[Interview+] How Much Gravity Is Too Much To Escape A Planet?
BONUS PART STARTS AT 20:51
Watch here (with no ads) or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QD5sJ636wxM
More interviews: https://www.patreon.com/collection/44300/
🟣 Guest: Dr. Sanjoy Som https://www.bluemarblespace.org/
📜 Multistage Rocket Optimization, Geophysics, and the Spacefaring Envelope of Habitable Super-Earths https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02691
Rockets fight against gravity to help us as a civilization escape into space. But what if a planet is much heavier? How big and dense does it need to get before a civilization gets permanently trapped and can't go to space?
00:00 Intro
01:16 Escaping the gravity well
06:53 Limiting factors
09:47 Rockets
15:18 Can a civilizations get trapped
20:51 Geology-driven civilization
32:54 Current obsessions
39:11 Final thoughts
Comments (10)
I think so
Excellent interview, thank you. I've just started looking into using Vera Rubin data, via lsst-env and JupyterLab. Doesn't look like there is much data available yet but still investigating. I'll let you know how I get on.
Please do - I’m interested in how a person accessing the data or applying for telescope time gets on ie how difficult or easy it is.
I have enough trouble walking around on earth at 1 earth mass. At 10 earths mass a 200 lb person would feel like he or she weighs 2000 lbs? Seems people would need the very small in order to exist with our kind of atmosphere.
Loved this interview particularly the reverse overview effect. Will definitely keep an eye out for Ironbound as and when it comes out
fab interview and look forward to the next one. - Rafe
At 29 min, who else was thinking of the Star Trek world where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn using materials like diamond and saltpeter? Also imagining a world where intelligent beings develop tech with radioactive minerals on the planetary surface, leading to an atomic age of steam, followed by…
The way in which space is terrifying is in the realization that we are just an inconceivably tiny ember floating away from nuclear detonation of the big bang. An ember that appears to be burning implausibly brightly - suddenly brighter even - for, perhaps, an implausibly long period of time. A spark which, one realizes, has apparently no where to land and rekindle the flame of consciousness, and which, at any moment, may suddenly, and will eventually, unobserved by any other consciousness, wink out. Other than that it's endlessly fascinating and inspiring.
Great interview! Couple of observations: For the atmosphere: higher gravity gives lower scale height, meaning inversively proportional to gravity, the atmosphere is that much more compressed towards the surface, so you’d go through it faster. For steam engines: The ancients did have steam engines, but they were toys. The standard supposition is that slaves negated the need to engines to push things or save labor costs, but I suspect their metallurgy wasn’t up to snuff either. And the scientific method wasn’t necessarily dominate (Aristotle never tested his assumptions).
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