1 calorie is interchangeable for approximately 4.1868 joules. Therefore, assuming his math was correct (many say it was not), I'm coming up with 2,687,016,337 calories needed. According to google, sourcing from the USDA, your average peanut butter sandwich has 384 calories. Therefore you'd be expending approximately 6,997,438 peanut butter sandwiches worth of energy to punt the ungrateful little shit into the sun.

Pretty sure you're generating twice as much energy as needed, the required speed is only about 106km/s

Besides, if you really needed those kinds of speed, you'd obviously have to calculate with relativistic formulas. Energy is asymptotical at the speed of light.

Yeah, their answer just intuitively seems very wrong. The ratio between the kid's weight and your foot's weight should be equal to the ratio between their final speed and your foot's required speed. Ridiculous.

There would be a crater where the parent and child were, and buildings would be leveled by the resulting shockwave.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

The fiery pits of hell

Are you arguing that 1.12 billion m/s is NOT faster than the speed of light, or are you arguing that the speed required by the kick is not 1.12 billion m/s? Because if it's the former, the speed of light in a vacuum is 300 million m/s (to 3 significant figures), or less than one third of that kick speed. If you're arguing the latter, I don't feel like checking all of the calculations this early in the morning, but you are probably right on that point.

The reliable way to get an answer from the internet is to provide the wrong answer, then someone will come and correct you, providing the answer you seek. (Xkcd, probably maybe?)

There are no spiral orbits. Canceling the forward motion is exactly what you need to do, to bring down the next periapsis to 0. Now, you can go with a periapsis of about half a million km, because the sun is pretty big, but that is not a significant difference. Getting anywhere near the sun, is the hard part.

Right, I wanted to ask: is that actually the minimum energy to make the child reach the sun? What's the minimum energy to launch something so it reaches the sun?

Right, and what force is acting on the child to make it deviate from a circular orbit into a spiral one?

I don't think you can achieve a spiral orbit in an area with so little friction, mostly devoid of dust and gas, else the earth would be on one of those too...

i'd cut squares out of the triangles.

Once the kid realizes he's getting less because of his demands, he might change his mind about shape being important.

Edit: or make him do it. toss in a lesson about geometry, too.

If the triangles have already been cut, the kid gets a brand new sandwich fully intact, crust and all, and a knife. Let's see you cut this sandwich better than I can brayxtyn

Parent's already thinking outside the biosphere.

i may be mistaken but I don't think it can be utilized to descend toward the sun