"Chris L Peterson" wrote in message
...
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.



Well, I know that massive earthquakes right above their epicenters produce
land waves. I think the biggest is eight feet? I wonder if this is what you
mean by tidal effects? That would be spectacular. I wonder if anybody has
ever modeled that on a computer. I know the national lab at Los Alamos had
their programs model the asteroid impact several years ago when the two
Hollywood movies came out. I think that was after the public consciousness
was raised with the Shoemaker-Levy impact on Jupiter.

I wonder if anybody ever animated what your talking about? Maybe it would
just be total devastation.