this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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I like the way you think. I think the sun is closer though. Probably easier to get too. I don’t know I don’t work on space travel.
Its actually easier to launch stuff out of the solar system than to slow stuff down enough to fall into the sun
Yeah but let's not leave anything to chance
Easiest is to just round them up and shoot them and let their corpses rot in a ditch.
I keep hearing that. Again - I don’t work on space physics, so forgive my ignorance on why. However- I’m good with billionaires taking as long as needed to get to our sun, some other maybe hospitable planet, or just dying in the cold of interstellar space while we observe a new holiday of them all fuckin’ off from terra firma.
guillotines need less energy than a light bulb.
technically, it uses a lot of energy (depending on how much the blade weighs). it is not electrical energy, but gravitational potential energy
Great way to get some exercise in.
Earth is traveling 29.8km/s around the sun. In order to go to the sun, you have to slow down. But to escape the sun from earth, you need to accelerate to 42km/s or just 12km/s relative.
And if the launch is towards the "back" of Earth's orbit? 29.8 km/s - escape velocity...
I’m a certified internet space-e-ologist and can confirm that it’s all conjecture cuz we’ve never tried.
So for scientific purposes we should send a capsule in both directions.
Actually we did!
I was referring to chucking billionaires into the sun.
I’m sure the physics are wildly different so we need to test it, is my point.
Are you trying to get us fucking killed??? Those types of speeds are capable of reversing the Earth's rotation, and turning back time! But even more likely is that the Earth will stop rotating and we'll all get crushed because of gravity vs centrifugal force, and the world will stop being flat and then we'll all fall off!
Hear me out what if we aaaiiimm it real good to the sun like "follow the bright ball buddy"?
That's how you get comets
Mars ?
The launch technology is already taken care of. We still need interplanetary radiation shielding and a landing system that doesn't bounce them across the landscape like a ball, but that's no reason we can't start now.
Nah, let the billionaires eat some radiation and bounce around at high velocity on landing
Is it because of our position?
As in, is it fair to say in terms of potential gravitational energy, that we are basically outside of the “centre” of sun’s gravity?
Not sure what you mean by the question, but it's because we're in orbit around the sun. We're already going way too fast, so you'd have to slow down, and slow down a lot.
It's actually a kinda' fun challenge in Kerbal Space Program to hit the sun, and KSP's solar system is much smaller than ours (meaning everything is much closer and easier to hit).
I meant whether we are farther away from the sun or not. As in, would it take less energy to hit the sun if we started from Mercury.
But now I realize that it’s our momentum given earths orbit. So I guess it would be harder from mercury cause it’s going faster?
Nope, it'd me much easier from Mercury. A higher orbit has more energy. A space ship has to speed up to increase it's orbit.
Think of it like the old expression about what an orbit even is: You're still falling same as always, you're just moving to the side fast enough to always miss. Earth is 'missing' the Sun by a whole lot more than Mercury is 'missing' the Sun.
Basically because the planet the craft is being launched from is hurtling around the sun, you have to first cancel out all of that...let's call it horizontal motion. Its the same way that orbits around earth work, you throw the thing horizontally fast enough and it will just fall around the planet. Want it to stop orbiting? Now you have to slow it down enough that it no longer falls around the planet but falls onto the planet.
Well while things are falling around (orbiting) the Earth, the Earth is falling around (orbiting) the sun. To launch something from earth and have it hit the sun, it first needs to get through all of Earth's atmosphere, achieve orbit around the Earth, then exit the Earth's sphere of orbital influence by increasing the height of the orbit so that the craft is no longer orbiting the Earth but orbiting the Sun, then decrease that orbit around the sun until eventually you get so close to the sun you fall into it rather than falling around it.
Now, if we were a real space program planning a real mission, we'd probably do something frugal and smart like using gravity assists to make the whole endeavor more achievable (which is exactly what the Parker Solar Probe did!)
Hear me out. What if we get that billionaire submarine company to build 2 big rockets, each one full of billionaire. We'd say one is going to do an exclusive tour near the sun, and the other is going to that fancy new planet. No one can go on both, because whatever, just bs that they leave at the same time. And limited seats to the highest bidder.
I mean the thing doesn't even need to work. Just take their money and ship them to their doom, then build public houses with their money and put on space YouTube to see them squirm.
shhhhhh they don't understand Hohmann Transfers, we can send them there regardless.
Recommend them to compute a sol gravity assist trajectory using chatgpt