Yep - not really that pornographic, but there was this really nice bit from the wikipedia:"According to urban legend, a manhole cover was accidentally launched from it's shaft from an underground nuclear test in the 1950's, at a great enough speed to achieve escape velocity. The myth is based on a real incident during the Operation Plumbbob nuclear tests, where
a 900 kg steel plate cap was blasted off the test shaft at an unknown velocity, and appears as a blur on a single frame of film of the test; it was never recovered. A calculation before the event gave a speed of six times Earth escape velocity, but the calculation is unlikely to be accurate and they did not believe that it would leave Earth in reality. After the event, Dr. Robert E. Brownlee described the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence as "going like a bat!!"
I can only assume that the urban legend edited the "Outta Hell" bit from the last line.
Also, I'm wondering, even if the calculations (for this urban myth) were off by a factor of 4 -that's pretty bad.
Nay. That's really, really, really bad! For those who are calling themselves nuclear scientists, dealing with energies most of us mortals can't understand - and even they can't really, without some super complex figures and math and stuff to deal with - these energies are beyond human scale. So even if they're wrong by a FACTOR OF FOUR, there's still 2x's the force required to achieve escape velocity for this manhole cover - and leave earth's gravitational pull, and shoot out into the stars.
Regardless if this is an urban myth or not...it kinda' sounds like to my ears, like it could have actually happened.
And as a pragmatic kinda' guy, I'd much rather a spacefaring race of aliens find a circular piece of iron that used to cover a hole, floating through space with "Made in Mexico" written on it...
than the one that has the instructions to find our planet, and how we reproduce, what our music sounds like, and our frikken DNA.
If they find the first one, they'll probably melt it down to make a cell-phone, or laser blaster, or mebee a nice side-table to hold a super-cool looking lamp. If they find the latter-well...we'll probably be working uranium mines until we die a horrible death of radiation poisoning. And I got a feeling, I don't think they'll care. Thanks to nuclear testing, and a super-nice manhole cover, we've got a 50 - 50 chance that that doesn't happen.
More manholes in space please, I'd like to up those odds.
