most definitely you could get a wifi signal in a cave, your own personal router to your computer, an external signal though would be different
299 792 452 m/s. By the way at shortest distance Pluto is actually closer to Sun than Neptune. Also it's orbit is chaotic and impossible to calculate with any precision forwards or backwards by more than 10-20M years. Also this, just because it's so cool: :edit: Shit, didn't see half the posts posted above this. Ah well.
Also the impact would create a very strong signal that could in theory be received by your wifi unit before it is burnt up by it. If you're deep enough and something like on the opposite side of the planet in relation to the impact your wifi unit will not be burnt by the excessive radiation caused by the impact. You will only be killed by the seismic activity that devastates your cave and even if you survive that it is impossible to build a structure that could survive the resulting increase in temperature that will follow - even if you found a way to survive the reshaping of a planet. Technically some hyper advanced alien race could use all of their hyper advanced society's energy to move our dwarf planet Pluto from it's orbit to collision course with massive nuclear engines. The funny thing is that the number and/or size of engines required for it is so vast that it would be impossible for mankind to take them out at that distance even if we solely focused on just that. It boils down to trying to accelerate massive hydrogen bombs to sufficient speeds that they can reach Pluto in meaningful time - but the trick is that the bigger the bombs are the more energy it takes to accelerate them and there are limitations to the size of rockets we can build. Economic limitation, there's only so much industrial hitech output mankind has capacity for and it's not exactly a great idea to send a handful of 50Mt bombs that will take 3-5 years to reach Pluto given that their construction itself will take years. And even then there's not enough to knock their engines out once they reach Pluto too late. Why would an alien race put so much energy and resources to squash a bunch of monkeys? "For cheap laughs" and "to make things go boom". Advanced doesn't necessarily correlate with super intelligent or sane. They just might have a very rigid clan structure and they might all share same mother but they might be absolute hicks and only have advanced technology because by idiot's luck they managed to have an unshakeable social structure that allowed them to develop all their tech over billion years time, half of it being bestowed upon them as gifts in the way humans feed ducks with bread because they're 'cute'.
That's silly why on earth would you send a nuke to destroy them makes zero sense. Would make more sense to try and shift the earth by way of using a comet or asteroid and using its gravity to shift the earth out of its original calculated area of impact. Which is also one of only a few current methods that actually has a chance of success of earth avoiding a actual comet or asteroid on a collision path. The other is using a unmanned space ship to ride along side the comet or asteroid and use its gravity to slowly move it out of its collision path. Then the problem would be if the incoming planet would be able to adjust to earths new position. I see use being taken out because we are becoming to much of a threat. lets face it, the human race is freaking crazy in terms of the shit we do to each other. Or some crazy military based race is going on a rampage and some back water garrison unit wants to shoot at some easy prey.
That's another problem. We don't have nearly enough energy to move Earth from it's current orbit, much less return it to another safe orbit. In short we'd be up for a task that was far more difficult than the task presented for the advanced alien civilization due to the massive difference in mass. Pluto's mass is 0.002 Earths! That's 1/500th. Imagine that you were running a car that had an engine with a fraction of the power compared to your rival's engine that also had to be moving a vehicle that weighed 500 times as much. In other terms, if it's hard enough for us to chuck a few big hydrogen bombs their way, imagine how difficult it is to move a planet. And with some subcontractors screwing up or skidding with costs we'd end up having the thrust applied in wrong direction or something like that and we might end up hitting the asteroid belt or falling too close to Sun. Even if we had the capacity in some point of our history to actually make a noticeable shift in the trajectory. With a fraction of that energy we could simply fly whole mankind to other star systems by the way.
yes, I read the whole number, I just didn't feel it necessary when I was already estimating the other
No, you said ~300k miles / second but it's actually ~300k kilometers / second or ~300M meters / second.
ah, well, that I'm going to place the blame firmly on quick tabbing back and forth and google defaulting to metric instead of simply including both. In which case, they'd have to almost be travelling Star Citizen speeds.
Shortest distance from Earth to Pluto (4.28 bn km) takes 3 hours, 58 minutes and 34 seconds for light to travel. 10 days is 0.0166c if I got it right. It's still close to 50km/s which is pretty insane maneuver and acceleration to pull off for a dwarf planet.
So apparently Pluto has a atmosphere still with a huge tail behind it created by the solar wind. It's probably so far away the solar wind can't destroy its atmosphere as fast like Mars. Or was geologically active longer then Mars as well.
Well, as long as it can be measured it's called an atmosphere. It measures roughly one millionth to 1/100,000th of Earth's atmospheric pressure at surface level. Apparently Pluto's north pole turned towards Sun ~120 years ago and this led to temporary increase in atmospheric density until much of it will end up condensed as ice on dark south pole. So for Pluto it has two problems - Sun blows away it's atmosphere and the coldness causes it to condense into ice. It's methane rich so it won't cool as fast as it would otherwise, especially upper atmosphere is relatively warm and if I understood it correctly it's upper atmosphere is warmer than lower atmosphere because of methane which would slow down the rate at which the atmosphere and Pluto itself cool. The atmosphere is so negligible that for a human or a plant it would probably feel like being in a vacuum and you'd need instruments to tell you that it's not a perfect vacuum.
The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen from what I know, but it's how the atmosphere extends thousands of miles behind Pluto like the tail of a comet.
I wonder if it's visible - that would look so cool! Now I've got my hopes up for seeing such a shot. If it's just 'technically' then it's pretty much the same with every object that has low gravity and atmosphere - the atmosphere carried away by solar wind is always forming a long tail. It's another matter if it's a visible tail or not and visibility itself is a tricky subject in space!
