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A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

gizmodo.com

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Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am certain that some of the ideas that many of us hold now will be thought quite silly in a few hundred years. Yes, like the theory that we're actually living in a simulation, espoused by Elon Musk and other respected, ostensibly science-minded people. It's basically Creationism in modern form.

It isn't like creationism because it is based on some otherwise currently unexplained observations such as quantum mechanical behavior and magic physical constants. The idea is that these are exactly the sort of observations you'd see if you were in a simulated universe. Now if we were to observe new species being created in N days, for small integer N, then I suppose your assertion about creationism would also hold.

Wouldn't a simulation have to have a creator? Unless you are postulating that a Turing-complete simulator got itself together by random chance and, by random chance, started simulating universe(s), one of which, by random chance, happens to simulate beings that can imagine a simulator simulating themselves. It seems like a simulation is a fairly strong evidence FOR a creator. Hawking's quantum bubbles seem much more like what would happen without intervention.

Also, creationism isn't limited to only 6 day creation, that's more of a modern thing by people that insist on taking Genesis 1 (which is poetry) literally. Early Christian thinkers postulated that 1 Genesis-day was actually 1000 years. Creationism just says that God created the world; how long it took and how he did it are implementation details.

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#62
post #58
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do large, bright stars ever pass that close? Yes, but it's extremely rare. > What would that look like? Not much. The Scholz flyby was at 0.6-0.8 light years, the same order of magnitude as the distance to Alpha Centauri. It would just look like a star, probably not even a particularly bright one.

Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away. Or did I misunderstand your comment?

Hard to say. Yes, Alpha Centauri is indeed 4.37 LY away, though that kind of precision is irrelevant when talking about orders of magnitude (OOM). Two numbers are considered to be the same OOM if the absolute difference of their base-10 logarithms is less than 1.

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#64
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the article mostly about how it did influence Oort cloud object orbits? Thirty-six identified.

That's a minuscule number and "influenced" doesn't necessarily mean "aimed them at the Earth." There's a lot of space out there which it takes things a lot of time to move through. It takes the Earth a year to go around the Sun. And the Oort Cloud is, like, 100,000 times further away from the Sun than we are.

They went into 'v' orbits, which as I understand it, means steep highly elliptical orbits that come inside the Earth's orbit? Its a lot more crowded in here.

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#66
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post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the theory that we're actually living in a simulation, ... It's basically Creationism in modern form. It's not even modern. It is basically Plato's Cave, which is classic Greek philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave The religious touch of that idea did not become popular until the movie "The Matrix", which originally had allusions to many different religions, but specialized to Christianity…

That is not the meaning of the Allegory of the Cave at all! The metaphor is that human experience is limited by our senses (like living in the cave) and so to understand eternal, absolute truths you need to use pure reason (leaving the cave), not experience.

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Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#67

I'll take this opportunity to recommend Universe Sandbox[1], which is pretty cheap on steam and worth every penny. Turning on projected orbital lines in an N-body simulation of our solar system and seeing what happens when you toss a star in there is really enlightening... the rings all shift in tandem in a visceral way that really helps me "feel" what happens. There's a simulation that comes out of the box that simu…

> Most orbits remain stable but very deeply shifted from where they were (earth's aphelion ends up far out where Jupiter was, with its perihelion much closer than before...) That's incredibly terrifying. Although from what I see in the book description, it focuses more on the drama aspect. I wouldn't mind someone exploring the technical aspect in more detail, e.g. what would be possible to do to prepare for such an e…

Reminiscent of "A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber (1951). The image of bringing in a pail of oxygen, to melt/boil by the fire, is wild.

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an interest idea and a great starter for philosophical thinking, but no-one is treating it like literal gospel.

>It is an interest idea and a great starter for philosophical thinking, but no-one is treating it like literal gospel. Of course not. "Gospel" is a religious concept. They're claiming that it's a plausible, scientifically-supportable theory. I don't think it's an interesting idea at all, nor do I think it's a good starter for philosophical thinking. I think it's Creationist nonsense.

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Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#69
post #6
post #5

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I'm amazed at this coincidence, too.

It can't have had sufficiently fast impact on Earth by disturbing orbits to create impactors, given the distance.

There doesn't need to be any physical impactors for there to be a significant effect on climate and life. Ice ages can start and end due to tiny changes in the Earth's orbital wobble.

https://phys.org/news/2016-12-ice-ages-linked-earth-orbitbut...

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