A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

Technically, this isn't completely true. There are gravity assist techniques that will allow you to dump speed by essentially adding your momentum to the object you are trying to orbit. The is basically an anti-slingshot manuever.

In practice, I believe the range of scenarios when this is possible with a dwarf planet is so small as to be practically useless.

I don't have a strong background in physics, and perhaps this is splitting hairs, but is this true if we consider gravitational radiation? Over a very long time a body's orbital energy will be lost to gravitational waves.

This object has all of the delta V that you could want, but for an object of that mass, the hyperbolic orbit would require going through the planetoid which you can't do. And if it was dense enough that you could (for example a miniature black hole), the tidal forces during the turn would be insane.

So no, this object cannot give a decent slingshot.

Uranium and Urine

[1] https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/content/story/anus-urine-us-...

For a setting where we were getting it right until we got it wrong, see Niven's "A World out of Time".

An entire fragmented comet impacted Jupiter in 1994

> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[24] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[25]

> At about one-quarter the diameter of Earth (comparable to the width of Australia), it [the Moon] is the largest natural satellite in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet, the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System overall, and is larger than any dwarf planet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon

Aside: if you are looking to learn more, I cannot recommend Kerbal Space Program enough.

With Starship this would definitely be doable, and I’m really optimistic about it; I just wanted to be cautious in my predictions.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Delta IV’s life gets extended. Vulcan is facing plenty of development delays, and Blue Origin are yet to produce anything useful.

You could get a free ride by having it crash into you, but that's going to be like catching a bus by letting it hit you, at ten thousand miles an hour.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... (note: popscience and old! let me know if any here got disproved or there is more up to date material)

Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

The biggest fusion bomb detonated on Earth was Tsar Bomba at 50 megatons, though the full yield is thought to have been more like 100 if the Russians hadn't deliberately nerfed it over radiation concerns.

Is there a theoretical upper limit to the yield of fusion bombs? I assume no one is building them bigger simply because there's no realistic military use for such things that wouldn't be better served by smaller accurately targeted nuclear bombs. Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961, and no one has seen fit to repeat the experiment, though I suppose one or more of the major nuclear powers may have a modern warhead with equivalent yield that they just haven't tested or announced to the world.

Wikipedia is saying that there's thought to be a practical limit of around 6 megatons of yield per metric ton of bomb mass [1], and actual nuclear devices have achieved a little over 5, so I guess after some point there's not much reason to make a bigger bomb when you can just make two smaller ones.

This scenario is starting to sound a bit like a long-running Factorio game where the goal is to launch a rocket once a minute. With, say, a one year lead time could the economies of Earth launch a starship-style rocket with a half-dozen or so Tsar Bomba sized warhead once per day indefinitely? I think so. Would it be enough to destroy a dwarf planet? Probably not, but maybe it could knock loose enough chunks to nudge it into a slightly different orbit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield