Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight up?
The Evergiven's maximum weight is 200000 tons. So that would be 15000+ Chinooks lifting it. A sight to behold.
Added: Only about 1200 were ever produced, so that won't fly.
[1] https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter
[2] 26000 pounds
Probably more expensive than most other solutions, and I doubt that the Evergiven will be in a good condition afterwards.
Amazingly, that's a severe underestimation.
The force on a wire carrying current in a magnetic field is given by F = B*I*l, and to move it upwards that force needs to be at least equal to gravity, so equate to F = m*g.
- Let's be generous and assume B = 100 uT = 100 * 10^-6 T.
- Likewise, assume the ship is a rectangular box with sides of 400 m x 100 m, so a circumference of 1000 m, and that we can wrap a wire 100,000 times around it, to give total wire length l = 10^8 m.
- m = 200,000 metric tonne = 2 * 10^8 kg (we assume magic wire that is massless).
- g = 10 m/s^2.
Solving for I yields I = mg/Bl = 2 * 10^5 A. That's a lot of current.
If we assume the wire has a diameter of 10 cm (which is ridiculously high considering we just wrapped it 100,000 times around the ship, but whatever) and is made out of copper, it has a resistance of ~200 Ohms. Necessary power to generate such a current is P = I^2*R = 8*10^12 W (= 8000 TW). That's about half the total energy consumption of humanity.
The largest nuclear power plant puts out about 8000 MW, so you'd need a 1000 of them.
That is a relatively fundamental result. With current materials, it's pretty much impossible to levitate anything against Earth's magnetic field. You can't put enough current through a wire to create a force bigger than its own gravity without using unreasonable amounts of power. Even if you put in that power, you'd melt the wire.
If you actually want to accelerate it upward to any meaningful speed, you'd need even more power.
Really it may be conservative to say another 100,000 tonnes for all the stuff other than the 200,000 tonnes of the ship itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...
The Evas can be airlifted anywhere in the world, but IIRC they have about five minutes of battery power. So, the biggest logistical problem would be getting suitable power on site. What are the voltage/current/frequency requirements of an Eva charger? How many months/years would it take to charge an Eva with a J1772 port or whatever they use in that part of the world? Looks like the nearest Tesla superchargers are in Israel and Jordan, which is too far even if they were compatible. Maybe NERV has a mobile generator?
The Jet Alone folks could put in a competing bid, but their robot would just get sabotaged again.
Let's just nuke it, them nuclear weapons have to be disposed of somehow, and the channel needs some expansion, it seems.
Use musk's starship and you need >166 of them...
I cannot find how much ship weights itself, but deadweight tonnage which is about 200000t. Let's assume 300000t. Thrust of Saturn V S-IC stage is 3300t, with diameter of 10m, empty mass of 130t and 2150t of propellant for 150s burn time. It would need nearly 300 fully fuelled S-IC stages to lift it! Which is a bit too much, as with 400x60m ship area we can only fit about 240 stages. But as we're definitely not going into orbit anyway we can reduce propellant amount for shorter burn time. Cutting propellant by half reducing burn time to 75s we only need around 143 stages, fitting on ship with room to spare.
So in that regard it is doable. But there's problem of what to do with all the exhaust, as rockets obviously aren't designed for pulling load attached to the bottom...
(I assume this is an equivalent problem to the lifting problem, as the extra pressure they'd be fighting would be that of the ship displacing water.)
I do believe this is probably one of the solutions that's being investigated but I also believe it's
1. Super expensive to construct an impromptu dam under water
2. Floating a listing ship can result in more severe listing if you're not careful (See, for instance, the fact that when a ship beaches itself while the tide is out it's initially bad news - and when the tide starts to come back in it becomes significantly worse news.
Learning and humor are fun together!
Let's assume it was possible. Would the force of lifting that much mass be enough to shift the earth in a measurable way? (I'm assuming it would be a lot stronger lifting it into the air than what floating on the water produces, but have no idea what the math would be)
Note that ships actually are accelerated up and down in the Panama canal, which has locks. (The Suez doesn't.) That amounts to pretty much the same thing. It doesn't matter whether the forces are transferred to the earth via a column of water or a column of air.
Since the static force in opposition won't contribute towards upward motion you actually need to supply the full amount of force to lift it - not just enough to barely nudge the need by .00001 m/s^2
In terms of whether that force would cause any effect the answer is yes (because everything is an effect) and effectively no since as ridiculously heavy as this container ship is it is absolute peanuts compared to the mass of the earth nuclear explosions that produce megatons of force are still immensely negligible, ditto for super massive volcanoes. A volcanic explosion large enough to derail the earth's rotation by a day would definitely be an extinction level event for all of the complex life forms on earth. But, that said, every little thing does contribute in its little way.
Lastly - yea, the presence of locks in the panama canal does mean that ships are regularly accelerated upwards and downwards without any noticeable effect - if that change in elevation was executed by explosives or chinooks there would be slight variations in the force but they'd be mostly inconsequential on the scale of things.
Actually it is:
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/einsteins-experimental-...
The speed of sound in steel is approx. 10,000 ft/s.
The distance from Suez to Beijing is approx. 25,000,000 feet.
The time for a force to be applied in Beijing and a reaction in Suez would be ~2,500 seconds - or 1.7 days.
In fact we can't find him anywhere...
This thing is truly massive.