Unwanted costume alteration

[Black Talon]

Quick summation: I have an alt - Brute (blueside) - with an origin oriented very strongly toward Arachnos.  His chest symbol is the Arachnos spider; and while this symbol still appears when I have him on the Server selector list, it has been replaced with some kind of bull-horn image when I actually put him online.  No matter what arrangement I've attempted at the Tailor, I seem to be unable to restore the original chest symbol for when I actually have this guy in Paragon City, regardless of the zone.  Wondering - was some kind of irreversible change for characters with this sort of costume addition instituted at some point in the past, or did the Halloween festivities, which this guy took part in quite enthusiastically, result in an alteration that can be reversed only through some unrevealed process?

 

Apologies to the gang for this rather pointlessly cosmetic topic, but getting this guy back to the way I'd like him to look is a bit of a personal sticking point.  All appreciations on the advice and/or guidance that might come forth.

[Luminara]

Exit Supergroup mode.

[Snarky]

Try exiting Supergroup mode 😄

[Luminara]

1 minute ago, Snarky said:

Try exiting Supergroup mode 😄

 

I don't think that will work.  He should try exiting Supergroup mode instead.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 hours ago, Luminara said:

Exit Supergroup mode.

 

53 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Try exiting Supergroup mode 😄

 

Those ideas both suck.

 

Go to Supergroup and hit settings.  Hit accept to move to the second page, then turn on "Hide Supergroup Emblem."

 

[Luminara]

11 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

 

Those ideas both suck.

 

Go to Supergroup and hit settings.  Hit accept to move to the second page, then turn on "Hide Supergroup Emblem."

 

 

Does someone need more level 10 Interrupt IOs?

I CAN ARRANGE THAT.

[Yomo Kimyata]

6 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

Does someone need more level 10 Interrupt IOs?

I CAN ARRANGE THAT.

 

Nice try.  I cannot, I will not, be interrupted!

 

[Luminara]

24 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

Nice try.  I cannot, I will not, be int-

 

 

Hey, did I tell you about the time I recommended that some guy exit Supergroup mode?

[srmalloy]

23 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Hey, did I tell you about the time I recommended that some guy exit Supergroup mode?

I'm sorry; I can't hear you over the sound of my posting a recommendation that the OP exit SG mode.

[Yomo Kimyata]

48 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

Hey, did I ...

 

You can't stop me from aiding myself!

 

[Black Talon]

In the 2013-2020 gap, I had completely blanked out on this.  Thank you, all, for having given me a valid reason to stop crying, presuming that various demonic forces were haw-hawing boisterously at my conundrum, and allowing My Boy to get back to the way he oughtuz look.  Next idiotic, "But what do I DO about this?" situation I've got, I'll send out the online broadcast message and see if I can restrict myself to having only one sharp swat upside the back of the head.  Again, thanks to all.

[Snarky]

4 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

 

Those ideas both suck.

 

Go to Supergroup and hit settings.  Hit accept to move to the second page, then turn on "Hide Supergroup Emblem."

 

My ideas might be different….   SG mode does nothing in the current game…. And would work.  My idea does not suck.  Yomo, I am insulted.  You owe me one billion inf.  
 

Now as a Vampire… okay I suck.  My plots, plans, schemes, and strategies do not suck!

 

 

[GM Crumpet]

6 hours ago, Black Talon said:

In the 2013-2020 gap, I had completely blanked out on this.  Thank you, all, for having given me a valid reason to stop crying, presuming that various demonic forces were haw-hawing boisterously at my conundrum, and allowing My Boy to get back to the way he oughtuz look.  Next idiotic, "But what do I DO about this?" situation I've got, I'll send out the online broadcast message and see if I can restrict myself to having only one sharp swat upside the back of the head.  Again, thanks to all.

Don't worry about it. The guys are just messing with you. Everyone has issues where it's a simple solution.

 

But as nobody has mentioned it, have you tried exiting SG mode?

 

😛 

[Scarlet Shocker]

If exiting Supergroup mode fails to work, quit your SG, but only after you've robbed all the salvage.

[High_Beam]

Another EvE Online Player?

[roleki]

Try exCiting Super Group mode!

 

 

[Skyhawke]

Sigh...nobody ever thinks outside the box. Do a reverse enter supergroup mode. That's the ticket.

[srmalloy]

7 hours ago, Snarky said:

My ideas might be different….   SG mode does nothing in the current game…. And would work

SG mode no longer has the effect of diverting inf into your SG's prestige, since prestige is no longer a currency for base building, but it still performs the visual transformation of replacing costume colors with the SG colors. If it was configurable on a costume-by-costume basis, instead of being a character-based setting, it would let you make a sort of 'home' and 'away' version of each of a character's costumes, but with the way it's likely stored internally, it would take a character database structure change to modify, which would involve a lot of coding for not much benefit.

[UltraAlt]

On 11/19/2023 at 4:47 PM, Black Talon said:

Apologies to the gang for this rather pointlessly cosmetic topic, but getting this guy back to the way I'd like him to look is a bit of a personal sticking point.  All appreciations on the advice and/or guidance that might come forth.

 

No need to apologize for asking questions in the forums or in-game in the /help channel.

 

Many of us believe in helping other players. We love the game, and we want you to love your CITY experience as much as we do.

 

I'll go with Yomo's method. This stops the issue form happening at all.

 

The only reason to be in Supergroup-mode is of you want to use it to change the colors on your costume (say to match the Supergroups "official" supergroup colors and - optionally - wear the supergroup emblem on your chest.)

It used to be that you needed to accumulate "prestige" to build and upkeep supergroup bases. The way that you gained "prestige" was by being in supergroup-mode. Bases no longer require "prestige".

 

I never put any of my characters into supergroup-mode unless it is by accident.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 11/20/2023 at 1:01 AM, Snarky said:

My ideas might be different….   SG mode does nothing in the current game…. And would work.  My idea does not suck.  Yomo, I am insulted.  You owe me one billion inf.  
 

Now as a Vampire… okay I suck.  My plots, plans, schemes, and strategies do not suck!

 

 

Oh, I am very aware of things that suck. 

 

[Snarky]

3 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Oh, I am very aware of things that suck. 

 

Yomo. You wrong.

 

Vacuums Don’t Suck

Devan Taylor

·

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Published in

Newtonian Curiosity

12 min read

·

Jul 11

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And neither do black holes!

In fact, suction doesn’t even exist like you probably think it does!

Vacuum Cleaners Don’t Suck

When you clean your carpets with a vacuum cleaner, you’re sucking up all the dirt and debris; Or are you?

In physics, all objects maintain constant, nonaccelerated, motion unless acted upon by an outside net force (with some exceptions). For example, the debris on your carpet does not randomly move around and bounce up into the air. It remains on the carpet utterly motionless until something, like a vacuum cleaner, exerts a net force on it. However, and somewhat counterintuitively, the vacuum cleaner itself is not what is exerting a force on the debris, but rather the air in your house.

Vacuum cleaners work by creating a low-pressure environment (aka a vacuum) inside the machine (hence its name). Because of the imbalance between the low pressure inside the vacuum cleaner and the relatively higher pressure of the outside air, the air outside of the vacuum cleaner rushes in to fill the space within the vacuum cleaner. While it is rushing inside the machine, the air exerts a force on the debris in your carpet, pushing the debris into the vacuum cleaner with it.

The idea of suction as we commonly describe it implies that debris is being pulled into the vacuum cleaner, but that’s not the case. There is no such thing as suction as a pulling force. If this is hard to understand, you’re not alone. The idea of suction exerting a pulling force on objects is a simplification that is deeply engrained into our vernacular.

To understand why the idea of suction as a pulling force is false, entertain the following question:

If a perfect vacuum is an absence of “stuff,” how can nothing pull on something?

The answer: It can’t.

Air, however, can push things. The gas molecules that make up the air we breathe naturally move from environments of higher pressure to environments of lower pressure. Vacuum cleaners take advantage of this by creating a low-pressure environment for the air to flow toward. The rotating bristles featured on some vacuum cleaners help to make this more efficient by breaking up debris and flinging it into the air.

How Do Straws Work?

We can also use the idea of air pressure to identify how drinking straws work. Before you suck on the straw, the pressure inside the straw is the same as the pressure outside the straw. The force being exerted on the liquid inside the straw is the same as the force being exerted on the water outside the straw. Thus, the liquid remains stationary because there is no net force. But when you create a low-pressure environment inside the straw by expanding your lungs it creates an imbalance between high and low pressure. The air outside the straw is now at a higher pressure than the inside of the straw and the force being exerted on the water inside the straw is lower than the force being exerted on the water outside the straw. This net force allows the air outside the straw to push down on the liquid and force it up the straw and into your mouth.

Because the idea of suction as a pulling force doesn’t exist and straws work via air pressure pushing on a liquid, there is a practical limit to how long a straw can be and still work. At a certain length, the air pressure outside the straw is too weak to continue pushing the weight of the liquid inside the straw up further against Earth’s gravity. The only way to push the liquid further up the straw would be to increase the air pressure outside the straw so that it pushes on the liquid more or decrease the pressure inside the straw even lower with the help of something like a vacuum pump. But even with a vacuum pump, once the pressure inside the straw becomes low enough you run into another issue: the vapor pressure of the liquid.

All liquids have a vapor pressure, or the pressure at which the liquid starts to transition to a gas; what we refer to as boiling. At normal atmospheric pressure and temperatures, water is a liquid. Once water is heated enough, it starts to boil and transitions into water vapor. This is because the temperature of a liquid is the average kinetic energy of the molecules within it. At a certain temperature (for water it’s 212°F at sea level) the molecules in the liquid have enough kinetic energy that they can overcome the air pressure pushing down on the liquid and the forces attracting the molecules to each other and escape as a gas. Another way that water can transition into a gas is by lowering the air pressure that’s pushing down on the liquid such that the air pressure exerts a force low enough that the kinetic energy of the molecules allows them to escape. If you attached a vacuum pump to the end of a straw and turned it on, eventually the inside of the straw would reach a low enough pressure that the liquid would start to boil and turn into a gas.

No matter how hard you sucked, you wouldn’t be able to drink through a straw that is above a certain length. Either there wouldn’t be enough air pressure to push the liquid all the way up the straw or you would be creating such a low pressure inside the straw that the liquid would start to boil and transition from a liquid to a gas.

How Does Earth Keep Its Atmosphere Nex to the Vacuum of Space?

As we’ve gone over already, a vacuum's strength depends entirely on the pressure around it. The higher the pressure around a vacuum, the more force will be exerted on objects being pushed toward the vacuum. Because of Earth’s gravity, its atmosphere is not uniform. Rather, there are more gas molecules near the surface of the Earth and fewer and fewer gas molecules as you climb in altitude. Because there are more gas molecules near the surface, the atmospheric pressure near the surface is greater than that of higher altitudes with fewer gas molecules. This means that attempting to drink through a straw gets harder the higher your altitude. There is simply less air pressure to push the liquid into the straw.

To better understand this, it’s important to know that gravity’s influence is based on two factors: 1) distance between objects, and 2) the mass of objects. The further two objects are from each other, the less gravity attracts them toward each other. Similarly, lower-mass objects are attracted to each other less.

Earth is absolutely massive compared to atoms and molecules in our atmosphere so most of them are strongly attracted to Earth’s center of mass. This is why Earth’s atmosphere is so thick near the surface. However, some atoms and molecules can overcome the attraction of Earth’s gravity by having a high enough velocity. The velocity needed to overcome Earth’s gravitational attraction entirely is referred to as escape velocity and the amount of energy it takes to accelerate an object to such a velocity depends on the mass of the object. For massive objects, like rockets, it takes a lot of energy to reach escape velocity. This is why rockets require large boosters. But, less-massive objects, like individual atoms and molecules, require much less energy to reach escape velocity.

As you go up in altitude, you encounter lower atmospheric pressure because there are fewer and fewer atoms and molecules that have enough velocity to fight against Earth’s gravity. Most atoms and molecules in the atmosphere have such low velocities that they cannot get much higher than Earth’s surface. Fewer atoms and molecules have high enough velocities that they can get higher than Earth’s surface, but can’t escape Earth’s gravity entirely so they exist above the surface levels but haven’t escaped into space. As you increase in altitude, atoms and molecules with high enough velocities to reach such altitude become more and more sparse. But, some of the lightest atoms, like hydrogen and helium, can reach velocities high enough to escape from Earth’s gravity and fly off into space never to return thanks to energy from the Sun. Earth’s magnetic field also plays a role in keeping some atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.

Rather than there being a hard line where Earth’s atmosphere suddenly stops right next to the vacuum of space like some conspiracy theorists suggest, the pressure gradually drops with altitude until it naturally reaches a vacuum. Really, there is no definitive altitude where we can say that Earth’s atmosphere stops and anything above that is space because it’s not that black and white. What we call the edge of the atmosphere is simply an agreed-upon altitude in which scientists have agreed that anything above it is more closely related to the vacuum of space than the atmosphere we are accustomed to. The atmosphere never really ends but rather just gets infinitely thinner and thinner and different countries and institutions use varying definitions of where Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins to suit their needs. In fact, hydrogen from Earth’s atmosphere has been detected as far away as the Moon’s orbit.

You can think of the situation as a battle of atmospheric pressure pushing out away from Earth, and Earth’s gravity attracting the atmosphere toward it. Without gravity, the pressure would diffuse Earth’s atmosphere into space. With gravity, a gradient is created in which pressure is highest near Earth’s surface and gradually becomes thinner and thinner with altitude.

Black Holes Don’t Suck

To accurately talk about black holes we need to have a more in-depth understanding of how gravity attracts objects toward one another.

In entry-level physics courses, you probably learned that gravity pulls objects toward each other according to their mass and distance. This is not the whole story. Gravity is taught this way in entry-level courses because it is a much simpler way to introduce students to the idea of gravity and forces in general and this way of thinking works for most scenarios on Earth. You can use this approximation to get very accurate results for how objects on Earth behave. It’s not until a higher level of physics education that students are taught about how gravity actually works. It’s a much more in-depth topic that requires mathematics more advanced than algebra and trigonometry to make accurate predictions. Thankfully though, mathematics is not required to understand the core concept.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is not some force that pulls objects toward other objects. Rather, it is the geometric warping of space itself. I explained this concept in my article Why Don’t We Feel Earth’s Motion? but I will briefly explain it here as well.

Objects with mass warp the space around them. The more massive the object, the more it warps space. The warped space around an object is referred to as the object’s “gravitational well,” and the motion we observe when two objects are attracted to each other via gravity is because both objects are falling into the gravitational well of the other. Because Earth is so massive, everything near Earth falls into its deep gravitational well. While Earth is technically also falling into the gravitational well of every object near it, the huge disparity in mass makes it practically nonexistent in all cases except for objects with masses on huge scales, such as the Sun.

The reason Earth orbits the Sun is because Earth is traveling in a straight-line path through space due to no net forces acting on it. But, because the Sun warps the space around it, Earth’s straight-line trajectory through space is also warped.

Imagine drawing a straight line on a flat piece of paper. The flat paper represents space with no masses warping it and the line represents Earth’s straight-line motion. Now, pick up the piece of paper and bend it. The previously straight line is now warped and no longer straight even though you didn’t do anything to the line itself. This analogy shows how a straight-line path can be warped into a curved path by the warping of space itself. Similar to how you can bend the paper in such a way that the line curves back on itself to create a circle, Earth has certain properties, such as distance from the Sun and tangential velocity, that the Sun’s warping of space causes Earth to orbit the Sun. If either of these two properties were changed significantly enough, such as greatly increasing Earth’s distance from the Sun or greatly increasing Earth’s tangential velocity, Earth would no longer orbit the Sun but would instead fly off in a straight line away from it. If Earth were significantly closer to the Sun or its tangential velocity was significantly reduced, it would crash into the Sun. Earth’s orbit around the Sun is entirely dependent on maintaining the right balance of these properties such that it is consistently falling toward the Sun but missing it due to significant tangential velocity and the Sun’s spherical nature.

You might have done a thought experiment in entry-level physics courses where you asked what would happen if you continued to increase the velocity at which a cannonball is fired from a cannon. At first, the cannonball goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. As you increase the velocity the cannonball is fired it travels further before hitting the ground. At a certain velocity, the cannonball will travel all the way around the Earth before hitting the ground. Eventually, you will reach a certain velocity at which the cannonball will fly all the way around the globe but it will never hit the ground because the Earth is constantly curving away from the cannonball. This is the point at which the cannonball has enough tangential velocity that it starts to orbit the Earth. This is a pretty good image of how Earth’s tangential velocity allows it to orbit the Sun. Just imagine that Earth is the Sun and the cannonball is Earth.

Black holes can simply be described as incredibly massive objects with an incredibly small volume. Imagine an object with the mass of the Sun but instead of having a radius of over 432,000 miles, it had a radius of just two miles. As I stated above, the more massive an object, the more the object warps the space around it. Black holes are called black holes because they are so massive while simultaneously being so relatively small that they warp the space around them so intensely that, after a certain distance called the event horizon, nothing can escape their gravitational well. Think about it like a hill that is too steep to climb. Not even light, which travels at the fastest possible velocity, can escape the intense warping of space created by a black hole at the event horizon; hence the name black hole.

Imagine for a moment that the Sun was instantly replaced by a black hole of the exact same mass. What would happen? Many intuitively predict that Earth would be sucked into the black hole because there exists a colloquial notion that black holes suck everything nearby into them, but that’s not how they work.

Earth would be in no danger of passing the event horizon because it would be very small for a black hole of such mass. If you use the equation for the Schwarzschild radius (the radius at which the event horizon lies) you’ll find that the event horizon for a black hole with the Sun’s mass would be a measly three kilometers from its center. That means you’d have to get pretty close to it before passing the point of no return and getting “spaghettified.” Meanwhile, Earth orbits the Sun comfortably at over 149 million kilometers from its center. Passing the event horizon of a black hole is really the only danger that they present. All the way up until then it is possible to escape their gravitational well just like anything else; although the closer you get to the event horizon the higher velocities you’d need to escape. So long as you stay away from the event horizon of a black hole, they act just like any other object in space.

Because orbits only depend on two factors (sufficient distance and tangential velocity for a given object’s mass), Earth’s orbit wouldn’t be affected at all if the Sun was spontaneously replaced with a black hole of equal mass. It would continue orbiting around the black hole exactly as it orbits the Sun currently. The distance between the center of the black hole and Earth would remain exactly the same as the current distance between Earth and the center of the Sun, Earth would maintain the same tangential velocity, and the mass of the object being orbited would be the same. With its orbit remaining undisturbed and no risk of falling past the black hole’s event horizon, Earth wouldn’t be bothered at all; although life on Earth would surely be having a bad time without the Sun’s energy.

So no, black holes don’t suck any more than any other object in space. They’re simply the absolute extreme examples of warped space. Just as Earth would only crash into the Sun if it got too close or had sufficiently low tangential velocity, objects will only fall into a black hole if they get too close or have sufficiently low tangential velocities as to fall past its event horizon. Otherwise, they would simply orbit the black hole or continue flying right on past it.

[Luminara]

11 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Yomo. You wrong.

 

Vacuums Don’t Suck

Devan Taylor

·

Follow

Published in

Newtonian Curiosity

12 min read

·

Jul 11

Listen

Share

And neither do black holes!

In fact, suction doesn’t even exist like you probably think it does!

Vacuum Cleaners Don’t Suck

When you clean your carpets with a vacuum cleaner, you’re sucking up all the dirt and debris; Or are you?

In physics, all objects maintain constant, nonaccelerated, motion unless acted upon by an outside net force (with some exceptions). For example, the debris on your carpet does not randomly move around and bounce up into the air. It remains on the carpet utterly motionless until something, like a vacuum cleaner, exerts a net force on it. However, and somewhat counterintuitively, the vacuum cleaner itself is not what is exerting a force on the debris, but rather the air in your house.

Vacuum cleaners work by creating a low-pressure environment (aka a vacuum) inside the machine (hence its name). Because of the imbalance between the low pressure inside the vacuum cleaner and the relatively higher pressure of the outside air, the air outside of the vacuum cleaner rushes in to fill the space within the vacuum cleaner. While it is rushing inside the machine, the air exerts a force on the debris in your carpet, pushing the debris into the vacuum cleaner with it.

The idea of suction as we commonly describe it implies that debris is being pulled into the vacuum cleaner, but that’s not the case. There is no such thing as suction as a pulling force. If this is hard to understand, you’re not alone. The idea of suction exerting a pulling force on objects is a simplification that is deeply engrained into our vernacular.

To understand why the idea of suction as a pulling force is false, entertain the following question:

If a perfect vacuum is an absence of “stuff,” how can nothing pull on something?

The answer: It can’t.

Air, however, can push things. The gas molecules that make up the air we breathe naturally move from environments of higher pressure to environments of lower pressure. Vacuum cleaners take advantage of this by creating a low-pressure environment for the air to flow toward. The rotating bristles featured on some vacuum cleaners help to make this more efficient by breaking up debris and flinging it into the air.

How Do Straws Work?

We can also use the idea of air pressure to identify how drinking straws work. Before you suck on the straw, the pressure inside the straw is the same as the pressure outside the straw. The force being exerted on the liquid inside the straw is the same as the force being exerted on the water outside the straw. Thus, the liquid remains stationary because there is no net force. But when you create a low-pressure environment inside the straw by expanding your lungs it creates an imbalance between high and low pressure. The air outside the straw is now at a higher pressure than the inside of the straw and the force being exerted on the water inside the straw is lower than the force being exerted on the water outside the straw. This net force allows the air outside the straw to push down on the liquid and force it up the straw and into your mouth.

Because the idea of suction as a pulling force doesn’t exist and straws work via air pressure pushing on a liquid, there is a practical limit to how long a straw can be and still work. At a certain length, the air pressure outside the straw is too weak to continue pushing the weight of the liquid inside the straw up further against Earth’s gravity. The only way to push the liquid further up the straw would be to increase the air pressure outside the straw so that it pushes on the liquid more or decrease the pressure inside the straw even lower with the help of something like a vacuum pump. But even with a vacuum pump, once the pressure inside the straw becomes low enough you run into another issue: the vapor pressure of the liquid.

All liquids have a vapor pressure, or the pressure at which the liquid starts to transition to a gas; what we refer to as boiling. At normal atmospheric pressure and temperatures, water is a liquid. Once water is heated enough, it starts to boil and transitions into water vapor. This is because the temperature of a liquid is the average kinetic energy of the molecules within it. At a certain temperature (for water it’s 212°F at sea level) the molecules in the liquid have enough kinetic energy that they can overcome the air pressure pushing down on the liquid and the forces attracting the molecules to each other and escape as a gas. Another way that water can transition into a gas is by lowering the air pressure that’s pushing down on the liquid such that the air pressure exerts a force low enough that the kinetic energy of the molecules allows them to escape. If you attached a vacuum pump to the end of a straw and turned it on, eventually the inside of the straw would reach a low enough pressure that the liquid would start to boil and turn into a gas.

No matter how hard you sucked, you wouldn’t be able to drink through a straw that is above a certain length. Either there wouldn’t be enough air pressure to push the liquid all the way up the straw or you would be creating such a low pressure inside the straw that the liquid would start to boil and transition from a liquid to a gas.

How Does Earth Keep Its Atmosphere Nex to the Vacuum of Space?

As we’ve gone over already, a vacuum's strength depends entirely on the pressure around it. The higher the pressure around a vacuum, the more force will be exerted on objects being pushed toward the vacuum. Because of Earth’s gravity, its atmosphere is not uniform. Rather, there are more gas molecules near the surface of the Earth and fewer and fewer gas molecules as you climb in altitude. Because there are more gas molecules near the surface, the atmospheric pressure near the surface is greater than that of higher altitudes with fewer gas molecules. This means that attempting to drink through a straw gets harder the higher your altitude. There is simply less air pressure to push the liquid into the straw.

To better understand this, it’s important to know that gravity’s influence is based on two factors: 1) distance between objects, and 2) the mass of objects. The further two objects are from each other, the less gravity attracts them toward each other. Similarly, lower-mass objects are attracted to each other less.

Earth is absolutely massive compared to atoms and molecules in our atmosphere so most of them are strongly attracted to Earth’s center of mass. This is why Earth’s atmosphere is so thick near the surface. However, some atoms and molecules can overcome the attraction of Earth’s gravity by having a high enough velocity. The velocity needed to overcome Earth’s gravitational attraction entirely is referred to as escape velocity and the amount of energy it takes to accelerate an object to such a velocity depends on the mass of the object. For massive objects, like rockets, it takes a lot of energy to reach escape velocity. This is why rockets require large boosters. But, less-massive objects, like individual atoms and molecules, require much less energy to reach escape velocity.

As you go up in altitude, you encounter lower atmospheric pressure because there are fewer and fewer atoms and molecules that have enough velocity to fight against Earth’s gravity. Most atoms and molecules in the atmosphere have such low velocities that they cannot get much higher than Earth’s surface. Fewer atoms and molecules have high enough velocities that they can get higher than Earth’s surface, but can’t escape Earth’s gravity entirely so they exist above the surface levels but haven’t escaped into space. As you increase in altitude, atoms and molecules with high enough velocities to reach such altitude become more and more sparse. But, some of the lightest atoms, like hydrogen and helium, can reach velocities high enough to escape from Earth’s gravity and fly off into space never to return thanks to energy from the Sun. Earth’s magnetic field also plays a role in keeping some atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.

Rather than there being a hard line where Earth’s atmosphere suddenly stops right next to the vacuum of space like some conspiracy theorists suggest, the pressure gradually drops with altitude until it naturally reaches a vacuum. Really, there is no definitive altitude where we can say that Earth’s atmosphere stops and anything above that is space because it’s not that black and white. What we call the edge of the atmosphere is simply an agreed-upon altitude in which scientists have agreed that anything above it is more closely related to the vacuum of space than the atmosphere we are accustomed to. The atmosphere never really ends but rather just gets infinitely thinner and thinner and different countries and institutions use varying definitions of where Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins to suit their needs. In fact, hydrogen from Earth’s atmosphere has been detected as far away as the Moon’s orbit.

You can think of the situation as a battle of atmospheric pressure pushing out away from Earth, and Earth’s gravity attracting the atmosphere toward it. Without gravity, the pressure would diffuse Earth’s atmosphere into space. With gravity, a gradient is created in which pressure is highest near Earth’s surface and gradually becomes thinner and thinner with altitude.

Black Holes Don’t Suck

To accurately talk about black holes we need to have a more in-depth understanding of how gravity attracts objects toward one another.

In entry-level physics courses, you probably learned that gravity pulls objects toward each other according to their mass and distance. This is not the whole story. Gravity is taught this way in entry-level courses because it is a much simpler way to introduce students to the idea of gravity and forces in general and this way of thinking works for most scenarios on Earth. You can use this approximation to get very accurate results for how objects on Earth behave. It’s not until a higher level of physics education that students are taught about how gravity actually works. It’s a much more in-depth topic that requires mathematics more advanced than algebra and trigonometry to make accurate predictions. Thankfully though, mathematics is not required to understand the core concept.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is not some force that pulls objects toward other objects. Rather, it is the geometric warping of space itself. I explained this concept in my article Why Don’t We Feel Earth’s Motion? but I will briefly explain it here as well.

Objects with mass warp the space around them. The more massive the object, the more it warps space. The warped space around an object is referred to as the object’s “gravitational well,” and the motion we observe when two objects are attracted to each other via gravity is because both objects are falling into the gravitational well of the other. Because Earth is so massive, everything near Earth falls into its deep gravitational well. While Earth is technically also falling into the gravitational well of every object near it, the huge disparity in mass makes it practically nonexistent in all cases except for objects with masses on huge scales, such as the Sun.

The reason Earth orbits the Sun is because Earth is traveling in a straight-line path through space due to no net forces acting on it. But, because the Sun warps the space around it, Earth’s straight-line trajectory through space is also warped.

Imagine drawing a straight line on a flat piece of paper. The flat paper represents space with no masses warping it and the line represents Earth’s straight-line motion. Now, pick up the piece of paper and bend it. The previously straight line is now warped and no longer straight even though you didn’t do anything to the line itself. This analogy shows how a straight-line path can be warped into a curved path by the warping of space itself. Similar to how you can bend the paper in such a way that the line curves back on itself to create a circle, Earth has certain properties, such as distance from the Sun and tangential velocity, that the Sun’s warping of space causes Earth to orbit the Sun. If either of these two properties were changed significantly enough, such as greatly increasing Earth’s distance from the Sun or greatly increasing Earth’s tangential velocity, Earth would no longer orbit the Sun but would instead fly off in a straight line away from it. If Earth were significantly closer to the Sun or its tangential velocity was significantly reduced, it would crash into the Sun. Earth’s orbit around the Sun is entirely dependent on maintaining the right balance of these properties such that it is consistently falling toward the Sun but missing it due to significant tangential velocity and the Sun’s spherical nature.

You might have done a thought experiment in entry-level physics courses where you asked what would happen if you continued to increase the velocity at which a cannonball is fired from a cannon. At first, the cannonball goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. As you increase the velocity the cannonball is fired it travels further before hitting the ground. At a certain velocity, the cannonball will travel all the way around the Earth before hitting the ground. Eventually, you will reach a certain velocity at which the cannonball will fly all the way around the globe but it will never hit the ground because the Earth is constantly curving away from the cannonball. This is the point at which the cannonball has enough tangential velocity that it starts to orbit the Earth. This is a pretty good image of how Earth’s tangential velocity allows it to orbit the Sun. Just imagine that Earth is the Sun and the cannonball is Earth.

Black holes can simply be described as incredibly massive objects with an incredibly small volume. Imagine an object with the mass of the Sun but instead of having a radius of over 432,000 miles, it had a radius of just two miles. As I stated above, the more massive an object, the more the object warps the space around it. Black holes are called black holes because they are so massive while simultaneously being so relatively small that they warp the space around them so intensely that, after a certain distance called the event horizon, nothing can escape their gravitational well. Think about it like a hill that is too steep to climb. Not even light, which travels at the fastest possible velocity, can escape the intense warping of space created by a black hole at the event horizon; hence the name black hole.

Imagine for a moment that the Sun was instantly replaced by a black hole of the exact same mass. What would happen? Many intuitively predict that Earth would be sucked into the black hole because there exists a colloquial notion that black holes suck everything nearby into them, but that’s not how they work.

Earth would be in no danger of passing the event horizon because it would be very small for a black hole of such mass. If you use the equation for the Schwarzschild radius (the radius at which the event horizon lies) you’ll find that the event horizon for a black hole with the Sun’s mass would be a measly three kilometers from its center. That means you’d have to get pretty close to it before passing the point of no return and getting “spaghettified.” Meanwhile, Earth orbits the Sun comfortably at over 149 million kilometers from its center. Passing the event horizon of a black hole is really the only danger that they present. All the way up until then it is possible to escape their gravitational well just like anything else; although the closer you get to the event horizon the higher velocities you’d need to escape. So long as you stay away from the event horizon of a black hole, they act just like any other object in space.

Because orbits only depend on two factors (sufficient distance and tangential velocity for a given object’s mass), Earth’s orbit wouldn’t be affected at all if the Sun was spontaneously replaced with a black hole of equal mass. It would continue orbiting around the black hole exactly as it orbits the Sun currently. The distance between the center of the black hole and Earth would remain exactly the same as the current distance between Earth and the center of the Sun, Earth would maintain the same tangential velocity, and the mass of the object being orbited would be the same. With its orbit remaining undisturbed and no risk of falling past the black hole’s event horizon, Earth wouldn’t be bothered at all; although life on Earth would surely be having a bad time without the Sun’s energy.

So no, black holes don’t suck any more than any other object in space. They’re simply the absolute extreme examples of warped space. Just as Earth would only crash into the Sun if it got too close or had sufficiently low tangential velocity, objects will only fall into a black hole if they get too close or have sufficiently low tangential velocities as to fall past its event horizon. Otherwise, they would simply orbit the black hole or continue flying right on past it.

 

The lack of proper formatting to make that readable sucks.

[Snarky]

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

 

The lack of proper formatting to make that readable sucks.

….Iseewhatudidthere…..

[Techwright]

Magic 8 Ball says:

[Yomo Kimyata]

51 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Black Holes Don’t Suck

 

I never mentioned black holes.  You are using black holes as a strawman argument, because as the NYT noted, straws and vampires both suck.