earth spiralling into the sun does have some basis in reality.

For an object to orbit something there has to be a gravitational force between them, and the orbiting object has to have some sideways speed. That's what you see happening when a rocket launches - watch any launch and the rocket tilts over to the side almost straight away, and keeps tilting over as it goes up. This is because the rocket needs to both climb out of the atmosphere and gain sideways speed in order to go into orbit.

The radius of the orbit is determined by how fast you are going towards the side. Basically the slower you go the closer you orbit.

What the bombs did, then, was slow the Earth. This would have the effect of reducing the orbital radius. What's important is that it would not just keep getting closer and closer until it fell into the sun... rather it would just shift to take up a new stable orbit that was closer to the sun. And yes, that would happen over a period of months.

The corrective bombs would do the same in reverse. They wouldn't make the Earth go speeding ever outwards forever, but rather speed up the Earth to its original speed and so shift it back into its original orbit.

Of course in reality no bomb could really change the Earth's orbital speed. But if it could, then the change in orbit isn't actually that far off reality.

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You Are Wrong. The Closer a Satellite is to the Body it is orbiting, the faster it much go to remain in obit.

The is most event in the space shuttle. Obriting about 200 miles above the Earth it goes at 17,500 miles per hour...but MOON is 250,000 miles away and cirles the Earth at about 2,000 miles an hour and take 28 days to complete on orbit.

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All the ``science`` in that movie was fake. Nothing in the movie is possible.

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