How close can you get to the sun with out dying?

Answer 1

Well, assuming you do not have any sort of protection of any kind besides the earth's atmosphere, you'd burn up the second you leave the earth's atmosphere towards the sun, if the gamma rays don't kill you first. If you leave in the other direction away from the sun you'd freeze. The idea of the earth's atmosphere is to protect us from the sun's harmful rays, and to keep us in a temperature range we can live in. Humans can only live in a very short temperature range. I mean, the atmosphere is your protection from cancer caused by x-rays and ultraviolet rays from the sun. That's why people who care, stress the protection of whats left of the ozone layer. Its the reason we're getting skin cancer easily now. In some parts of Australia its illegal to take your shirt off, or even be out because the suns rays there are so bad, because of the amount of ozone depletion in that area. To even get out of the atmosphere without being killed, you need a space shuttle, or you could be in the space station, but even if you tried to take a space shuttle to the sun, it won't work. The heat sheilds protect only to a certain degree. The shuttle would explode/burn up, not to far off from the atmosphere. Then there's fuel, food, oxygen, the shuttle only carries a finite supply of each. Think about it, 93,000,000 miles to cover. It'd take maybe months going at top speed, probably years. But none of these issues can be solved without going back to the first issue I pointed out, protecting yourself. If it was possible, the faster you go the faster the sun will pull you in, remember the sun's gravity keeps all planets in orbit. You couldn't stop. No earthly power is strong enough to resist the gravity of the sun, except the earth itself. The Gamma ray bursts would get more frequent and more powerful the closer you get. The explosions will throw the ship around, kill you all, and that's just the gamma rays. There'd probably be bursts the size of Japan the closer you get. It's like it's one step (more like billions of years of tech) ahead of us, its got every entrance sealed if you know what I mean. The way we're made (Having to eat and to breathe precious oxygen), the way it's made... It's inpenetrable as far as we know, its more power than anything on any planet in the solar system probably. Sooooooooo yeah...... Getting to the sun... Not an option for humans or earthly beings. Maybe someday, but the tech is not on earth, plus we only have a limited ammount of resources.

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This is a dumb answer. First of all you didn't answer the question. The question is hypothetical so there is no need to worry about the fuel, food, and time needed to get to the Sun. The person merely wants to know how close we could get to the surface of the Sun before we burned up. I assume the person means how close we could get in some form of space craft with technology that is currently available, or currently possible given large amounts of resources. Here are other reasons why this answer is dumb:

"If it was possible, the faster you go the faster the sun will pull you in, remember the sun's gravity keeps all planets in orbit. You couldn't stop." ---- Only an idiot would travel directly towards the sun. A space ship would approach the Sun in an elliptical orbit similar to Haley's comet so that it would be able to escape the Sun's gravity.

"No earthly power is strong enough to resist the gravity of the Sun, except the earth itself" ---- This statement makes no sense. What is an earthly power? The laws of astrophysics apply to the entire universe in the same way. They don't differ for the Earth or Sun. Also, the Earth is not resisting the Sun, it's in an orbit around that Sun and it's quite possible that after many years, even the Earth's orbit will decay and eventually it will fall into the Sun.

"There'd probably be bursts the size of japan the closer you get. It's like it's one step (more like billions of years of tech) ahead of us" ---- Solar flares reach distances hundreds of times the size of the Earth, so a burst the size of Japan is not that large or impressive at all. Also, billions of years of tech is a gross overstatement. Technology increases at an exponential rate, look at the advancements of the 20th century. So the technology needed to get near the sun could be possible in just a few generations.

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