You wouldn’t, of course. Hearing, the way we hear, in such an environment would be useless. We wouldn’t have evolved that. This is like saying “ultraviolet radiation from the sun would be everywhere, all the time, can you imagine?” It is everywhere all the time, but as such it isn’t a useful sense to possess, so we don’t.
This also makes some very weird assumptions about what the sound would be like. If space were a medium sound could travel through then it would–like all mediums capable of carrying a sound wave–alter the wave in many ways. Intensity, frequency, etc. But since we don’t know what kind of medium that would be, and since the comment doesn’t posit any particular medium, we don’t know what the sound would sound like or even how loud it would be.
By your logic, light isn’t a useful sense to possess since it’s everywhere all the time thanks to sunlight and moonlight, is that correct?
Actually, since ultraviolet radiation and light are both electromagnetic waves, they should be treated the same, shouldn’t they? It’s as if there could be a different reason why we can detect one but not the other.
Yes, and some animals (mostly birds iirc) do see UV. Boring brown/black birds aren’t so boring in UV. I don’t know the evolutionary pressure necessary for UV, but it could have developed. Red, for instance, is believed to have been useful for us to pick out berries. Wolves, being carnivorous, wouldn’t necessarily need it, so see in yellow blue… or so I read as a theory a while ago.
I assume that this thought experiment posits a space filled with the same average density of particles found at ground level on Earth. Obviously such a thing is nonsensical, but it serves to illuminate one aspect of the raw power of the Sun that we ignore, because we’re insulated from it by 93 million miles of vacuum.
Noone would live for longer than a few weeks after the sun went out.
Okay just to be clear. The sun not only went out. The sun will explode and we too.
A lot of the suppositions are done with impossible to happen stuff, like the sun literally disappearing, or collapsing into a blackhole with no added mass (a sun mass blackhole would be stable, but I don’t know how one could be created).
If it disappeared, then we’d still feel even gravity for those 8 mins, as the effect of gravity propagated at the speed of light. If it somehow magically became a black hole, we’d still orbit it the same even after 8 mins, but losing all the head would eventually kill us.
The expected explosion wouldn’t be what makes the earth uninhabitable either. The sun increases in luminosity by ~1% every 100 million years, and it’s estimated that between 700 million and 1.5 billion years the surface of the planet will be too hot for liquid water. An astronomer also says photosynthesis would be impossible in 500-600 million years.
Just one small hitch: if there was an atmosphere in space dense enough to carry sound, the earth would burn up in minutes.
If it takes 13 years for sound how long would it take for us to reach the sun on a rocket
Interesting question.
You’d have to cancel out the sideway movement of the earth, and it’s going roughly 85000km an hour.
Once you cancel that out, you’ll simply fall down to the sun. But you’d need a very powerful rocket. It’s way easier to get to mars, as comparison.
It’s more realistic to do gravity assists from venus and other bodies, and in that case it’d take years. Just a rough guesstimate would be 10 years I guess? But maybe you’d have to even sling past jupiter or something to really slow down, so then it might be decades.
Wow I didn’t think it’d be that complicated haha, I imagined we’d just swirl towards it like going down thr toilet
If the planets line up correctly, you can do it in way less, like 4 or 5 months. I’d need to get some orbital calculations out for the whole thing
But simplest case, you lower your perihel to Venus orbit, that’ll take you less than half a year. With a perfect gravity assist you can then head straight for the sun at more than orbital speed, accelerating as you go. Free fall time is a fraction of orbit time, and you’re going in with a high initial velocity, so a month or two more, max. That’s 6-9 months total, but it’ll be faster with more Δv
It does. We can’t hear it, but it does.
Well, I think technically it doesn’t. There’s no medium to propagate pressure waves, so at no point would the mechanics of sound actually exist, I would think.
The sun itself is a medium that can propogate sound waves. Someone standing on the Moon could equally well make the case that there is no medium to propagate pressure waves from the Earth, so the Earth must not make a sound.
Aye, true. Though I would consider that case different (slightly, but not fundamentally wrt waves existing) from the sun because on earth there are atmospheric sound waves that just don’t reach out to the moon. But I hadn’t thought of the possibility of waves going into the sun, so there would be existing waves there too. More akin to making a sound on the moon by vibrating the moon itself I suppose.
Edit: and really, I’m talking out of my ass lol. There could very well be gases or some such to vibrate around the sun, even coming out of the sun and carrying vibrations, but I don’t know enough.
