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No more unsettling than space in general is. It’s pretty hostile to life. We’re not just making turns around the orbital racetrack setup around the Sun, we’re a
by SllX 2y ago
No more unsettling than space in general is. It’s pretty hostile to life. We’re not just making turns around the orbital racetrack setup around the Sun, we’re also flying through space following the gravitational trail of the Sun as it races forward without a destination.
I was playing with Universe Sandbox over the weekend trying to figure out how to terraform Venus. Changing its axial rotation period to a day to match the Earth while I screwed around with its chemistry was enough to cause Europa and some of the other famous moons of Jupiter and Saturn as well as Charon to yeet themselves outside of the solar system within about 10 or 20 years of simulated time.
- danparsonson 2y agoWhy would changing the rotation speed of Venus have any noticeable effect on the outer planets? That sounds more like a limitation of the model than anything else. Especially over such a short time! 20 years is nothing to the orbit of Charon.
- SllX 2y agoProbably, but if a Venus-sized mass showed up in the inner solar system because the Sun just picked it up along the way, it might not be instant death but we’re probably in for a rough time. It doesn’t have to be a black hole that does us in, it could be something much smaller that still strips the Moon away or causes Earth to readjust its own position in a way we, as in life, but also maybe we as in humans or we as in mammals just don’t like very much in a very short amount of time temporally speaking, and we couldn’t do anything about it anymore than we could do anything about a black hole because we’re just not the captains of this ship. We’re just some homegrown stowaways. But for what it’s worth, it’s also just so incredibly unlikely it’s not a scenario worth thinking about either, and thinking about it too much just invites existential dread.