What would the villain's corpse do to Earth?(5th Element)

[FaxModem1]

Inspired by the Bill O'Reily and tides thread.

After the events of The Fifth Element, what would happen to the Earth after it has received a new moon so close in orbit?

[Rabid]

Well, instead of having a 2-body system like before, where the two body turn around their common center of gravity ; You now have a 3-body system.

Now, I'm no expert in astronomy/astrophysics, but from the little knowledge I have gathered, a 3-body system like the one described in the film seems non-viable :

You have a a Satellite like half the size of the moon orbiting at less than 1000 Km of the earth crust, possibly with a retrograde, elliptic, and polar orbit (we can't know from what was seen in the movie : they just stopped it when it was about to crash directly on earth - after that, it just hover in the skies...).

Depending on the orbital parameters of the new body, one of the three bodies could either be expelled of the system (leaving a new 2-bodies system) ; or two of three bodies could collide.

As far as I know, with such little difference in mass between the three bodies, and the "altitude" of the new moon around earth (it flies VERY low, far less than the geosynchronous orbit), the system is unstable.


Basically, that's a case of Endor Holocaust, unless they use some technomagical-babble to put the new moon on a better orbit.


Hmm... Good question, that ! Imagining that you could put this object on the orbit you want, where would you put it ?


Object characteristic :

- Roughly the same density as the Moon, maybe a bit more
- 1/2 to 2/3 of the size of the Moon
- Spherical shape, homogeneous repartition of mass in the body assumed


Maybe at the same distance that the Moon is to the Earth, but diametrically opposed ?

Or would it be better to just put it into the Jovian satellites-trashcan, or even to toss it into the sun ?

[Srelex]

Well, they were expecting to destroy it early on in the film with a few missiles, weren't they? I guess now they can demolish it, and given the tech level of the Fifth Element (guidance systems in bullets!), taking out the pieces wouldn't be too much of a task of them, I'd reckon.

[Bright]

Well, they were expecting to destroy it early on in the film with a few missiles, weren't they? I guess now they can demolish it, and given the tech level of the Fifth Element (guidance systems in bullets!), taking out the pieces wouldn't be too much of a task of them, I'd reckon.

What about the debris? Unless their weapons were so powerful as to completely disintegrate the rock (or whatever it's made of), wouldn't that just make matters way, way worse?

[Srelex]

Well, they were expecting to destroy it early on in the film with a few missiles, weren't they? I guess now they can demolish it, and given the tech level of the Fifth Element (guidance systems in bullets!), taking out the pieces wouldn't be too much of a task of them, I'd reckon.

What about the debris? Unless their weapons were so powerful as to completely disintegrate the rock (or whatever it's made of), wouldn't that just make matters way, way worse?

That's what I said--I mean, I admit this is pure guesswork, but I don't find it inconcievable for their ships to be able to intercept the debris or for planetary defences to do it. But yeah, the precise workings of T5E tech are too vague to be sure one way or the other.

[Uraniun235]

Or they could just push or tow the whole thing away intact. They've got the spare resources to build interstellar cruise liners and smallish personal interstellar space craft, I'd bet they can find the ships to just push it into a wider orbit around the Sun where it won't hurt anyone and can be studied or taken apart at leisure.

[Junghalli]

Well, instead of having a 2-body system like before, where the two body turn around their common center of gravity ; You now have a 3-body system.

Now, I'm no expert in astronomy/astrophysics, but from the little knowledge I have gathered, a 3-body system like the one described in the film seems non-viable :

One of the scenarios in Neil F. Comins's book What If the Earth Had Two Moons? is, as the title suggests, exactly this. The system was unstable ... but in the sense that tidal forces are gradually moving the moon away from Earth, and the inner moon will retreat faster than the outer moon, so eventually (many millions or billions of years) they will collide. In human timescales it should be fine.

You have a a Satellite like half the size of the moon orbiting at less than 1000 Km of the earth crust

We can do some quick math here. Tidal force scales by r^3, since it is a factor of the difference in gravity between the near and far side of the effected body. The moon has a semi-major axis of ~385,000 km. Assuming you mean half the mass of the moon this object will be raising tides tens of thousands of times higher than the present moon. This will distort the ocean (resulting in huge floods) and the solid body of the Earth (resulting in Io-like tidal stressing) - I think it's safe to say it will be pretty catastrophic and I doubt the Earth would remain a habitable world with such a moon.

It should be noted that 1000 km above Earth's surface is deep within the Earth's Roche Limit: if it's held together by gravity this object should be torn to pieces and form a ring around Earth.

This may not happen if it's held together by forces other than gravity. However, it should also be noted that it would orbit in less time than it takes the Earth to rotate, so tidal evolution will lower its orbit instead of raising it (as is happening to Mars's inner moon Phobos). As it's already in an extremely low orbit and the tidal forces involved will be huge I doubt it will last long on a geologic timescale even if it holds together until splashdown day.

Best rationalization is probably that it has an extremely low mass to volume ratio, or magic.

[Havok]

Why would it orbit at all? It came straight in and stopped. I don' know if it would stay stationary above Egypt, but there is no reason it would start circling around the planet.

[Junghalli]

Why would it orbit at all? It came straight in and stopped. I don' know if it would stay stationary above Egypt, but there is no reason it would start circling around the planet.

Even if it was just a pass an object half the mass of the moon (just going by what was posted here) coming within 1000 km of the Earth would probably do a lot of damage; it would just be a one-time disaster instead of (semi)permanently screwing up the planet.

[TOSDOC]

Or they could just push or tow the whole thing away intact. They've got the spare resources to build interstellar cruise liners and smallish personal interstellar space craft, I'd bet they can find the ships to just push it into a wider orbit around the Sun where it won't hurt anyone and can be studied or taken apart at leisure.

As long as they're pushing it around, I'd vote for pushing it into the nearest black hole. After what that thing nearly did, and what it represented, I wouldn't want a molecule of it hanging around in the solar system. It'd be poetic justice for them to push it into our sun, only to have our sun go out. Or they take it apart at leisure, and then the pieces begin leisurely possessing people and technology. Some things are better left alone.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Why would it orbit at all? It came straight in and stopped. I don' know if it would stay stationary above Egypt, but there is no reason it would start circling around the planet.

If it is stationary relative to the planet, wouldn't it start to fall as soon as the effect that stopped it is turned off? It impacts anyway and Earth gets rendered molten?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Given that we see the President checking in on Dallas later on (at what seems like a few hours after the big drop) and he does not look to be in a state of panic or emergancy, we can (resonably) assume that the big rock is stable for the time being and not in danger of falling down or causing immediate choas.

That said TOSDOC brings up a valid point, which is that we really should not trust the 'dead' moon. The simple existance of the 'Ultimate Evil' and its creation speaks of some sort of supernatural force, so we would want to be catious in dealing with the moon less people start gettign possesed and such from any lingering effects.

My advice would be to consult LeeLoo (once she comes back from vacation) about the corpse. She did not seem to have much knowledge about the world in general BUT she seems to have built in knowledge of the 'big bada boom'. It would be resonable she may be able to let us kow if we can exect anything from the corpse.

[Junghalli]

If it is stationary relative to the planet, wouldn't it start to fall as soon as the effect that stopped it is turned off?

Unless it's in a geostationary orbit, yes. 1000 km is well below geostationary orbit (which is around 35,000 km).

[DudeGuyMan]

The moon is an average of over 200k miles away from Earth. Pretty sure the movie explicitly stated that the Big Bad came to a halt like 60 miles from impact. Out of universe, it's basically a flub that it didn't still crash into the planet and kill everyone. In universe, I dunno, they pulled it away with tractor beams, make up whatever you like.

[madd0ct0r]

Well, the elemental 'gun' managed to strip it of velocity and turned it into rock, not a big ball of evil.

It might not even be very dense rock, possibly kept afloat by ego.

[Sea Skimmer]

You’d figure that given that the ultimate weapon protected earth in the past, when it distinctly did not have high yield weapons or space travel, it has some kind of effect which prevents the dead rock from slamming into the earth and killing everyone anyway.

Also tidal effects from gravity may not be relevant. Sure the rock is huge... but is it really made of rock? Does it have rock like mass? Given that it had propulsion intelligence and the ability to shoot out fireballs and harden and melt its own surface I dare say it may have little or no mass at all or otherwise exist as some kind of totally unknown pure evil material. I don't recall what they said about the scans in the movie.

[DudeGuyMan]

You’d figure that given that the ultimate weapon protected earth in the past, when it distinctly did not have high yield weapons or space travel, it has some kind of effect which prevents the dead rock from slamming into the earth and killing everyone anyway.

I'm more inclined to think the weapon wasn't really meant to be fired one second before impact and just write it off as a flub. Certainly no one seemed to find it odd that the thing was just hanging there 60 miles away from the surface.

Also tidal effects from gravity may not be relevant. Sure the rock is huge... but is it really made of rock? Does it have rock like mass? Given that it had propulsion intelligence and the ability to shoot out fireballs and harden and melt its own surface I dare say it may have little or no mass at all or otherwise exist as some kind of totally unknown pure evil material. I don't recall what they said about the scans in the movie.

The original script heavily implied that Earth's moon was the result of all this having happened previously. Nevertheless, let's keep the moon's size but assume the dead evil ball thing had the same density powdered sugar has under normal earthly conditions.

The moon: 21.9 billion cubic kilometers
Powdered sugar: 801 kilograms per cubic meter
Mass of dead ball thing: 1.754x10^22 kilograms
Mass of Pluto: 1.3x10^22 kilograms

Sixty-two miles from the surface of the planet. Assuming I didn't misplace a zero or something like a dumbass, I think Earth is still in deep shit. Honestly given it's proximity and volume, it could be made of gas and still be extraordinarily bad news.

I don't really share the local urge to rationalize everything. It's a habit that seems to carry over from versus debates where there's a reasonable imperative to do so. Outside of a versus debate, I'd rather just look at something like this and go "lol hollywood" and call it a day.

[Darth Yoshi]

Considering how soft 5th Element is justifying the Earth's continued existence is a matter of whatever ass-pull you'd prefer. Hell, it could just be that space!FEMA or whatever has fancy magic terraforming abilities and can easily reverse any damage caused by the near impact.

[DudeGuyMan]

I like monkeying around with Fifth Element. I just don't need every last thing to add up. Like that horizontal space-border of glowing beacons the Mondoshawan had to pass through? Man what sense does that make? Anyway, random thoughts upon the movie...

* Absolute bare-minimum FTL speed for a commercial liner is, if I'm recalling correctly, about one light year per hour. Four hour trip to Phloston, assume Phloston orbits Proxima Centauri. Not quite Star Wars hyperdrive (unless of course Phloston is substantially farther away) but certainly not bad.

* Why put all the passengers to sleep for a four hour flight? This seemed odd to me at first, since you associate sleeping through space travel with much longer journies. I have to figure FTL travel used to be much slower, everyone got used to the idea of sleeping through flights, and the technology for doing so safely was perfected. Once FTL got faster, no one could think of a good reason to start staying awake. No one really wanted to go back to sitting around in a cramped seat eating peanuts oldschool airliner-style, and the spacelines certainly didn't want to give up being able to cram people in like sardines.

* We know they have nigh-instantaneous FTL communication, but curiously we never once see it used to broadcast video. Maybe audiovisual communication exists, but it just never happened to come up. Or maybe bandwidth is sharply limited.

* If I ever meet Luc Besson, I totally plan to ask him WTF a meat popsicle is.

* Man one way or another this has to be one of the most technologically optimistic visions of the future I've ever seen, silly fluff movie not worth analyzing or not. Less than 300 years into the future and Earth is at a point where in some ways SW would consider it merely... rustic... as opposed to hopelessly primitive. Too bad we never got any idea what their warships can do.

[Coyote]

Putting passengers to sleep is a commercial decision, I think, so they don't have to provide amenities, and jam people in.

I actually figured that the tech potential of T5E put Earth at somewhere in the ballpark of the KoTOR era, although they seemed to have spent more of their development on commercial/consumer goods rather than "important" stuff. The high-rise cities and speeder cars seemed comparable, as well as the fast FTL. It does seem incongruous that --in a galaxy of powerful aliens-- defense tech doesn't seem to be more advanced, but I got the impression that Earth was sort of a client of the more powerful Mondoshowan. They are described as "allies" but they are obviously more advanced.

[Lord of the Abyss]

* Why put all the passengers to sleep for a four hour flight? This seemed odd to me at first, since you associate sleeping through space travel with much longer journies.

An explanation I've seen for doing that in other works is that most people find the side effects of the FTL drive highly disturbing or physically unpleasant. If, say, two thirds of the population suffers from severe hallucinations or extreme pain when entering hyperdrive, keeping the passengers unconscious and choosing the crew from the immune minority seems like a good idea.

[DudeGuyMan]

Putting passengers to sleep is a commercial decision, I think, so they don't have to provide amenities, and jam people in.

I actually figured that the tech potential of T5E put Earth at somewhere in the ballpark of the KoTOR era, although they seemed to have spent more of their development on commercial/consumer goods rather than "important" stuff. The high-rise cities and speeder cars seemed comparable, as well as the fast FTL. It does seem incongruous that --in a galaxy of powerful aliens-- defense tech doesn't seem to be more advanced, but I got the impression that Earth was sort of a client of the more powerful Mondoshowan. They are described as "allies" but they are obviously more advanced.

We don't really know what their military tech is like. We saw their warships briefly, but were given nothing at all against which to judge their effectiveness. Small arms were still slugthrowers, but there's nothing wrong with that. Zorg's new all-in-one gun had a lot of interesting features, and at least some of them were described "old favorites" and not something brand new.

The Mondoshawan ship seemed to go down pretty easily to a couple of fighters, but it didn't seem to have any defensive capability at all. The fighters engaged at very close range with what looked like slugthrowers, but since the Mangalores were mercenaries we don't really know how up-to-date or well armed their fighters would be.

The Mangalores also seem to be horrible tacticians in general, engaging in melee combat when they don't need to and generally behaving like morons, with a crippling cultural flaw related to killing their leaders. No wonder they lost their war and were "scattered to the wind" by the government.

My personal fanon was always that they were a primitive warrior race that had advanced technology dumped into their laps thanks to the lack of a Prime Directive. That might explain why, despite having a martial culture, they seemed to be such poor fighters. Maybe they're just not that used to modern weapons and fifty years prior would have just been hitting everyone with axes.

[DudeGuyMan]

Ball of Evil was 1200 miles across, so markedly smaller than the moon, but still big enough to fuck the planet as it was explicitly stated to be 62 miles from the surface.

Also, the heroes left Phloston by stealing Zorg's shuttle. They then had an instantaneous FTL voice conversation with Earth where it was stated that the Ball of Evil was two hours from impact, THEN they jumped to lightspeed. They obviously made the trip from Phloston back to Earth in less than two hours since they had time to fuck around in the temple and still save the world, so the bottom end estimate for their max FTL is a little better than double what it was before, going off the 4 hours commerical flight.

[SAMAS]

Or more accurately, that Zorg's shuttle was faster than a luxury liner.

That's not too big of a stretch, given that Luxury Liners aren't exactly built for speed.

[DudeGuyMan]

Yeah, it's reasonable to assume that there are ships faster than that liner. I just had to see the movie again to remember that one was actually seen.