 Oh hoi hoi, and welcome back to the SCP Versus series. I have gotten a new microphone, maybe you can tell, maybe you can't, I think this one is a bit of a higher quality than the previous one, hopefully it works out a little bit better. If you think it's better, you can leave a comment, don't leave a comment, it's up to you. Today we're going to do SCP-096 versus the sun. Not a whole lot of build up to this, let's go ahead and get started. We had the best of intentions. That's the kind of thing you tell yourself late at night, when you're feeling particularly self-reflective, but only because it's actually true, when you're dealing with infinities, though it doesn't really matter what you meant, only what actually happened. If you took a poll today, among Foundation staff you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person who supported the proposal. I'm serious. Ask around. In the last class we'll tell you it was Samarian's fault, Samarian will say it was Moose's fault, Moose will blame light, like it matters. But if you keep following faults, you'll end up with Dr. Olexai. It all started with his bloody crusade, after all. The SCP Foundation took the exceptionally stupid step of telling him he was to be terminated, as soon as he dealt with SCP-096. Essentially we put a dead man in charge of saving the world. The first rumblings of what was going to happen came to my attention when several million dollars of my resources were earmarked for a newly classified project. As the fellow in charge of the Foundation space forces, I was a bit used to that. They remember the day when I got read in on the details. It all seemed so pedestrian. I'd seen, let's throw it into the sun, proposals before, how I'd even approved one or two. This was just another silly project in the long line of projects from people who think that education and arrogance are a good replacement for actual intelligence. And I told Dr. Olexai I was going to say no to this stupid idea. And he said that he wasn't going to listen to an engineer when he went over my head to get approval. I wasn't surprised. Nor was I surprised when they told me to handle the details of his proposal. Because Olexai was an expert in being a pompous blowhard, not orbital mechanics. But you should have seen the look on his face when I told him that we'd need to go out to Saturn in order to hit the sun. He was practically a pop-lectic. I told him, since every celestial body has essentially a sphere, as long as you pass over the horizon faster than you fall, the body surface is essentially falling away from you just as fast as you're falling down. Douglas Adams was partially right. The trick is simply to miss the ground. If you're not moving around the sun at 30 kilometers a second and you're at the point of Earth orbit, you're going to move towards the sun. And if you have any leftover momentum from what you started with, you'll just set up a new, more trendy orbit a bit closer to the sun at a different speed. The problem with the math is that it only takes 41 kilometers a second to escape the solar system. You're going 30 already. Which means you only have to add 11 kilometers a second to the speed you, your mother, dog, your house, and the ground beneath your feet is already going to get away from the sun. But to hit the sun, you have to lose all 30 kilometers per second of speed. So paradoxically, once in a stable orbit, it's generally easier to escape the sun than it is to hit it, especially when you start from the inner solar system. And if you're still with me, you're doing better than Alex I did. And, well, he destroyed the world, so one leg up, I suppose. So why go out to Saturn? Well, like I said, the inner solar system is going quite fast, but the thing about orbital speeds is that stuff closer in moves faster than the stuff further around. So we sent a rocket containing one very unfortunate helion, Octos-Gaussi Saturn, first. She did several gravity assists to slow down and then came back down. The whole thing took us four years and not an inconsiderable amount of resources. It wasn't the first time we'd crashed a woman into the sun, mind you, but it was a sufficiently rare occurrence that we called everyone in for it. There was a little party with free drinks, two free drinks, and free food, which wasn't all you could eat. Americans. We treated it, though, as a going away party for Alexi, and, of course, almost no one showed up. So we had our sun diver look at a picture and boom. SAP-096 took off like a lanky, slightly quieter rocket. We calculated, at the speed it was going, it would hit the sun, just like we'd planned. All that was left was to listen to the D-class which sent up screen. As she was incinerated by the sun, we turned off the feed halfway through. After all, that was my primary objection to the project. We'd never deliberately killed anyone in space before, so you're probably thinking that's a lie with the SAP Foundation, but it really wasn't. People with the mental stability for years-long trips to space are damned rare. When you're pulling from prison populations, it's even rare, and I'd love to say it was for purely humanitarian reasons, but the truth is we simply couldn't spare the astronauts. But we tracked SAP-096 all the way, and it took it two more years to get where he was going, but he got there, and as far as we know, he was bathed in nuclear fire, reduced to constituent atoms in the plasma of the sun, I suppose. He probably died screaming. Then they killed a lexicon a year ago. I'm not going to use a euphemism here, it was a murder, justified or not. A month ago, they finalized the reports, and then they approved one last test. And how could we know we'd succeeded, really? Maybe 096 was simply swimming around in there, waiting for someone on the earth to look at a picture. So they had a D-class look. One last time, a week ago, we noticed that Earth's orbit has begun to decay. It doesn't fit any of the science, or the math. Optal mechanics describes nothing about what's happening now, but I can tell you. The sun is moving closer. Thank you very much for watching. If you liked it, please hit the subscribe button and the notification bell next to that. Just scroll down, hit them. It's not very difficult, and it helps me a lot. So if you enjoy this, help me out a little bit. And if you'd like to support this content even further, you can head on over to patreon.com forward slash de-semmerian, and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I'll see you all again on Tuesday.