
The Disturbing Fate of a Planet Made of Blueberries - DmenshunlAnlsis
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-if-earth-were-made-of-blueberries
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V-2
At the risk of being the you-must-be-fun-at-parties guy - why would a planet
"made of blueberries" be comprised of any air at all to begin with? :)

 _" Releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors"_ \-
the question, at least the way it's phrased here, doesn't say anything about
any air. Made of blueberries means made of blueberries, period.

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JumpCrisscross
> _the question, at least the way it 's phrased here, doesn't say anything
> about any air_

Nor does it mention water, but blueberries contain water. Likewise, the paper
finds "the air content of the berries" to be "211 times the mass of Earth’s
atmosphere" [1].

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.10553.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.10553.pdf)
_page 3_

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V-2
I'm okay with the water that blueberries actually CONTAIN, and the same with
any air INSIDE them.

I just don't think that _" air that had separated each berry from its
neighbors"_ should count.

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DanBC
> Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal
> volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen
> from the perspective of a person on the surface?

Closely packed but uncompressed means you're going to have air between some
bits of them.

~~~
Izkata
More importantly, that description means Earth's atmosphere is left behind.

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jl6
Seems the original question on Stackexchange has been removed :(

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quotemstr
I really hope I live long enough to see scaled-up spectroscopy of exoplanets
[1]. (I don't have enough optimism for hope for actual imaging.) It'll be
fascinating to get a sense of the true range of world-types out there and see
how often planets end up developing life.

(Picking up oxygen would be a high-confidence indicator of the presence of
life, since oxygen reacts with _everything_ and so can maintain a stable
fraction of a planet's atmosphere only by continual replenishment, the only
known mechanism for which is biological.)

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4156723/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4156723/)

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testplzignore
Would all of the air at the core of the sphere necessarily escape into the
atmosphere, or could it stay trapped and solidify?

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egamble
That was my first thought as well. I can see how air relatively close to the
surface could geyser out, but I'd guess that deeper air would likely be
trapped. Given the high pressure and density farther down, compressed
blueberries would probably behave like the rock that traps water and methane
in the Earth's crust. Because of the trapped air, maybe the planet would
shrink a little less than the author predicts. (Of course it will shrink a
lot, because the air compresses, but maybe just a little less than predicted.)

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afterburner
Aw, I thought the thought experiment would be the ecological damage to Earth
if all crops were replaced by blueberries.

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frankquist
Well, I'd say, what's keeping you/us? Go!

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afterburner
I'm not an expert on agriculture effects on ecosystems. Baseless speculation
isn't nearly as interesting.

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selimthegrim
This sounds like a lost level from Jazz Jackrabbit or Zool.

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krylon
Blueberry Planet would not be a nice place to live, but it would be the most
delicious planet ever. Until somebody accumulated an earth's mass worth of
chocolate, that is.

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paulpauper
if it does not have enough mass, it will lose its atmosphere quickly. I wonder
what the minimum mass and surface gravity to have a viable atmosphere is

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Avshalom
To first order you can just use the ideal gas law to calculate the average
velocity (v_rms = sqrt(3 _T_ k_b/m)) of pick-a-molecule and compare it to the
escape velocity (v_e = sqrt(2GM/r)

~~~
chongli
And then you need to consider the magnetic fields of your blueberry planet.
Without them, the solar wind will slowly blast away the atmosphere.

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Avshalom
well I mean, it's very unlikely to have a magnetic core.

That said Wikipedia tells me Mars looses ~.1Kg per second to the solar wind.
Bump that up to a Kg/s because the Earth is closer and that still leaves 100
Billion Years before the atmosphere is completely stripped from Earth, so not
an immediate concern.

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8bitsrule
_Sandberg says he would visit the jammy planet he imagined—“With protective
gear. And probably a supply of ice cream.”_

Urp. Given "a roaring ocean of boiling jam", the surface doesn't sound likely
to be very appetizing!

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throwaway080383
Reminds me of xkcd's "What If?" series.

~~~
kmfrk
A bunch of publications stole the idea from a popular tweet, apparently:
[https://twitter.com/sannewman/status/1025176560951808001](https://twitter.com/sannewman/status/1025176560951808001).

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kyle-rb
It doesn't seem like the publications stole it from the tweet. It's just that
someone presumably saw the tweet, asked the question on StackExchange
(question is gone now so not sure whether the asker mentioned the tweet), and
then StackExchange was where the answer was, so the people writing articles
probably had no reason to assume there was a deeper source.

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ianai
I, for one, worry about spoiledge. Awful waste of food! Jk

Excellent Saturday morning read.

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windows_tips
Everything was replaced with blueberries, so there'd be no organisms to break
things down. The sun would mostly dry things out probably, but eventually
would start to change things.

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sthgrau
Without specifying sterilized blueberries, I would assume that the surface of
the blueberries contain the same flora and fauna that you find in nature.

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ishi
But the heat would boil them, returning the planet to sterility.

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beached_whale
Or alcohol would be made

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EamonnMR
Reminds me of Randall Munroe's Mole of Moles thought experiment:

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/)

