Some big scary thing hit Jupiter and gave it a black eye. Freaky! Freakier: the guy who found this out is some dude in his backyard in Australia. (NASA? Anyone?) He told his hometown paper: "If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us." Well that's a nice idea, isn't it? But ha ha, um NO.
The hittable, death-by-ice-chunk surface of the earth is 510 Mm^2. (That's 510 megameters, squared! And each megameter is 1000 kilometers!) That's a lot of surface. Big planet!
Now, Jupiter, in terms of surface, is, give or take, 122 earths. So its surface is a whopping 62,179 Mm.
In terms of getting some scale for that? If you are six feet tall, you are 122 times as big as something that is .6 inches tall. So, SPEAKING VERY CARELESSLY, the earth is to Jupiter like a pinkie finger is to a standing adult man.
On average, Jupiter is 778 million kilometers away from the earth. It takes 11.86 Earth years for it to orbit the sun. Most importantly for this, it travels at about 13 kilometers a second.
So if it is traveling 13 kilometers a second... let's round down to 31 million seconds in a year... multiply by 12 years.... that's 372,000,000 seconds... times 13... that means Jupiter is traveling nearly 5 billion kilometers in the course of its orbit. (Um, check my math, someone.)
We are simplifying here, and treating things as flat. But! Since Jupiter is only 142,800 kilometers around, that means that there remains (and simplifying further here because round things are smaller at the top and bottom (adoy)), the space of 35,014 NON-JUPITERS in the course of its orbit for GIANT BLOCKS OF DEATH ICE to come in and destroy us.
And I am only counting directly the path of the orbit-in, essentially, two dimensions! There is also the issue of things that are coming directly at the Earth not through the pretend semi-2D path of Jupiter's orbit. This is also pretending that the Earth and Jupiter are on exactly the same plane at all!
In short: JUPITER SUCKS in so many ways at saving the Earth from terrible things from space.
This is precisely the sort of defeatist attitude we do NOT need right now. Our celebrities are dying left and right. The least the media can do is flood the American brainpan with pleasant diversions about how other planets are totally willing to take the fall for us.
This is why I have always said that I'm a single issue voter: NUKE JUPTER 2010.
Pareene's Space post on Gawker (7/20) elicited a similar response from you. That's not very Jovial of you.
Leave Jupiter Alone!!!
Also we did not address gravitational pull? Jupiter is 318 more "massy" than the Earth. So it has a certain sucking power, we should add in our calculations?
BUT IT STILL SUCKS (IN THE OTHER WAY).
THIS EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! Even if we're to invade and occupy the rogue Jovian planet with THE EVIL RED EYE, we couldn't land. We would fall right through to the core cause it's an awful swirling gas ball of death that is greedily eating up our galaxy! IJAOIJDFJOEFIO; I hate it so much!!!
THIS EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! Even if we were to invade and occupy the rouge Jovian planet with THE EVIL RED EYE, we couldn't land on it. We would fall right through to the core cause it's an awful swirling gas ball of death that is greedily eating up our galaxy! IJAOIJDFJOEFIO; I hate it so much!!!
It's not 'massy,' it just has big tectonics.
It's taking every ounce of discipline at my disposal to stop myself from making a comment about Uranus.
That's fine, because if Jupiter isn't big enough to save us, neither is Uranus.
Finally, someone refuting that tired old saw that Jupiter has some sort of use to someone. Turn the whole thing into a methane-mining operation, I say, and burn what's left over.
Even considering the size of Jupiter, I think it's safe to say that Jupiter should've been buying MegaMillions tickets around the time it got hit by that bit of stellar debris.
Could someone convert all of this into feet and inches for me?
Damn, Jupiter, I thought you were cool.
Wait, will I live to regret what I did last night or not?
I sat through a space talk at the Adler Planetarium to indulge my boyfriend's space geekery, and the speaker said something about Jupiter functioning as a giant vacuum cleaner for our solar system - "it sucks up all the stuff we don't want and pulls it into its orbit or the asteroid belt."
I decided this made Jupiter the Milky Way's douche. Neither my boyfriend nor my friends found that nearly as amusing as I did.
You do realise our solar system is only a tiny part of the Milky Way, and within the Milky Way, there are most likely much larger 'planets' than Jupiter that are a lot more sucky, right?