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These planetars stoke the scifi imagination. They are the perfect hideaway for a fleeing civilization... or deadly weapon. What kind of life could exist on a pl

These planetars stoke the scifi imagination. They are the perfect hideaway for a fleeing civilization... or deadly weapon. What kind of life could exist on a planet without a star? Even when the scientific payoff is limited, the payoff to the imagination is immense.

GotAnyMegadeth 14y ago
I read this brilliant short story once where the Earth had been 'stolen' by a massive rogue planet (the earth started to orbit it instead of the sun). A family had survived by building a air tight shelter and having a constant fire burning. They had to go out to fill up buckets with frozen oxygen to bring back and defrost.
- MrMember 14y ago
  A Pail of Air http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6.htm http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6...
  - imglorp 14y ago
    classic
  - kalms 14y ago
    That was amazing.
  - CapitalistCartr 14y ago
    That is one creepy story. I don't know if the orbital mechanics would work that way, but its a good story anyway.
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    Yeah; the Earth would remain warm for millennia -its 55 degrees underground only a few feet all year around. I always wondered, why didn't these people just live in a basement or underground garage or cave or something? Would have massively simplified their lives.
    - dalke 14y ago
      Those who did likely died. "Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands."
      - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
        ...and then it stopped. And then they could have moved underground. Even in their own neighborhood (in a city) I imagine there were basements.
        dalke 14y ago
        Basements don't help. Too close to the surface. You get some insulation from the earth, yes, but it's not much. The gradient is something like 25°C per km of depth/1°F per 70 feet of depth. They live at liquid helium temperatures, so you'll have to get pretty deep to be at a stable temperature. That's to get to the stable point. It takes a while for the earth to cool down. Assuming 100m depth, ... I tried, but I couldn't figure out the physics. The frost depth in some parts of the world is over 2 meters, so a basement wouldn't be all that useful. Compare the temperature of -50C for winter in Siberia to -270C for the many years of the story. You'll also have liquid air leaking through any cracks and pooling in the bottom - the parts at least which don't drain to cover the frozen sea. But how deep do you need to go to be ahead of the chill? I found a table in the "permafrost" page on Wikipedia, which linked to http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA295515 http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=Get... . That looks like it has enough details to figure out how long it would take for a surface temperature near absolute zero to penetrate 100m into the ground, causing an initial subsurface temperature of 12C to drop to 0C. Can you figure it out? In any case, perhaps others might have survived in deep caves, using geothermal heat. It's doesn't mean that the people in this story couldn't have survived using some other means.
        JoeAltmaier 14y ago
        I'm not convinced our atmosphere would freeze at all; it would be winter but the stable temperature is hard to calculate as you say. Antarctica hasn't gotten appreciable heat in millennia and the air isn't freezing there. I know, convection brings some warm but still.
kibwen 14y ago
The planet was found to be between 50 and 120 millions years old, with a temperature of approximately 400 degrees Celsius, and a mass four to seven times that of Jupiter. Not exactly sure what "temperature" refers to there, but Wikipedia tells me that Jupiter itself has a surface temperature of less than -100 degrees C. So even without a star, it's rather substantially warm. However, at Jupiter's distance, the solar radiation received from the sun is rather minimal anyway.
- k3n 14y ago
  I'm most of the way through reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's book "Origins", and I just finished chapter 24 last night, which deals with this exact subject. By the way, it looks like the entire book is available online; this[1] is a link to the section of ch. 24 that talks about these star-less planets and the possibility that they contain life. First, he points out the "extremophiles" that exist on earth -- for example, organisms that live on the sea floor, where the heat from the sun is fully nullified. Despite the great atmospheric pressure and the lack of light and heat, life still thrives in these environments. One of the factors that facilitate life at these extremes are the geothermal processes (vents in the sea floor) which are purely disconnected from the events of the sun, and completely powered by our magma core. As we know, many planets are suspected to have molten cores, which are the result of their formation and which will continue to remain such for billions of years (we will probably be wiped out by our Sol turning into a red giant before our the Earth's core will lose it's energy). As such, though it'd be near-impossible for life to survive on the surface of a planet that is not a part of any solar system, under the surface life could be bountiful. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=o6OmdAFDTVQC&lpg=PA233&pg=PA244#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=o6OmdAFDTVQC&lpg=PA233&... That's page 244, and from there until the end of the chapter (p.250) is all relevant to your comment.
  - btilly 14y ago
    The core of planets do not remain hot for billions of years based on their formation. They remain hot because they have radioactive material that continues to generate heat. Before the discovery of radioactivity invalidated the calculation, the fact that the Earth's interior is still hot was used by Lord Kelvin to set an upper limit of 40 million years for the Earth's age.
scrumper 14y ago
> hideaway for a fleeing civilization Larry Niven's Known Space books deal with this. They put a civilization of herbivorous creatures called Puppeteers on a group of sunless planets accelerating away from a catastrophe in the galactic center. One enjoyable aspect comes from the creatures' herd-like, risk-averse nature, a hold over from their distant past as prey animals. They dream of fleeing forever, enjoying a nomadic existence in the voids between galaxies.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Actually, I think their plan is to go to the Magellanic clouds, following the rest of the Known Space species who would get there before them via Hyperdrive. It's been awhile since I've read the series, the Ringworld novels bored me.
  - scrumper 14y ago
    That was the direction they were heading in, but a pretty decent chunk of them didn't ever want to go back to living inside a galaxy.
pavel_lishin 14y ago
Damn, I forget the name of the story, but I read one set on such a rogue planet. They were facing a catastrophe - their low-temperature planet was going to pass through the solar system, and they needed to work out a way to prevent themselves from being cooked to death. Wish I remembered the author or title, and I wish even more that the author would expand it into a full-length novel.
jws 14y ago
In Passages in the Void[1], these planets are the only places the machines were willing to reincarnate humanity after deciding that stars were too dangerous, having suffered the anguish of their humans being extinguished by our own Sun. [1] A series of short stories by a Roger Williams, tagged localroger on kuro5hin, wrote back in the day. I gathered the parts together into an ePub suitable for iBooks. I'm checking with the author now to see if I can make it available. You can always read it on the kuro5hin site, linked from http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/ (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is something else entirely.)
- codewright 14y ago
  Prime Intellect was rough on my psyche, but a good experience.
- jws 14y ago
  Sorry, no response from the author. I can't share the epub.

GotAnyMegadeth 14y ago

I read this brilliant short story once where the Earth had been 'stolen' by a massive rogue planet (the earth started to orbit it instead of the sun). A family had survived by building a air tight shelter and having a constant fire burning. They had to go out to fill up buckets with frozen oxygen to bring back and defrost.

MrMember 14y ago
A Pail of Air http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6.htm http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6...
- imglorp 14y ago
  classic
- kalms 14y ago
  That was amazing.
- CapitalistCartr 14y ago
  That is one creepy story. I don't know if the orbital mechanics would work that way, but its a good story anyway.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Yeah; the Earth would remain warm for millennia -its 55 degrees underground only a few feet all year around. I always wondered, why didn't these people just live in a basement or underground garage or cave or something? Would have massively simplified their lives.
  - dalke 14y ago
    Those who did likely died. "Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands."
    - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
      ...and then it stopped. And then they could have moved underground. Even in their own neighborhood (in a city) I imagine there were basements.
      - dalke 14y ago
        Basements don't help. Too close to the surface. You get some insulation from the earth, yes, but it's not much. The gradient is something like 25°C per km of depth/1°F per 70 feet of depth. They live at liquid helium temperatures, so you'll have to get pretty deep to be at a stable temperature. That's to get to the stable point. It takes a while for the earth to cool down. Assuming 100m depth, ... I tried, but I couldn't figure out the physics. The frost depth in some parts of the world is over 2 meters, so a basement wouldn't be all that useful. Compare the temperature of -50C for winter in Siberia to -270C for the many years of the story. You'll also have liquid air leaking through any cracks and pooling in the bottom - the parts at least which don't drain to cover the frozen sea. But how deep do you need to go to be ahead of the chill? I found a table in the "permafrost" page on Wikipedia, which linked to http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA295515 http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=Get... . That looks like it has enough details to figure out how long it would take for a surface temperature near absolute zero to penetrate 100m into the ground, causing an initial subsurface temperature of 12C to drop to 0C. Can you figure it out? In any case, perhaps others might have survived in deep caves, using geothermal heat. It's doesn't mean that the people in this story couldn't have survived using some other means.
        JoeAltmaier 14y ago
        I'm not convinced our atmosphere would freeze at all; it would be winter but the stable temperature is hard to calculate as you say. Antarctica hasn't gotten appreciable heat in millennia and the air isn't freezing there. I know, convection brings some warm but still.

kibwen 14y ago

The planet was found to be between 50 and 120 millions years old, with a temperature of approximately 400 degrees Celsius, and a mass four to seven times that of Jupiter. Not exactly sure what "temperature" refers to there, but Wikipedia tells me that Jupiter itself has a surface temperature of less than -100 degrees C. So even without a star, it's rather substantially warm. However, at Jupiter's distance, the solar radiation received from the sun is rather minimal anyway.

k3n 14y ago
I'm most of the way through reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's book "Origins", and I just finished chapter 24 last night, which deals with this exact subject. By the way, it looks like the entire book is available online; this[1] is a link to the section of ch. 24 that talks about these star-less planets and the possibility that they contain life. First, he points out the "extremophiles" that exist on earth -- for example, organisms that live on the sea floor, where the heat from the sun is fully nullified. Despite the great atmospheric pressure and the lack of light and heat, life still thrives in these environments. One of the factors that facilitate life at these extremes are the geothermal processes (vents in the sea floor) which are purely disconnected from the events of the sun, and completely powered by our magma core. As we know, many planets are suspected to have molten cores, which are the result of their formation and which will continue to remain such for billions of years (we will probably be wiped out by our Sol turning into a red giant before our the Earth's core will lose it's energy). As such, though it'd be near-impossible for life to survive on the surface of a planet that is not a part of any solar system, under the surface life could be bountiful. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=o6OmdAFDTVQC&lpg=PA233&pg=PA244#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=o6OmdAFDTVQC&lpg=PA233&... That's page 244, and from there until the end of the chapter (p.250) is all relevant to your comment.
- btilly 14y ago
  The core of planets do not remain hot for billions of years based on their formation. They remain hot because they have radioactive material that continues to generate heat. Before the discovery of radioactivity invalidated the calculation, the fact that the Earth's interior is still hot was used by Lord Kelvin to set an upper limit of 40 million years for the Earth's age.

scrumper 14y ago

> hideaway for a fleeing civilization Larry Niven's Known Space books deal with this. They put a civilization of herbivorous creatures called Puppeteers on a group of sunless planets accelerating away from a catastrophe in the galactic center. One enjoyable aspect comes from the creatures' herd-like, risk-averse nature, a hold over from their distant past as prey animals. They dream of fleeing forever, enjoying a nomadic existence in the voids between galaxies.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
Actually, I think their plan is to go to the Magellanic clouds, following the rest of the Known Space species who would get there before them via Hyperdrive. It's been awhile since I've read the series, the Ringworld novels bored me.
- scrumper 14y ago
  That was the direction they were heading in, but a pretty decent chunk of them didn't ever want to go back to living inside a galaxy.

pavel_lishin 14y ago

Damn, I forget the name of the story, but I read one set on such a rogue planet. They were facing a catastrophe - their low-temperature planet was going to pass through the solar system, and they needed to work out a way to prevent themselves from being cooked to death. Wish I remembered the author or title, and I wish even more that the author would expand it into a full-length novel.

jws 14y ago

In Passages in the Void[1], these planets are the only places the machines were willing to reincarnate humanity after deciding that stars were too dangerous, having suffered the anguish of their humans being extinguished by our own Sun. [1] A series of short stories by a Roger Williams, tagged localroger on kuro5hin, wrote back in the day. I gathered the parts together into an ePub suitable for iBooks. I'm checking with the author now to see if I can make it available. You can always read it on the kuro5hin site, linked from http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/ (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is something else entirely.)

codewright 14y ago
Prime Intellect was rough on my psyche, but a good experience.
jws 14y ago
Sorry, no response from the author. I can't share the epub.