this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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That's assuming all cows are a point on a frictionless 2 dimensional plane.
you don't need to hit the sun dead center to be incinerated.
the sun is huge
you aren't in a frictionless environment, your orbit will decay into the sun.
These are all technically correct but fairly inconsequential. Even just to graze the sun you need to lose 90% of your orbital velocity. And although everything orbiting the sun will eventually fall in, the friction is really low. It will take billions of years to lose enough velocity to fall in.
Billions of years and billions of times less energy, would you agree?
If you're willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could "launch someone into the sun" by just...leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.
What does engulfing the earth mean to you? The mass of the sun expanded to a body 1 au would not be very dense. My money says the earth would continue to orbit "inside the sun" for quite a while, but the orbit would degrade more quickly.
But yes, I argue get them out of the earths gravity well and let Newton handle the rest, no reason to propel them in any direction, eventually they'll get to the sun.
If the sun became a red giant tomorrow, and Earth found itself inside the outer layers of solar atmosphere, then drag would start slowing it down. In less than 70,000 years, it would fall close enough to the center to be torn apart by tidal forces like one of Saturn's moons (assuming it hasn't already been vaporized).
If we've already waited 5 billion years to have our revenge, whats another 70k? The lowest amount of Delta V we can spend on this project is zero.
No that's not really the case, the earth will be destroyed.