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Filling the Solar System with AIR - What would happen? (hackertalks.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Let's suppose we could dump enough "breathable" air (whatever that means for humans) into the solar system that it filled the spaces between planets.

What would happen?

A - I imagine it would then become possible to fly airplanes between planets, perhaps balloons? Would space travel become easier or harder?

B - According to another lemmy post, we would start to hear sound waves from the sun (A constant jackhammer sound - delightful)

C - Each each planet become the center of some mega cyclone (like the Jupiter storms, but bigger)?

D - At some point the air above us wouldn't be pushing down onto the earth at sea level, could we survive the additional pressure?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You say that air doesn't weigh much but 1 atmosphere of pressure is already 14.7 pounds pee square inch at sea level. That's enough to flatten a steel barrel if a vacuum is pulled inside it. The consequences of increased atmospheric pressure at the earths surface alone would be nothing short of a mass extinction event. Every planet would become a gas giant, and potentially even brown dwarfs if not stars in their own rights. I bet Saturn and Jupiter would ignite at the very least.

If we thought global warming was bad, the heating of the gas accretion combined with the insulating effects of a thicc atmosphere would likely completely eradicate all life.

On the plus side, it would be one hell of a show before all life burns out of existence.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Yeah, this question kinda undersells how it's sprinkling a couple aspirational rocks into an enormous cosmic gas cloud, rather than providing those rocks with a quaint environment. Even the provolone-slice model that's 1 AU thick is only lighter by two orders of magnitude. It's one million times the total mass of everything else in the solar system. Spreading it on as thickly as our soupy atmosphere, where even certain mammals can flap hard enough to hunt in midair, would have an impact on world events the way a period impacts a sentence.