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dogscoff said:
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AgentZero said:
And finally, there's a bit where our hero is brought to a massive underground city, designed to support enough people to create the genetic diversity required for the species to survive.
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How exactly would burying yourself in an underground city protect you from a supernova? Might as well try to protect yourself from an atom bomb by opening an umbrella...
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There is a tendency to think of the star going nova as equal to a huge bomb that would send out a pressure wave destroying everything around it. The mind-boggling amount of energy might well
vaporize planets that are too close, but outside a certain radius you are really not looking at a 'shockwave' but something akin to a huge 'solar flare' radiating in all directions. Space is mostly
empty after all.
The pressure wave would be reduced at a very high rate just like radiation intensity (Inverse square law and all that:
http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResou...sesquare.htm).
Sure, the surface of a planet would be heavily irradiated, and even scoured of its atmosphere. But unless it was very close to the star (like Mercury) the solid body of the planet could probably survive. So the underground city makes some sort of sense. The thing is, the planet would then be dead. How long could a human-managed ecosystem with no 'margin for error' survive? Judging by the examples provided by the history of previous human civilizations, which almost all destroyed
themselves through mismanagement of their own natural resources in much more forgiving circumstances, not very long...