CompuServe Messages

Dear Kameron, You still don't know scaling laws. The materials you talk about are very flexible on these time scales, at these pressure, and, most of all, on these size scales. Physical properties scale differently than you imagine. I have heard of glass windows ("brittle") thicker on the bottom than the top due to flow after 200 years. I have reshaped polycrystalline materials using a vise, lett alone a diamond cell. Basalt is not brittle for objects 100's of miles across. Furthermore, tidal forces fall off much faster with distance than monopole forces. Your massive stellar body could knock the earth out of orbit, but the tidal forces may not be large enough to even stretch it. More complex gravitational forces necessary to create complex patterns would fall off even faster. Scale models have to be used carefully because of physical scaling. Some call it "the Gulliver effect."