Can HOLLOW PLANETS Exist?

planets are enormous objects in outer space right now there are six trillion trillion kilograms of rock and water and people and a lot of ants another biomass beneath my feet as humans have defined them planets are huge and roughly spherical but are all planets solid now entering the facility the idea that humanity is living inside of a planet rather than on it or at least there's something underneath the surface besides a terawatt level underground laboratory has been going around for a long time for example the ancient Greeks thought there were a system of underground caves and caverns that led to another world an underworld and slightly more recently the scientist Edmund Halle of Halley's Comet proposed that the earth was not solid it was in fact a series of concentric shells this begs the question can hollow planets exist and is earth one of those planets well let's begin with how we define them define a planet nice hair dude now where did I put them uh here it is observe my cup Oh science inside of this cup of science I have both water and vegetable oil substances that don't mix they are immiscible and they tend to separate themselves because of both pressure and gravity as a consequence of that because water is more dense in this vegetable oil even when I mix everything up very well it will start to separate itself out again now when everything comes to arrest because of gravity and pressure and density this system is now in what we call hydrostatic equilibrium and this concept is not useful for just defining the layers of cups of science it helps us define planets a planet like Earth or Mars is a lot of stuff but a certain amount of stuff take Jupiter for example this gas giant is massive enough to round itself out under its own gravity but not so massive that gravitational forces ignite thermonuclear fusion in its core and turn Jupe Jupe into a star and the reason why planets will round themselves out under gravitational forces is that when you have enough mass to be a planet that gravitational force overcomes the rigid forces of your own material and makes solids move like fluids yes even rock can flow so planets as humans define them are under hydrostatic equilibrium just like our oil and water example and so for hollow planets to be a thing they would have to be strong enough in their shells to fight off those gravitational forces trying to solidify and spear a PHY them and that strength is something that we can calculate oh hello what am i doing well I'm using a spoon to dig to the center of the earth that would be one way to tell if the earth was hollow right if you could dig all the way down and crack some kind of inner shell but unfortunately humans aren't that good at digging right now the deepest hole in the world the Kola super-deep borehole yeah real original name I know is only about 12 kilometers deep right now from the surface of the earth down to the core it's about 6,400 kilometers so digging oddly enough has not yet ruled out a Hollow Earth because humans have not drilled down but 1% of the Earth's radius so if you excuse me by my calculation I have about a hundred million more kilograms of rock to spoon so on your way on your way if a planet is to be hollow it better be seriously strong and Arya here can help us calculate that strength nice one most Hollow Earth theories go something like this all of humanity lives on the inside of a planet shell and there's a Sun at the center it's a wild idea but we should still math it anyway this idea is analogous to another shell around a star conception the Dyson Sphere named after recently ass genius Freeman Dyson there are a number of papers that calculate the actual required strength for Dyson Sphere so we can use the same equations therein to get how strong a hollow planet shell would have to be for these theories to be correct aria run Dyson Sphere projection seven the first six I didn't carry like any of the decimal go ahead according to the paper Dyson spheres around white dwarfs from 2015 the compressive strength of the material for a rigid Dyson Sphere can be shown to be GM over 2r times Rho where G is Newton's gravitational constant M is the mass of the Interior star R it's the radius of the shell and Rho is the density of the show if we plug even very conservative numbers into this equation like the mass of Earth's Sun the density and radius of Earth you still get a required strength on the order of 57 peda Pascal's that's fifty-seven thousand trillion Newton's of force on every square meter of this shell that's what it would have to put up with and if that sounds like a lot that's because it is this exceeds the theoretical maximum strength of matter there is less pressure at the center of the Sun there is less pressure at the center of a nuclear detonation if humans are right about any of these numbers like the mass of the Sun and the density of the earth then the concept of a hollow planet really shouldn't exist you know like facetiming in public without headphones oh wait wait I'm getting a notification it says that the majority of facility faculty didn't enjoy the music mix at the Android ball wait what are you talking about that music slapped I know Kevin shouldn't a DJ Kevin not everything in hydrostatic equilibrium is necessarily a planet it's just one of those conditions that we need to be there to be a planet for example the smallest object confirmed to be in hydrostatic equilibrium is the dwarf planet Ceres see not a planet and the largest object that we know of that's in not in equilibrium is Earth's own moon which is 77 times larger than Ceres in these border cases the formation and composition of these objects is really important planet ship can be particularly complicated just look at Pluto it's okay we all still love you the laws of physics may discourage hollow planets from really being a thing but who's to say that the earth just isn't some special case and that humanity really does live inside of a hollow shell well math says that math does think about what it would actually feel like to live inside a planet ship well if I was inside a planet shell right now I would feel some gravitational force at my feet because their shell underneath my feet but I would also feel some tugging at the top of my head from the parts of the shell above my head though that force would be less because that mass is further away now you can do this same analysis for every part of my body and every part of the shell and what you find is that all of these forces when summed up exactly cancel out leaving me weightless no matter where I am inside of this shell this was first proven mathematically by intellectual lad Isaac Newton in his shell theorem this means that if humans really were living in a Hollow Earth right now you'd be able to tell because everything and everyone would be just floating around weightless which does sound pretty fun to be honest there's another planet-sized problem with the idea of a Hollow Earth - and that is protection without a core at the center of Earth without all the heat and pressure and molten metal that comes with it there is no giant spinning ball of nickel and iron that in tandem with Earth's rotation creates a magnetic field and without this magneto sphere earth and its inhabitants would be quickly fried by incoming cosmic radiation and then if this theory was true you just have a big shell with a bunch of irradiated floating earthling corpses in it which is terrible the fact is from physics and direct observation we can be fairly confident that no true hollow planets exist in the universe and that the earth is itself not Hollow it's almost like this theory is haha because Holley Oh dr. Jeff is gonna slap it oh wow it's good to laugh thank you so much to the facilities very nerdy faculty for their help in directly producing this video especially assistant researcher Adam Frost and visiting scholar Luke Cashman the facility gets the majority of its revenue from faculty members and from our patreon if you want to join our patreon and our discord where right now literally hundreds of nerds are talking to each other giving the episode ideas posting photos of their lizards and cats you can go to patreon.com/scishow you'll want to do that science videos today for a nerdier to mom that's still going huh well there's a lot of you so I'm just gonna guess I'm just gonna ride this one out it's longer than last time I'm gonna go okay here we go [Music] and thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 623,742

Keywords: science, stem, education, space, astronomy, math, physics, learning, kyle hill, because science, engineering, solar system, hollow earth, science documentary

Id: hYU7PVMMkZM

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BloodyPommelStudio]

What if the inside was pressurized, like the Earth was a giant beach ball?