Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Terraforming & Electromagnetospheres

re: Terraforming & Electromagnetospheres
gbaikie — (archived)

"Moving a planet is sheer insanity. Our solar system is like a bunch of plates balanced on a tray held in the air by a nervous waitress racing to a mean customers table. Everything is just so and any shift will throw everything out of balance and cause disaster."

This is nonsense. Mars or Venus have little gravitational affect upon Earth and it's orbit.
If one were to half either of their distances to earth, there would be a barely measurable affect. Or if either were to somehow disappear there would little measurable affect.

Venus which is closer and more massive than Mars has a larger gravitational effect upon Earth. But Jupiter has a larger affect than either Mars or Venus [of both them or even if you halved their distance to Earth]

The bodies with the most gravitational affect upon the Earth are the Sun and the Moon.

"Let's look at gravity first. Right away you can see that even mighty Jupiter, king of the planets, only pulls about 0.01 (= 1%) as hard as the Moon does (just to show how I did this, Jupiter masses 27,000 times the Moon, but is 1640 times farther away. The square of 1640 is about 2.7 million, and 27,000/2.7 million=0.01). Venus is next, with only 0.6 % of the Moon's force."
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html

And after Venus is Saturn and then you get Mars.

I would guess that the gravitational affects of Venus upon earth's orbit is probably less than compared to some large NEO which in the past, has flown close to Earth. By which I mean it's insignificant and the "throw everything out of balance and cause disaster" affect has probably already occurred in Earth history- without any actual noticeable affect [it's when they actually hit the planet that one then could get something describable as "throwing everything out of balance".]

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (45 posts)