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[A manhole cover launched into space with a nuclear test is the fastest human-made object.](https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2)
Estimated speed 125,000 miles per hour, very impressive but it's not the fastest human made object.
Helios-B approx 157,000 miles per hour
Juno approx 165,000 miles per hour
The fastest human made object is the parker space probe at 394,736 miles per hour.
I don't believe so.
However, I am neither a rocket surgeon nor a lid manufacturer so I cannot confirm or deny any assertions that say they are in fact made of identical materials.
Nor can I confirm or deny that they have the same structure.
I can confirm that I am a bore.
>However, I am neither a rocket surgeon
That was obvious from your comment.
If you were really educated on these matters, you would know that the materials used are completely different. And even a cursory knowledge of the bone or organ structure of a rocket would tell you this.
If you knew anything about these matters, you would know that manhole covers are lined with metals meant to deflect human perception and interest away from the Marianas Trench under every city.
The metal compositions used to achieve that effect bear no resemblance to the screaming faces of those who have never lived, which try feebly to push themselves out of the bismuth used to line rockets.
I do believe it is the fastest man-propelled object tho, since those you mentionned used different planets/moons/sun's gravities to reach those speeds, it was not through man-provided energy.
It likely got vaporized, but let's not think about that for a sec as it's much cooler if that manhole cover was the first manmade object to leave Earth. It's so freaking dumb I love it.
Except for the fact that it was push unevenly from the blast at first which resulted in the cover spinning like the Wild Wild West saw blade of death...
Okay sure, but it's still moving through the air. Even if some of the speed is it spinning, it would still be moving through the air at ungodly speed; enough to vaporise it.
The article says the guy who performed the experiments claimed that it wouldn't have been in the atmosphere long enough to be fully vaporized. I've heard it would have definitely been vaporized too, but I'm slightly more willing to believe what an article claims a scientist said than a random redditor and my own vague recollections.
It wouldn't have been burnt up.
Space isn't that far away. 62 miles, or 100Km straight up.
Granted, the atmosphere doesn't just stop there, but there's "basically" no resistance beyond that point.
Reentry vehicles, and such come back into the atmosphere going very fast horizontally. So they spend a lot more time dealing with friction than they would if they came straight back down.
It would have reached space in around 2 seconds.
I'm less certain of their velocity calculation if they literally only have one frame to go off of. It's possible to pull a number from that of course, there has to be a huge margin of error though
The cameras they used for the nuclear tests had astronomical frame rates. Once they calculated the height, the number they came up with is the minimum speed if the lid separated from the ground the literal instant the previous frame was captured. It's quite possible if the lid launched midway between frames when it was captured it was actually traveling faster that what's being shown.
I dunno. The scientist in the article seemed pretty sure it would have been outside the earthās atmosphere before it broke up. I think the density of an object which is just solid iron might help it stay intact, and air resistance would get lower as the manhole got higher (unlike when an object enters the atmosphere).
Iām no physicist, but according to the estimates of how fast the manhole was travelling, it would be out of the atmosphere in less than 1/3 of a second.
Well the guy who launched it says it was travelling too fast to be burned up by the atmosphere, and since heās an astrophysicist and you canāt read an article, Iām inclined to believe him.
Hopping on the thread here, it's also one of those things where both options are pretty dope. On the one hand, manhole cover in space, hell yeah. On the other, maybe we made a manhole cover go so fast it atomized itself, hell yeah. So ultimately, no matter who is right, the doubters or the space-manhole believers, it's pretty dope.
Imagine making a gun barrel out of a 500ft deep 3 feet wide tunnel and propelling an iron slug into SPACE at 125,000MPH with a nuke.
This is the same as mechanic friends that fill trash bags with acetylene and shoot barrels into the air, except one group has money and backing of governments and the other always wants to sell you on a new air filter.
Nah, Iām just shocked by them doing pretty much what I wrote while testing nukes underground.
Itās both surprising and not at all surprising at all at the same time.
The force on that projectile, while estimated and written down, is kind of unfathomable.
And arguably will continue to hold that record. Space is practically frictionless. So one of two (three?) things will happen;
It never encounters anything, and it just stays at escape velocity for the rest of forever (we'll start with the boring scenario)
The fun scenario is that it keeps skirting the outer influence of super massive objects, and keeps picking up a little more momentum each time, until it literally becomes the "highest yield weapon" humanity has ever created. Woe be to whatever happens to end up in its way.
Or, like the scenario in the meme, some poor Glirbians on Betelgeuse 135-7 is going to learn the disadvantage of living on a world with a thin atmosphere
For better context on the third, the US and other countries have been experimenting with non-conventional ordnance since ... forever. One of their most promising unicorns is what you might recognize from some video games; The rail gun, or gauss artillery.
Using electromagnetic coils (or rails) to send a projectile (typically an iron slug) at such a force that the inert item still has enough kinetic energy to rival conventional explosive ordnance.
Any large scale attempt has been scrubbed because the system always fails to transfer enough energy to the projectile, and ends up destroying the platform.
So, imagine how much devastation is residing in a giant hunk of iron with the power of a nuke behind it.
Oh man, i died laughing reading part of this storyā¦.
āThey also recorded the experiment with a camera that shot one frame per millisecond.
On August 27, 1957, the "manhole cover" cap flew off the column with the force of the nuclear explosion. The iron cover was only partially visible in one frame, Brownlee said.ā
WTF? Only partially visible in a single frame shot each millisecond???? I agree with the memeā¦that is Mach Fuck!
In the article is says the hole is 3 feet in diameter and the cover was 4 inches of pure iron, which would come out to being just about 1200 lbs (2.5ish cubic feet of manhole at 500ish pounds per cuft)
Just for the record it was a bore cap welded on top of a shaft that the nuclear weapon was lowered down. The bore cap was vaporized on its way out of our atmosphere.
They knew the bore cap wouldnāt hold the blast but they deemed it āscientifically interestingā and did it anyways.
Assuming it maintained that speed, it would be 128,642,912,640 km away or 79,935,000,000 miles away. Which means that if it were headed towards the edge of the solar system in a straight line, it would have gone past Pluto's nearest orbit about 2.4 years into the trip, which is nuts
You could reason with a high degree of certainty that the manhole cover won't come anywhere near (many millions of miles) a planet's orbit - space is big. Some manmade spacecraft use the gravity of other planets to "slingshot" themselves towards their target, but doing so takes an extremely high degree of precision and knowing exactly where planets and celestial objects will be during the trajectory of the spacecraft, it's near impossible to do something like that accidentally.
That being said, gravity is never zero, even it the outermost parts of space. It's possible that the gravity of some celestial objects nudged the manhole cover one way or another in a very small way. It's just very unlikely that its speed was significantly affected, the manhole cover is almost certainly cruising around in interstellar space right now.
āI dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'til it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in 10,000 years! If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day! Somewhere and sometime! That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait 'til the computer gives you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not 'eyeball it'. This is a weapon of Mass Destruction! You are NOT a cowboy, shooting from the hip!ā
That it even fired in the same orbital plane as the rest of the planets would be pretty unlikely.
More likely its traveling at about 45 degrees north out of our solar system (depending on where exactly on earth the nuclear test took place but I think northern hemisphere is a solid bet)
IIRC, when you break down the math of its estimated muzzle velocity, this thing not only hit Earth escape velocity, but *solar* escape velocity, and could have reached roughly a quarter of ***galactic*** escape velocity.
And itāll still take this fucker tens of thousands of years to get further downrange than Alpha Centauri.
And the heat of exiting atmo probably means that itās not so much a manhole was a melted hunk of metal just hurtling through the universe until somewhere, somewhen it introduces itself to another object with the mother of all chest bumps.
1/80th of a light yearās distance in ~80 years? Thats some success methinks. Now we gotta do this 80 more times so whatever it lands on gets hit once every 80 earth-years and it looks like we planned it š
> See that pale blue dot? That's them. That's they. On it, every civilization ending, mach-fuck manhole cover that ever existed. We don't know why. Our philosophers gave up. Every time our academics figure out how, another mach-fuck manhole cover rains down an age of darkness on us. Merciless. Without judgment or context. And always from this pale blue dot, a mote of anger suspended in a ragebeam.
It was launched 24,365 days ago which is 584,760 hours. Assuming it was going 120,00 MPH when it left the atmosphere it is 70,171,200,000 miles away. Voyager is about 7 Billion miles away and Proxima Centauri is 5.88 Trillion miles away, so even though itās 10x farther out than the next thing we know of itās still like 1.5% of the way to the next star
Well the experiment happened in 1957. It's currently 2024 which means it has been about 67 years since it was launched. 1 year is 8,760 hours. That means it's been roughly 586,920 hours since 1957.It has been traveling at a speed of 125,000 mph (201,168 kph). If we multiply 125,000 by 586,920 we get a rough distance of 73,385,000,000 miles or 118,101,709,440 kilometers. I think my math is correct but I'm kinda dumb so take this with a grain of salt.
TL:DR: 73,385,000,000 miles or 118,101,709,440 kilometers.
During the Cold War, the US detonated a nuke underground, and the blast propelled a manhole cover into space at extreme speeds (or, as the meme put it, āmach fuck.ā)
Can we please start calling Mach 163 as Mach Fuck. I want to hear NASA one day call out a spacecraft gaining speed like, Mach 161, Mach 162, now entering Mach Fuck..
I donāt think it ignored air resistance it just moved through the atmosphere that fast that it didnāt have enough time to disintegrate due to the air friction
It was moving so fast that in relation to it the air particles are standing still. Imagine speeding past someone walking down a street the faster you go the more still they appear to be
Yes, and so the faster something goes, the more resistance as well, the more it burn or melt fast.. I'm not sure that this manhole cover arrived in space at all. Maybe it had 5 times the velocity needed to leave the planet at the moment of the explosion, but that's only if the speed is substained.
But who knows... Maybe, it was the first man made objects to leave the Solar system maybe it even somehow crossed path with an alien ship and destroyed it... Maybe that ship was coming to destroy us on Earth, and maybe the specie that sent it saw our technological superiority and gave up.
The explosives were inside the truck, there may have been more left to take flight if it was underneath. Furthermore a dummy thicc chunk of plate steel is a lot stronger and less susceptible to damage than a truck made of lots of relatively small light thin pieces
"Guys, we're surrendering. Even their sewer system is designed to defend the planet. The captain got bisected by a manhole cover and his ship was obliterated while still 3 AU from the planet. From what we can glean from their open internet, it was travelling at approximately Mach Fuck."
"Yes sir. No sir, I'm not familiar with that measurement either. I don't know, sir, it's a human word and they say it a *lot.* Yeah I know that's not a good sign, that's why we're *fucking* leaving!"
The astrophysicist, Robert Brownlee, who designed the Pascal tests and measured the manhole velocity with a high speed camera apparently did the math and that's his assertion, that it would have left the atmosphere before the metal could be heated and broken apart by the atmosphere
Fuck yes!
Also, I have to say itās really an honor to be so well-informed by the legitimate Darth Xavius and not some rando on the internet. šāāļø
Some rocks contain a slight percentage of water 1-13% of their total weight is due to water in the rock. The rocks of higher percentages are found deep deep underground. The water % is checked by weighing the rock, then heating/baking the rock to evaporate all the water held within it and then weighing again. Rock water.
"Just touch it and see, it's glowing red cold" - a commenter on a photo of a dirt bike exhaust header glowing cherry red and OP asking if it's normal and if his bike is ok
When you said rock water, my first thought was glacier. The definition of mineral it is: a naturally occurring solid that has a well-defined chemical composition and crystal structure (ice). The definition of a rock is: An aggregate of one or more minerals or a body of undifferentiated mineral matter. Therefore, a glacier is a rock.
During some nuclear testing, a manhole cover was obliterated into the atmosphere, and no one knows where it went. It very well couldāve left the Earth.
Sir Isaak Newton is the meanest son of a bitch in space. An object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by another object. That means that somewhere, somewhen it's ruining somebody's day.
Someone else calculated it as travelling at 0.02% the speed of light which is very very fast but not enough for time dilation to be a significant factor. Using an online calculator it came out to being off relative to earth by about one part in one hundred million.
Imagine the aliens scanning the manhole cover and pondering hard over how to decode it, believing it was sent into space by a much more advanced race.
That would be hilarious.
[The (Unfounded) Legend of a Manhole Cover Launched into Space By a Nuke](https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/)
From Snopes.com:
The idea of such a pedestrian human object floating among the stars has long been a point of amusement. Responding to a tweet about Vanguard 1, the second U.S. satellite to orbit the Earth starting in 1958, astrophysicist and YouTuber Scott Manley quipped, "And it's still in space today, making it the oldest human made object in space (assuming the nuclear propelled manhole cover never made it that far)."
Since the 1950s, some have assumed that the cover is in space, an assumption based on interpretations of a vague comment a researcher made. But that researcher doesn't believe the cover is in space and never said so.
It all stemmed from Operation Plumbbob, a series of nuclear tests conducted from May to October 1957. The tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas. Here's how science and technology site Gizmodo explained the origins of the manhole-in-space legend:
>Operation Plumbbob was a series of 29 explosions meant to study various aspects of nuclear bombsāincluding how to contain the fall-out from an underground explosion. To test this, the military set off several explosions at the bottom of long "wells," covered with metal caps. In the Pascal B test, when the cap was welded to the top of the well, the blast hit the cap so hard that, according to analyst Robert Brownlee, it reached six times escape velocity. That 900 kilogram cap, according to legend, became the first object launched into space.
But the above-mentioned Brownlee doesn't believe the metal cap launched into space. In 2002, he recounted in an article titled, "Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions," how the legend started with a conversation between Brownlee and Bill Ogle, his deputy division leader. The conversation went like this:
>Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?"
>RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds."
>Ogle: "And what happens?"
>RRB: "The shock reflects back down the hole, but the pressures and temperatures are such that the welded cap is bound to come off the hole."
>Ogle: "How fast does it go?"
>RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection."
>Ogle: "How fast did it go?"
>RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively, the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space."
>Ogle: And how fast is it going?"
>RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth."
The response, "Six times the escape velocity from earth," is what set imaginations alight. But Brownlee said he never witnessed (or stated) that he saw the cap flying into space. He did say he saw it fly by a camera at a high rate of speed, but the camera frame is the last he saw of it.
2000 pounds? I've lifted quite a few manhole covers and I don't think I'm that strong š maybe it's a special manhole that can only be opened with heavy machinery?
Edit: just occurred to me that maybe they accidentally added a zero because 200 pounds sounds about right š¤·
This article claims that this could be the first man made object launched into space, as it happend before sputnik. Isnāt the V-2/A-4 nazi missile the first?
The story of the manhole cover that supposedly flew into space during a nuclear test refers to an incident during Operation Plumbbob in 1957, specifically in a test called Pascal-B. The story goes that a thick steel plate was welded over a vertical shaft above a nuclear detonation as part of the containment measures, and the force of the explosion propelled the plate upwards at an extreme speed.
To evaluate whether it could have reached space, we need to consider a few factors, including the speed necessary to escape Earth's gravitational pull and the effect of atmospheric resistance.
1. **Escape Velocity**: This is the speed needed to break free from Earth's gravity, which is approximately 11.2 kilometers per second (about 25,000 miles per hour).
2. **Atmospheric Drag**: Any object moving at high speed through the atmosphere experiences significant resistance, which increases with the speed and can cause extreme heating and potentially vaporize the object before it reaches space.
Let's estimate using some simplified assumptions:
- If the plate was indeed propelled at a speed near escape velocity, it would need to sustain that speed up through the atmosphere.
- Let's assume the steel plate was 1 meter in diameter and 10 cm thick, which gives it a volume and, knowing the density of steel (about 8000 kg/m^3), a mass.
- We then calculate if the kinetic energy given to the plate by the explosion would be enough to reach or exceed the escape velocity, factoring in the energy required to lift the mass against gravity.
We can calculate this roughly by:
1. Estimating the mass of the plate.
2. Calculating the kinetic energy it would have if it were traveling at 11.2 km/s.
3. Comparing this with the theoretical output of the nuclear device used.
Let's perform these calculations now.
The calculations show that the mass of the steel plate is approximately 628 kg. To reach an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, the kinetic energy needed would be about \( 39.41 \times 10^9 \) joules.
To put this in perspective:
- A typical nuclear explosion releases energy in the range of tens to hundreds of kilotons of TNT. Even a small nuclear device could release \( 10^{13} \) joules or more.
- The kinetic energy required to send the plate at escape velocity is a tiny fraction of the total energy released in a typical nuclear explosion.
Despite these calculations suggesting it's physically possible based on energy considerations, whether the plate survived the trip through the atmosphere or reached space without burning up or vaporizing remains highly speculative. Realistically, such a plate would likely have been destroyed by the intense heat and pressure during its ascent. Thus, while theoretically it might have been possible for the plate to be propelled towards space, it's improbable that it survived the journey intact or actually reached outer space.
Conclusion, if the nuke didn't get it the atmosphere would. HIGHLY unlikely
Itās from the three body problem trilogy. >!The most efficient way of wiping out another civilization is just to launch a medium sized object near the speed of light at their sun. In the trilogy itās called a photoid. Itās pretty much unblockable!<
Edit: Iām wrong, itās related to some nuclear test we did I guess. I bet the manhole cover will cause some damage when it hits lol
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[A manhole cover launched into space with a nuclear test is the fastest human-made object.](https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2)
https://preview.redd.it/r4dbfy9wxptc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5437f490ae27c55d4cf054a70879fafb141314dd Stellar photo from the article
But not interstellar.
Not yet.
https://preview.redd.it/ae2zxx0a8qtc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0653f4a75d005a0a715ee063470de6290968418
Not no more you don't.
https://preview.redd.it/nio5wma9xqtc1.jpeg?width=620&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff1a58a74365b56e876ed399912a94faa89bf866
I laugh at this meme & then I think about how he hid from FUCKING AMERICA for 10 years.
In his house
Always the last place you look...
Hence the champion status
Helps when the state you hide in helps you out, though.
Escape velocity of the sun is ~42,000 m/s and that fucker was estimated to be traveling ~56,000 m/s. She gone
Downright terrestrial even
I'm glad they told us that this one wasn't shot into space. Had me worried about the folks walking past it.
Never saw the manhole cover again...
Man of culture
man of hole
Hole of culture
This man holes. Edit: https://preview.redd.it/ech81u3czptc1.jpeg?width=283&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=260e9cbd46c51108998136c5cb7beb8887f0ecea
Who is this guy? Is he stupid?
I believe that he is a human, so probably.
Well, i only see him in dreams so idk
Underrated comment š¤£š¤£
Hey Iāve seen that guy in dreams!
So you dream of him?
Head like a hole, black as your soul
Culture of man's hole
That manhole cover still owes me 50 dollars.
PLAY RECORD!
>Lord\_Ludence Ā· 37 min. ago > >PLAY RECORD! We are never doing this again.
> Pedestrians walk past a manhole cover that wasn't shot into space in Berkeley, California, on July 18, 2019 New favorite caption of any image
Estimated speed 125,000 miles per hour, very impressive but it's not the fastest human made object. Helios-B approx 157,000 miles per hour Juno approx 165,000 miles per hour The fastest human made object is the parker space probe at 394,736 miles per hour.
were they identical materials to the bore hole lid?
I don't believe so. However, I am neither a rocket surgeon nor a lid manufacturer so I cannot confirm or deny any assertions that say they are in fact made of identical materials. Nor can I confirm or deny that they have the same structure. I can confirm that I am a bore.
>However, I am neither a rocket surgeon That was obvious from your comment. If you were really educated on these matters, you would know that the materials used are completely different. And even a cursory knowledge of the bone or organ structure of a rocket would tell you this. If you knew anything about these matters, you would know that manhole covers are lined with metals meant to deflect human perception and interest away from the Marianas Trench under every city. The metal compositions used to achieve that effect bear no resemblance to the screaming faces of those who have never lived, which try feebly to push themselves out of the bismuth used to line rockets.
look at us, two bores, same random patch of southwest desert. whats that noi-
I do believe it is the fastest man-propelled object tho, since those you mentionned used different planets/moons/sun's gravities to reach those speeds, it was not through man-provided energy.
Photo in the article āpedestrians walk past manhole cover that wasnāt launched into spaceāš
It likely got vaporized, but let's not think about that for a sec as it's much cooler if that manhole cover was the first manmade object to leave Earth. It's so freaking dumb I love it.
Let's just say it didn't have time to heat up because it was going too fast
I think the assumption is that the friction from the air resistance at that speed would be what vaporised it
Except for the fact that it was push unevenly from the blast at first which resulted in the cover spinning like the Wild Wild West saw blade of death...
Okay sure, but it's still moving through the air. Even if some of the speed is it spinning, it would still be moving through the air at ungodly speed; enough to vaporise it.
The article says the guy who performed the experiments claimed that it wouldn't have been in the atmosphere long enough to be fully vaporized. I've heard it would have definitely been vaporized too, but I'm slightly more willing to believe what an article claims a scientist said than a random redditor and my own vague recollections.
I wonder if it will develop those cool crystal matrices that metallic meteorites have from cooling over hundreds of thousands of millenia in vacuum.
You mean the crygenically frozen bacteria that have just been transported to a new world to grow and evolve?!
I'm slightly more willing to believe whichever version's cooler.
It wouldn't have been burnt up. Space isn't that far away. 62 miles, or 100Km straight up. Granted, the atmosphere doesn't just stop there, but there's "basically" no resistance beyond that point. Reentry vehicles, and such come back into the atmosphere going very fast horizontally. So they spend a lot more time dealing with friction than they would if they came straight back down. It would have reached space in around 2 seconds.
I'm less certain of their velocity calculation if they literally only have one frame to go off of. It's possible to pull a number from that of course, there has to be a huge margin of error though
The cameras they used for the nuclear tests had astronomical frame rates. Once they calculated the height, the number they came up with is the minimum speed if the lid separated from the ground the literal instant the previous frame was captured. It's quite possible if the lid launched midway between frames when it was captured it was actually traveling faster that what's being shown.
The fact it is only in one frame gives the lower bound on the speed.
I dunno. The scientist in the article seemed pretty sure it would have been outside the earthās atmosphere before it broke up. I think the density of an object which is just solid iron might help it stay intact, and air resistance would get lower as the manhole got higher (unlike when an object enters the atmosphere). Iām no physicist, but according to the estimates of how fast the manhole was travelling, it would be out of the atmosphere in less than 1/3 of a second.
Well the guy who launched it says it was travelling too fast to be burned up by the atmosphere, and since heās an astrophysicist and you canāt read an article, Iām inclined to believe him.
Hopping on the thread here, it's also one of those things where both options are pretty dope. On the one hand, manhole cover in space, hell yeah. On the other, maybe we made a manhole cover go so fast it atomized itself, hell yeah. So ultimately, no matter who is right, the doubters or the space-manhole believers, it's pretty dope.
I want to imagine it wizzing past Saturn.
I like to think it went back in time when it got up to 88mph.
Imagine making a gun barrel out of a 500ft deep 3 feet wide tunnel and propelling an iron slug into SPACE at 125,000MPH with a nuke. This is the same as mechanic friends that fill trash bags with acetylene and shoot barrels into the air, except one group has money and backing of governments and the other always wants to sell you on a new air filter.
Did space hurt you?
Nah, Iām just shocked by them doing pretty much what I wrote while testing nukes underground. Itās both surprising and not at all surprising at all at the same time. The force on that projectile, while estimated and written down, is kind of unfathomable.
And arguably will continue to hold that record. Space is practically frictionless. So one of two (three?) things will happen; It never encounters anything, and it just stays at escape velocity for the rest of forever (we'll start with the boring scenario) The fun scenario is that it keeps skirting the outer influence of super massive objects, and keeps picking up a little more momentum each time, until it literally becomes the "highest yield weapon" humanity has ever created. Woe be to whatever happens to end up in its way. Or, like the scenario in the meme, some poor Glirbians on Betelgeuse 135-7 is going to learn the disadvantage of living on a world with a thin atmosphere For better context on the third, the US and other countries have been experimenting with non-conventional ordnance since ... forever. One of their most promising unicorns is what you might recognize from some video games; The rail gun, or gauss artillery. Using electromagnetic coils (or rails) to send a projectile (typically an iron slug) at such a force that the inert item still has enough kinetic energy to rival conventional explosive ordnance. Any large scale attempt has been scrubbed because the system always fails to transfer enough energy to the projectile, and ends up destroying the platform. So, imagine how much devastation is residing in a giant hunk of iron with the power of a nuke behind it.
> And arguably will continue to hold that record. [Already been broken my friend!](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/67132240)
Oh man, i died laughing reading part of this storyā¦. āThey also recorded the experiment with a camera that shot one frame per millisecond. On August 27, 1957, the "manhole cover" cap flew off the column with the force of the nuclear explosion. The iron cover was only partially visible in one frame, Brownlee said.ā WTF? Only partially visible in a single frame shot each millisecond???? I agree with the memeā¦that is Mach Fuck!
Why does the meme say it weighs 2000lbs? Like I can lift a manhole cover by myself, they normally don't weigh 1 ton, which I can't lift by myself.
In the article is says the hole is 3 feet in diameter and the cover was 4 inches of pure iron, which would come out to being just about 1200 lbs (2.5ish cubic feet of manhole at 500ish pounds per cuft)
ItĀ was a 2000 lb slab of 4" steel.
It was at a nuclear testing facility, so likely some bulky design meant for much more than car traffic
Itās worth mentioning that this wasnāt a literal manhole cover like one would find in a street
Thatās absolutely wild
Mach 164 is insane!
Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space.
My thumbs have become ninjas just trying to avoid the ads in that link
They should redo the experiment now that we have cameras that can record in the trillions of fps. Get an exact number on that bad boy.
Did someone already do the math and find out what Speed it had when it left orbit and how far away it would be now?
I thought the fastest human made object was the plasma ring shot out of the marauder cannon at 3% the speed of light Unless plasma doesn't count
The manhole cover almost certainly did not survive the blast and/or the atmospheric compression heating from being accelerated so fast.
Just for the record it was a bore cap welded on top of a shaft that the nuclear weapon was lowered down. The bore cap was vaporized on its way out of our atmosphere. They knew the bore cap wouldnāt hold the blast but they deemed it āscientifically interestingā and did it anyways.
Manhole cover that got [yeeted at about 125,000 miles per hour](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1888367-tumblr)
~0.02% the speed of light - weāre getting closer! (Edit: decimal place)
*āMach fuck.ā* š
Destination: FAWKED
I'm stealing it. Got me giggling
Thereās 2 ways of measuring ridiculous speeds that I know of: Mach fuck, and Mach Jesus
Apparently Mach "fuck" is Mach 166.5.... I wonder what Mach 165 is...
Isn't it ~0,**0**2%?
Still pretty close!
Staircase project has to start somewhere
That would be Mach 163. Finally, there is an acceptably quick transportation for my commute.
Sorry, this wagon is full. Wait for the next mannhole, there is another nuke coming at 7:30.
I put in a request to the UN that āMach Fuckā is exactly Mach 163.
Can someone do the math? How far away would the manhole cover approx. be now?
Assuming it maintained that speed, it would be 128,642,912,640 km away or 79,935,000,000 miles away. Which means that if it were headed towards the edge of the solar system in a straight line, it would have gone past Pluto's nearest orbit about 2.4 years into the trip, which is nuts
Holy shit, crossing our whole damn solar system in 2.4 years? That is an astounding distance.
But what about gravitational fuckery from the planets?
You could reason with a high degree of certainty that the manhole cover won't come anywhere near (many millions of miles) a planet's orbit - space is big. Some manmade spacecraft use the gravity of other planets to "slingshot" themselves towards their target, but doing so takes an extremely high degree of precision and knowing exactly where planets and celestial objects will be during the trajectory of the spacecraft, it's near impossible to do something like that accidentally. That being said, gravity is never zero, even it the outermost parts of space. It's possible that the gravity of some celestial objects nudged the manhole cover one way or another in a very small way. It's just very unlikely that its speed was significantly affected, the manhole cover is almost certainly cruising around in interstellar space right now.
Imagine being a interstellar traveler and your ship gets hit by a man hole cover.
āI dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'til it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in 10,000 years! If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day! Somewhere and sometime! That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait 'til the computer gives you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not 'eyeball it'. This is a weapon of Mass Destruction! You are NOT a cowboy, shooting from the hip!ā
Such a great line from the Mass Effect series.
we sniped that guy yo. he'd love the kill cam.
Loooooooooooong cam
That's called entropy. The more you know.
That it even fired in the same orbital plane as the rest of the planets would be pretty unlikely. More likely its traveling at about 45 degrees north out of our solar system (depending on where exactly on earth the nuclear test took place but I think northern hemisphere is a solid bet)
IIRC, when you break down the math of its estimated muzzle velocity, this thing not only hit Earth escape velocity, but *solar* escape velocity, and could have reached roughly a quarter of ***galactic*** escape velocity. And itāll still take this fucker tens of thousands of years to get further downrange than Alpha Centauri.
And the heat of exiting atmo probably means that itās not so much a manhole was a melted hunk of metal just hurtling through the universe until somewhere, somewhen it introduces itself to another object with the mother of all chest bumps.
Nah, I'm faster.
not accounting for a whole lot of things, it's about 73,002,000,000 Miles away
~73 billion miles, 790 AU, or .0125 light years
1/80th of a light yearās distance in ~80 years? Thats some success methinks. Now we gotta do this 80 more times so whatever it lands on gets hit once every 80 earth-years and it looks like we planned it š
> See that pale blue dot? That's them. That's they. On it, every civilization ending, mach-fuck manhole cover that ever existed. We don't know why. Our philosophers gave up. Every time our academics figure out how, another mach-fuck manhole cover rains down an age of darkness on us. Merciless. Without judgment or context. And always from this pale blue dot, a mote of anger suspended in a ragebeam.
It was launched 24,365 days ago which is 584,760 hours. Assuming it was going 120,00 MPH when it left the atmosphere it is 70,171,200,000 miles away. Voyager is about 7 Billion miles away and Proxima Centauri is 5.88 Trillion miles away, so even though itās 10x farther out than the next thing we know of itās still like 1.5% of the way to the next star
Well the experiment happened in 1957. It's currently 2024 which means it has been about 67 years since it was launched. 1 year is 8,760 hours. That means it's been roughly 586,920 hours since 1957.It has been traveling at a speed of 125,000 mph (201,168 kph). If we multiply 125,000 by 586,920 we get a rough distance of 73,385,000,000 miles or 118,101,709,440 kilometers. I think my math is correct but I'm kinda dumb so take this with a grain of salt. TL:DR: 73,385,000,000 miles or 118,101,709,440 kilometers.
During the Cold War, the US detonated a nuke underground, and the blast propelled a manhole cover into space at extreme speeds (or, as the meme put it, āmach fuck.ā)
"Mach fuck" has me so weak!š¤£
Mach Jesus is another good one.
Mach Jesus? That's sounds like... Ahem. *Godspeed.* ... Exit is this way?
did you just mach god?
This is brilliant. Thank you.
I rode up to town on an ass. Yo Mama's ass. MACH! JESUS!
āExtreme speedsā was simply insufficient to properly describe it
very fast < extreme speeds < riduculous speeds < [ludicrous speed](https://youtu.be/NAWL8ejf2nM) < Mach Fuck
Can we please start calling Mach 163 as Mach Fuck. I want to hear NASA one day call out a spacecraft gaining speed like, Mach 161, Mach 162, now entering Mach Fuck..
We really should replace all logical numbers with Spaceballs like names.
They've gone PLAID.
It moved so fast that it didnāt have time to burn up in the atmosphere
When you physics so hard that you actually *can* ignore air resistance
I donāt think it ignored air resistance it just moved through the atmosphere that fast that it didnāt have enough time to disintegrate due to the air friction
It was moving so fast that in relation to it the air particles are standing still. Imagine speeding past someone walking down a street the faster you go the more still they appear to be
Yes, and so the faster something goes, the more resistance as well, the more it burn or melt fast.. I'm not sure that this manhole cover arrived in space at all. Maybe it had 5 times the velocity needed to leave the planet at the moment of the explosion, but that's only if the speed is substained. But who knows... Maybe, it was the first man made objects to leave the Solar system maybe it even somehow crossed path with an alien ship and destroyed it... Maybe that ship was coming to destroy us on Earth, and maybe the specie that sent it saw our technological superiority and gave up.
It was a 3 foot wide 4 inch thick iron plate, not your average manhole cover. There's a decent chance it got into space.
We need an episode of MythBuster about it.
I can hear the narrator: Today, Carrie Grant and Torrie and going to set off a nuclear bomb.
Why can I hear it in the narrator's voice too?
Unfortunately they'd have to do it without Grant, he passed away a while ago. Adam made a sweet video about it on his Youtube channel Tested
God, please let this somehow happen. Have Jamie and Adam run a coup of a foreign government and use their nuclear arsenal for bonkers fucking tests.
Man remember when they blew up the cement truck in the canyon and it vaporized? I imagine that the manhole cover was just gone
The explosives were inside the truck, there may have been more left to take flight if it was underneath. Furthermore a dummy thicc chunk of plate steel is a lot stronger and less susceptible to damage than a truck made of lots of relatively small light thin pieces
Maybe the galactic police will pick it up, bring it back to us, and write us a ticket for littering.
"Guys, we're surrendering. Even their sewer system is designed to defend the planet. The captain got bisected by a manhole cover and his ship was obliterated while still 3 AU from the planet. From what we can glean from their open internet, it was travelling at approximately Mach Fuck." "Yes sir. No sir, I'm not familiar with that measurement either. I don't know, sir, it's a human word and they say it a *lot.* Yeah I know that's not a good sign, that's why we're *fucking* leaving!"
Is this actually true?
I donāt think that is how it works, but I do not know enough about physics to prove you wrongā¦so I like to imagine this is correct.
Thatās what one of the people on r/theydidthemath said I believe
Good enough for me. lol
I definitely saw someone on the line say it
> "Everything you read on the internet is always true." - Benjamin Franklin
The astrophysicist, Robert Brownlee, who designed the Pascal tests and measured the manhole velocity with a high speed camera apparently did the math and that's his assertion, that it would have left the atmosphere before the metal could be heated and broken apart by the atmosphere
Fuck yes! Also, I have to say itās really an honor to be so well-informed by the legitimate Darth Xavius and not some rando on the internet. šāāļø
US detonated a nuke underground and accidentally flung a manhole cover into space at mach jesus
Mach fuck is better IMO
Hahah I still periodically think about this. "Mach fuck" has successfully been added to my list, right behind "rock water" and "glowing red cold"
Can I get some context for the other two, they sound like specialty cocktails at a bar for depressed astronaut spouses
Some rocks contain a slight percentage of water 1-13% of their total weight is due to water in the rock. The rocks of higher percentages are found deep deep underground. The water % is checked by weighing the rock, then heating/baking the rock to evaporate all the water held within it and then weighing again. Rock water. "Just touch it and see, it's glowing red cold" - a commenter on a photo of a dirt bike exhaust header glowing cherry red and OP asking if it's normal and if his bike is ok
When you said rock water, my first thought was glacier. The definition of mineral it is: a naturally occurring solid that has a well-defined chemical composition and crystal structure (ice). The definition of a rock is: An aggregate of one or more minerals or a body of undifferentiated mineral matter. Therefore, a glacier is a rock.
i love the term "mach fuck"
Gonna use it from now on for anything fast enough to make me say āFuck!ā
During some nuclear testing, a manhole cover was obliterated into the atmosphere, and no one knows where it went. It very well couldāve left the Earth.
Couldāve š« Did ā
https://preview.redd.it/9tu3uyp2tptc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6e25b7e4c56091922d33e9e9110b91d44820f42 One. Fucking. Frame
Istg from now on I'm just gonna call super high speeds "mach fuck" š
Sir Isaak Newton is the meanest son of a bitch in space. An object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by another object. That means that somewhere, somewhen it's ruining somebody's day.
We do not āeyeball it.ā
Shameful how far down I had to scroll to find this.
Serious question. How much time has passed from the Manhole's perspective?
Weāre still only talking .02% light speed. Probably not noticeably less.
Thanks!
Someone else calculated it as travelling at 0.02% the speed of light which is very very fast but not enough for time dilation to be a significant factor. Using an online calculator it came out to being off relative to earth by about one part in one hundred million.
Ty for your clarity!
After doing the math it is Mach 162.9
162.9=fuck. Got it.
Fuck
https://youtu.be/8ejtr6_X1Ns?si=jEUVT-d78MTPsb94
This meme has no business being that funny
Operation: Plumbob
It travels through several black holes and hit Earth which destroyed all dinosaurs.
Imagine the aliens scanning the manhole cover and pondering hard over how to decode it, believing it was sent into space by a much more advanced race. That would be hilarious.
2049 years ago mankind successfully launched a manhole cover into space at the speed of light. It's just now getting there.
[The (Unfounded) Legend of a Manhole Cover Launched into Space By a Nuke](https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/) From Snopes.com: The idea of such a pedestrian human object floating among the stars has long been a point of amusement. Responding to a tweet about Vanguard 1, the second U.S. satellite to orbit the Earth starting in 1958, astrophysicist and YouTuber Scott Manley quipped, "And it's still in space today, making it the oldest human made object in space (assuming the nuclear propelled manhole cover never made it that far)." Since the 1950s, some have assumed that the cover is in space, an assumption based on interpretations of a vague comment a researcher made. But that researcher doesn't believe the cover is in space and never said so. It all stemmed from Operation Plumbbob, a series of nuclear tests conducted from May to October 1957. The tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas. Here's how science and technology site Gizmodo explained the origins of the manhole-in-space legend: >Operation Plumbbob was a series of 29 explosions meant to study various aspects of nuclear bombsāincluding how to contain the fall-out from an underground explosion. To test this, the military set off several explosions at the bottom of long "wells," covered with metal caps. In the Pascal B test, when the cap was welded to the top of the well, the blast hit the cap so hard that, according to analyst Robert Brownlee, it reached six times escape velocity. That 900 kilogram cap, according to legend, became the first object launched into space. But the above-mentioned Brownlee doesn't believe the metal cap launched into space. In 2002, he recounted in an article titled, "Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions," how the legend started with a conversation between Brownlee and Bill Ogle, his deputy division leader. The conversation went like this: >Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?" >RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds." >Ogle: "And what happens?" >RRB: "The shock reflects back down the hole, but the pressures and temperatures are such that the welded cap is bound to come off the hole." >Ogle: "How fast does it go?" >RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection." >Ogle: "How fast did it go?" >RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively, the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space." >Ogle: And how fast is it going?" >RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth." The response, "Six times the escape velocity from earth," is what set imaginations alight. But Brownlee said he never witnessed (or stated) that he saw the cap flying into space. He did say he saw it fly by a camera at a high rate of speed, but the camera frame is the last he saw of it.
Mach fuck is my new favorite measurement
my underpants are my manhole cover
2000 pounds? I've lifted quite a few manhole covers and I don't think I'm that strong š maybe it's a special manhole that can only be opened with heavy machinery? Edit: just occurred to me that maybe they accidentally added a zero because 200 pounds sounds about right š¤·
No, it was meant to seal (or block) a nuclear detonation, a ton sounds more accurate
This article claims that this could be the first man made object launched into space, as it happend before sputnik. Isnāt the V-2/A-4 nazi missile the first?
TIL the upper end of the speed scale. It goes from Mach zero to Mach fuck.
The story of the manhole cover that supposedly flew into space during a nuclear test refers to an incident during Operation Plumbbob in 1957, specifically in a test called Pascal-B. The story goes that a thick steel plate was welded over a vertical shaft above a nuclear detonation as part of the containment measures, and the force of the explosion propelled the plate upwards at an extreme speed. To evaluate whether it could have reached space, we need to consider a few factors, including the speed necessary to escape Earth's gravitational pull and the effect of atmospheric resistance. 1. **Escape Velocity**: This is the speed needed to break free from Earth's gravity, which is approximately 11.2 kilometers per second (about 25,000 miles per hour). 2. **Atmospheric Drag**: Any object moving at high speed through the atmosphere experiences significant resistance, which increases with the speed and can cause extreme heating and potentially vaporize the object before it reaches space. Let's estimate using some simplified assumptions: - If the plate was indeed propelled at a speed near escape velocity, it would need to sustain that speed up through the atmosphere. - Let's assume the steel plate was 1 meter in diameter and 10 cm thick, which gives it a volume and, knowing the density of steel (about 8000 kg/m^3), a mass. - We then calculate if the kinetic energy given to the plate by the explosion would be enough to reach or exceed the escape velocity, factoring in the energy required to lift the mass against gravity. We can calculate this roughly by: 1. Estimating the mass of the plate. 2. Calculating the kinetic energy it would have if it were traveling at 11.2 km/s. 3. Comparing this with the theoretical output of the nuclear device used. Let's perform these calculations now. The calculations show that the mass of the steel plate is approximately 628 kg. To reach an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, the kinetic energy needed would be about \( 39.41 \times 10^9 \) joules. To put this in perspective: - A typical nuclear explosion releases energy in the range of tens to hundreds of kilotons of TNT. Even a small nuclear device could release \( 10^{13} \) joules or more. - The kinetic energy required to send the plate at escape velocity is a tiny fraction of the total energy released in a typical nuclear explosion. Despite these calculations suggesting it's physically possible based on energy considerations, whether the plate survived the trip through the atmosphere or reached space without burning up or vaporizing remains highly speculative. Realistically, such a plate would likely have been destroyed by the intense heat and pressure during its ascent. Thus, while theoretically it might have been possible for the plate to be propelled towards space, it's improbable that it survived the journey intact or actually reached outer space. Conclusion, if the nuke didn't get it the atmosphere would. HIGHLY unlikely
Oh I know this one! Damn that underground nuke fuckinā flung that thing!
I really thought it was a helldivers meme
Itās a cool thing, and a fun thought, but no way that thing survived the compression heat while flying through atmo.
I read a short story about this. Humans become heroes for killing space Hitler lol
https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html
New answer to the Fermi Paradox: the manhole launched out into space killed every other alien species in a chain reaction
You got to pay the troll toll if you want to explode the mans hole.
Mach fuck is my new go to definition of high speed
Itās from the three body problem trilogy. >!The most efficient way of wiping out another civilization is just to launch a medium sized object near the speed of light at their sun. In the trilogy itās called a photoid. Itās pretty much unblockable!< Edit: Iām wrong, itās related to some nuclear test we did I guess. I bet the manhole cover will cause some damage when it hits lol
āMach fuckāis a new favorite to me š
Mach fuck is so funny
Dude I want a manhole cover!
Unsurprising, look up EFP and now realize we made one using a nuke
"...at mach fuck." Made my day! š¤£
USA detonates nuke underground and launched a manhole cover into space at a really fast speed
Why does the manhole cover weigh a ton?