On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 05:11:29 GMT, wrote:

This is very interesting. It is interesting to think of the world's cities,
not to mention its lifeforms, if the gravity suddenly went up some huge
fraction of what it is now. I can see it pulling all the skyscrapers
colllapsing straight down into the ground like spears. Or maybe the
structures are overbuilt but the gravitational pull sucks the file cabinets
though the floor panels along with the water coolers down into the basement?
And while you might be ok supported by your car seats, and the car
suspension might be able to handle slow driving - what happens when you step
out of the car and you now weigh triple what you joints and bones are use
to?

What a way to go. I wonder if the dinosaurs wouldn't have had an easier
time with the asteroid?

I wonder what would happen to planes in the air? Would the gravity make the
atmosphere now three times as dense so that the planes, while weighing three
times as much, would have that much more lift on their wings? I guess the
wings might just rip off?

I don't think it is this simple. What you have is an object massing the same as
the earth and traveling with a fairly high relative velocity. So first of all,
there is going to be a transfer of momentum, and the Earth is going to be
slingshot out of its orbit- whether that takes us out of the Solar System, or
simply into a new solar orbit, we're in deep doo doo.

Second, because the black hole and the Earth are moving rapidly with respect to
each other, the effect isn't going to be a simply increased gravitational field,
but some kind of vector that changes over several minutes. If the black hole
ends up orbiting inside the Earth, the tidal effects are going to cause all
manner of tectonic events that will be much more effective at collapsing
buildings than the gravitational fluctuations alone.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com