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Comment by rybosome | Hacker News Reader

I’ve wondered about this a lot.

More so the grim question: if you were in a typical space suit sitting in a ship just outside Jupiter, then propelled yourself towards the planet - what would kill you first?

Assume you are close enough that from the moment you are launched out, you are “in” the atmosphere at the outer edges. Also assume moving fast enough that the answer is not “dying from dehydration”.

I discussed a bit with GPT 4o and came to the conclusion that shear wind gusts of over 300mph in the upper atmosphere would probably do it. You’d hit that almost instantly, before high pressure, temperature or highly corrosive materials.

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You would burn up just as you would on Earth. There is a steep increase in atmospheric density just as there is on Earth. The atmosphere doesn't extend much further than the sharp edge of visible atmosphere.

The Galileo probe needed a heat shield to survive dropping into atmosphere. The 225g deceleration would have killed any human. It is presumed to be destroyed from the temperature and pressure.

Although, you might die from the radiation first.

Depending on your path to get there, the Jovian system’s radiation might kill you before you hit the atmosphere.

‘Jupiter’s radiation belts – and how to survive them’: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

There's no need to ask ChatGPT, astrophysics PHD/u/astromike23 answered exactly that question here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dgt1f/could_yo...

Sounds like the LLMs may be hiding something up there, likely a monolith of sorts?

(This is were we find out an AI was running that weird room Bowman found himself in - the one with the lit floor ...)

They have all been quite cagey with me about Europa too now that you mention it …

> discussed a bit with GPT 4o

A fascinating, unexplored yet frequent use case, I am sure :)

(Positing these "what-ifs")

PS. On that note: All the recent space probes are yielding much interesting information on this.-

How can you be sure that what-if analysis by the LLMs are correct or plausible?

As with anything else coming out of LLM-land, you can't.-

How can you be sure with humans?

The first response definitely wasn’t. It laid out the hazards in great detail, then asserted the likelihood of making it implausibly far. I poked at that conclusion and it backed off until we arrived at shear winds in the outer edges, where I agreed with the analysis that this would be lethal.

It was a thought provoking conversation, regardless of whether it was absolutely accurate.

> assume moving fast enough

then wouldn't the movement kill you?

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