These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. This page was last modified on 3 May 2016, at 16:07. Barring the joke answer of “everything would probably freeze to death”, nothing much would happen.

While launching something directly into the sun costs a lot of energy, couldn't we just launch it opposite earths orbit? But maybe by spreading out a bit the damage ends up being survivable? Another solution is to have a matched pair of contrarotating tori. Problem 3: The moon is beyond the earth's Hill sphere.

He has yet to explain what that actually means in less than twenty minutes. Responding to the Lavender Letter and commitments moving forward. The vast majority of humanity is (likely) completely doomed. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight and Flaherty's faction is defeated. The moon weighs about 7 * 10^22 kilograms. ~ reading and reviewing one book at a time since 2007, very highly recommended: highly recommended recommended so-so not recommended did not finish. In my humble opinion, Lottery Discounts is the best Neal Stephenson character name. When the first 2 collide hard and fast enough to be a “watchable” event where people can see 1 of them break in half, I was very confused. Maybe that one unlike the others could be _moved_ by a nuclear weapon rather than disintegrated by it? I have a few problems with SevenEves, but don't know how to attack the problem in terms of its physics. Star clusters are only the tip of the iceberg, Upgraded GMRT measures the mass of hydrogen in distant galaxies, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253893/, Lunar solstice when the Moon's Equator crosses the Zero Plane of the Earth. I’m trying to decide if Stephenson was working on two separate books and then had the brilliant idea of combining them, or if it was planned all along. A dispersed moon will be lower than this. ); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. The engineering and technical mumbo-jumbo has a point in the story of actually being important in saving our genetic skins. The Diggers would have had a major problem sucking in hot air from outside, then using a heat exchanger to expell it even hotter and thus cool their habitat. Would the solid material inside an airship displace air and be counted towards lift? The story tells of the efforts to preserve human society in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth, following the disintegration of the Moon. With extremely generous assumptions, and the setting of arbitrary constants to 1 where convenient, I get something like this: This simulation was very nearly contrived to produce an explosion of chunks in the beginning, and should be taken with a tremendous grain of salt, but hopefully it will allow you to at least suspend disbelief for the doomsday premise of the novel.

Still, if you’ve ever wondered how to really save the world without any superpowers, Seveneves is the book for you. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sqrt%28%282+*+10^9+teraJoules%29+%2F+%285+*+10^21+kilograms%29%29). He studies Quantum Information in Birgitta Whaley's group. "[9], The Guardian's Steven Poole was more critical in his review, criticizing the work as being overly descriptive, and observing: "Once we arrive in the novel's snail-paced last third, there are lots and lots of lavish descriptions of imaginary machines: city-sized orbiting habitats, giant pendulums reaching down into the Earth’s atmosphere, 'sky trains'.

Difficult by remote control. This favours a white sky. Is it a common practice to strongly incentivize employee to relay company posts on Linkedin with our personal account? Perhaps the mine cooling pulled a reverse geothermal, expelling the heat into the earths crust? So, humanity, with all of its knowledge, rolls a Hail Mary to survive the coming storm of rocks, by sending up supplies, hastily constructed ships and people into orbit, the safest place possible. Thanks for contributing an answer to Physics Stack Exchange! Stephenson’s best hook since Snow Crash masterfully sets the tone for the remainder of the novel. Others want to go to Mars.

I recall this being a process that cleans dwarf stars out of globular clusters. Berkeley. - James Lovegrove, Financial Times In the novel, some agency disrupts the moon.

This is a fairly common idea, if not outright complaint, that bureaucratic waste is the root of all of life’s ills. “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”.

Does the time-independent Schrodinger equation in 1D have an exact and general solution? The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. Not sure how the energy came about, though. Regarding the 7 big moonchunks, I had two questions about potential Earth responses once it was understood that the big pieces would in about 2 years results in the “hard rain”. A huge problem that deserved a mention. Engineering geeks, this book was written for all of us. Why does the speed of an object affect its path if gravity is warped spacetime?