I guess I do not have to feed the cat and pay my mortgage anymore

4 min readJan 23, 2022

Source: found on Twitter, not sure anymore where. Should you hold the rights, please, grant me permission to use!

I love this image. Whenever I see this image, my brain goes wide! Not a theoretical physicist, just a physics lover, and happened to be good at physics during my bachelor of engineer and did a double master degree with one part focused on applied physics and mathematics. Here I am going to make some freelancer thinking, should you be a physicist, do not hesitate to jump in and correct me.

Since now we also have our audiostories, let me explain the image. The image shows an austronaut looking to earth, however, something hit it, and now it is destroyed. He has no planet to come back, and most likely a limited source of air.

You would hear no sound

One interesting observation is that we need air to propagate sound, or any other medium. Light is able to travel in space for being an eletromagnetic wave, sound is a mechanical wave: it is a difference of pressure traveling from one space to another.

It would take some minutes for you to feel the event

It is known from relativity that the light takes about 8 minutes to arrive to earth, for sure since the moon is closer, it would take lesser for us to feel the earth explosion, as a set of gravity waves.

You would go around in space, until reaching a new equilibrium point

It is hard to say with precision, the irregularity of the gravity waves may create a complicate scenario to predict, but, it is possible that you will travel in space until a strong gravity, maybe Jupiter, will pull you and the moon will have a new planet to orbit. If it is Jupiter, you are in big trouble. Jupiter is known for a strong dead electromagnetic wave, radioactive; with proper equipment, you can hear the “death song”. Further, it is also known to attract almost anything to it, it is a giant.

You may suffer some indesirable effects

Since the release may be bumpy, you may feel a set of gravity variations, since you are receiving a wave from the distruction of earth.

Final remarks

It actually happened a funny case during a Tsunami: the person was diving, and when they came up, everything was destroyed. Imagine you leave earth, and when try to come back, everything is gone! Sounds like science fiction, and it may be for a while. We are a huge piece of material floating on space, depending on a delicate equilibrium between planets, asteroids, and lost materials in space; a single movement could chain a cascade disequilibrium until reaching earth. Sometimes I wonder how we are going to die, and it could be by a lost piece of material in space that happens to find earth as its final destination. There are several theories how the moon was formed, one suggests a huge collision between old earth and a huge planet. Of course, no theory was able to explain completely how our beautiful and charming moon was formed, they all seem to have flaws. Compared to other planets, it is different; and most planets have several moons, we happen to have one; and it is also relatively big! Like a mother with just one soon, we have just one moon, beautiful and well-curated, let keep it this way for now until we master space traveling and could create hotels in the moon!

I guess I do not have to feed the cat and pay my mortgage anymore

Written by Jorge Guerra Pires, PhD

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