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I wonder how we'd feel as a species if our star was one of these instead of being the Sun. We'd see this amazing group of stars and planets, going away from us
by alex_duf 8y ago
I wonder how we'd feel as a species if our star was one of these instead of being the Sun.
We'd see this amazing group of stars and planets, going away from us knowing the more we wait for space travel to less likely our species would to reach any other star system.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoThe more interesting question is how you would feel if one of the inbound stars was inbound directly toward our sun.
- comboy 8y agoYou underestimate the emptiness of space.
- wlesieutre 8y agoWe had a "close" flyby (0.82 lightyears) about 70,000 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz%27s_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz%27s_Star
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> A star is expected to pass through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years or so.[4] An approach as close or closer than 52,000 AU is expected to occur about every 9 million years.[2] In about 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass somewhere between 8,800 and 13,700 AU from the Sun. Just wow.
- njarboe 8y agoMaybe interstellar travel is basically impossible but there might be very long lived civilizations that propagate to others stars when one comes near by. Imagine what happens when both stars are populated by different long lived civilizations and they start to get near each other. I would love to read a good book speculating about such an event.
- planteen 8y agoThat "close" encounter was still over three orders of magnitude further out than Pluto (which has a distance of around 0.000624 ly).
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI have this science fiction writing/game backstory idea I recently came up with. Feel free to use it, as I guess I won't get around to do anything with it any time soon. Copying straight from my "ideas" file: At some point in time (past or future, or magically also present), a star passed in very close vicinity to our sun. It had a habitable planet in its system, full of alien plant and animal life. For the brief moment it was Δv-accessible, it was studied, and eventually colonized. The people going there knew it was going to be a one-way trip, as the star eventually moved further away. Possible stories to set before, during, or after encounter (or even long, long after). (This works for no-FTL, hard sci-fi setting. By "very close vicinity" I mean, close enough for us to reach it via sublight propulsion, but still far enough not to mess up the inner Solar System gravitationally.) -- EDIT: Wow, turns out this isn't even that implausible - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123098.
- kbenson 8y agoWow. Just the changed mindset (compared to the present, at least) would be amazing. "Are there others out there? Yes. And they're like us. We should try to meet again some day." It's almost like a modern day Atlantis myth, but true. If you want a really interesting setting for a game/book, imagine a major regression on Earth (standard post-apocalypse trope), and the colonists finally find a way to visit again...
- soraki_soladead 8y agoWasn't this sort of the idea behind the Homeworld games? Ancient artifact discovered in Antartica, left by the original settlers of Earth, leads to a quest to travel "home".
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSort of. It wasn't Earth, and the artifact was found in a desert.
- 8y ago
- stephengillie 8y agoHow would it impact a solar system if one of these relativistic stars got too close? Any chance it could pick up a few planets, or would they mostly be flung into space? Along that point, what does the heliosphere of such a star look like - a giant comet? Lastly, were a life-bearing planet sent into space this way have any chance of maintaining that life without a parent star to heat and magnetically shield it?
- behringer 8y agoChances are nothing would happen as space is vast, but if it did get too close, it would be going way faster than anything around it, as it would be on a different plane. It would just scanner whatever is nearby like a big boat in a small pond. The heliosphere would look normal because there would be no drag on it. A comet has a tail because the sun is both melting and pushing material away from it. Lastly, we could probably heat our homes with the core of the planet for a little while, but everything would be dead within a few years. I think the Twilight Zone covered this scenario in an episode! In it the Earth started moving away from the sun for no good reason.
- Scramblejams 8y agoThe Milky Way is due to collide with Andromeda in about 4 billion years, and there is apparently a 12% chance that whatever's left of us (!) will be spun out in the process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision#Fate_of_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
- Gravityloss 8y ago"of course the galaxies are devoid of life. The amount of supernovas is just too great."
- pavel_lishin 8y agoThere's at least two stories I've read with a similar premise; one was an interesting tale of a planet that stifles its scientific development, and is almost-unaware that they're about to approach another star. Damned if I remember what it's called, or who wrote it, though...
- abecedarius 8y agoPerhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#%22The_Science_Fair%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Verno...
- pavel_lishin 8y agoThat's it!
- alasdair_stark 8y agoYou should check out the Iain M. Banks novel, Against a Dark Background. It's set outside of his Culture Universe, in a planetary system orbiting an intergalactic star. There is no FTL so humanity is effectively trapped. I wish that Banks had expanded on the idea with further novels as I really enjoyed reading about the cyclical rise and fall of societies while humanity explored different social/political structures, hoping to achieve some form of long-term stability.